The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Elizabeth Kolbert: Can human technology solve unintended consequences of human technology

Episode Date: January 14, 2023

Note: Due to internet difficulties due to storms in California delaying uploading of the video, the video post of this podcast will be delayed by a few hours. We are thus releasing the audio version now. (Usually these are released at the same time.) Seven years ago I invited Elizabeth Kolbert to participate in a dialogue about Extinctions at the Orpheum Theater in Phoenix, following the publication of her Pulitzer Prizewinning masterpiece, The Sixth Extinction. Once we began The Origins Podcast, I knew that I wanted to have an in depth discussion with her about her work reporting on science issues, most importantly on climate change and other technological challenges facing modern society. An opportunity arose with the publication of her most recent book, Under a White Sky, which focuses on how scientists, and politicians, have attempted—with with widely varying degrees of success—to address the unintended consequences of various human alterations of terrestrial ecosystems. It is a fascinating book, told, as is typical in her writing, by relating personal experiences as Elizabeth has traveled the world to meet scientists and others spearheading attempts at solving sometimes urgent ecological crises induced as a result of the application of previous human technologies. Elizabeth writes so clearly about science that I wanted to explore her own journey, from a student focusing on German literature, to one of the pre-eminent science writers in the country, working as a staff writer for The New Yorker Magazine. We had a wide ranging discussion about her own experiences and then moved on to discuss more broadly the issues raised in her most recent books. Incidentally, the title of her new book comes from the fact that one of the side-effects of solar geoengineering, which I expect will be an inevitable response to climate change in a world where governments and businesses prefer to carry on business as usual in spite of concerns about rising temperatures, sea levels, and other potentially dangerous consequences of increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. The effect in question, if aerosols are injected in the upper atmosphere to reduce the intensity of solar radiation impinging on the earth’s surface, will be to cause formerly bright blue skies to instead resemble the whiter skies those who live in big cities are used to. A potentially unfortunate consequence, but perhaps less unfortunate than other potential consequences of global climate change. The conversation was fantastic. Everything I had hoped for. We went on for over 2 hours, but the time passed quickly because it was so fascinating. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. And by the way, if you enjoy this podcast, Elizabeth will be joining the Origins Project Foundation Galapagos Travel Adventure in January of 2024. Reservations will open up at the beginning of April for this exciting trip, with Elizabeth, Frans de Waal, me, and 33 other Origins voyagers. I hope you can join us.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, I'm Lawrence Krause and welcome to The Origins Podcast. My guest this week is Elizabeth Colbert, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer of the Sixth Extinction, and a staff writer for the New Yorker who writes about, largely about science and human affairs, particularly climate change and issues associated with modern technology. Her writing is infused with both a fascination and excitement about science and an ability to meet and interview very interesting people from around the world. Her most recent book, Under a White Sky, The Nature of the Future, is a fascinating discussion of basically how humans are needing to develop technological solutions

for problems that technology has created and the opportunities, challenges, and frustrations associated with that. And she has talked to people around the world about a number of very interesting and sometimes tragic conundrums. I wanted to chat with Elizabeth about that book and also about her own development of interest in science as someone who study literature rather than science and where that came from

and the importance of really science for understanding public policy and our culture. So we had a remarkable discussion about these topics and an in-depth dive into her new book and I hope you'll enjoy our discussion. Elizabeth, by the way, we'll be joining us on our Galapagos Origins Project Foundation trip in January

2024, so stay tuned for announcements about that. In any case, I hope you'll enjoy watching the podcast on our Substack site, Critical Mass, where you can watch it commercial free, and by doing so, support the nonprofit Origins Project Foundation that produces the podcast, or you can watch it on YouTube, or listen to it on any podcast listing site, whether you watch it or listen to it.

I hope you'll really enjoy this discussion with Elizabeth Colbert. Well, Betsy, it's wonderful to see you again, and I want to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to spend some time with me virtually. It's great to see you again. Likewise. And I'm going to get to ask you questions about things that I've always wondered about you. because this is an origins podcast and one of the things I like to do is talk to people about the origins of how they got to where they got to before we actually talked to where you've

gotten to. And I'm fascinated by your origins because they don't seem, as far as I can see, to have prepared you for the incredible success. Well, in one way they have, but for the subjects of your incredible success as a writer most recently. you grew up in in in largemont or for the most part in near New York and some a nice feeder school to Yale and you went to Yale and of course at Yale you studied literature what else do people study at Yale and and and I was pleased actually you went to Yale you fortunately left Yale a year and a half before I moved there to become a professor there well it's too bad because I actually did take a physics class and it was it was kind of a debacle I still have, remember the final. Yeah. Was it a real physics class or was it physics for Yeah, it was a real physics class. I was really stupid and I took like the real premed physics class. I was, it was a big, big boo-boo, yeah. And of all the physics classes you should never take,

pre-med physics is the one you should definitely never take because it's, yeah, it's not taught like regular physics. They're trying to get, and then you have these students who are all, anyway, I I once taught that class at Yale, and I've never teach it again. But I used to teach the physics or poets class, but I thought maybe that might be the one you would take. I should have taken that. Yeah. Anyway. I might be a physicist today.

You never know, but you took that. Were you thinking of being a doctor? Is that why you took the pre-med? No, I was interested in, you know, I was interested in science. And I, but I was not well enough prepared by my very kind of mediocre high school education. So I was immediately blasting out of the sciences. Now, hold on. It's too bad. You said you were interested in science. So what kind of literature did you focus on when you did when you studied literature? I studied German literature. I was a, yeah, it was called a lit major. It still exists. It's not exactly conflict. It's not

exactly English. It's its own thing. It was very heavily theoretical in those days. It was as, you know, Yale was just a hotbed of deconstruction at that time. And you survived that. I survived. I'm a, I'm a survivor, yeah. Wow. Yeah, no, I remember we used to look down from Science Hill at those deconstructionists and laugh and claim it would never, science would never be affected. But then, yes, yes. Then look what's happened. But anyway. Yeah, that's right. It's like a cancer. It's right. But anyway, So, okay, so German literature, and did you take any other science classes? How did I fulfill my requirements?

I don't think I ever went up science hill again now. I think I... Yeah, that's the case. Most students that, you know, never even have to go up science hill once, but... Yeah, I think I just used AP credits or something. I can't remember. So then you graduated, and this explains. So I was trying to figure why, after you graduate, he went a Fulbright scholarship to Germany,

to Hamburg. And it's because you'd studied German literature. Is that the reason you went? Yes, exactly. Did you plan to go on to graduate school or something? Or did you, at that time, why did you, why did you go to Germany? I mean, other than the excitement of getting a scholarship to go there? Well, that's a, I mean, I, you know, this is perhaps more than your listeners want to hear.

But I had, my grandparents, my mother was born in Germany. and my grandparents were German refugees from and there's a lot of you know sort of waking up I suppose to my own family's history and that made me study German and study German literature and go to Germany for a year and I did entertain thoughts of going on and you know really getting a PhD in German literature but not really terribly serious ones. I kind of, I toyed with it, but I never, you know, I never actually applied to grad school. Well, now, was the fact, I noticed, at least in your biography, it says you became a stringer for the New York Times in Germany. Did that, did you seek that out or did that happen?

Is that sort of help derail you, actually having a job derail you from going back to school? Yes, yes, exactly. I, instead of going to class, in European universities, people don't go to class that much. and no one went to class. We just had to sort of be there for the end of the semester. So instead of going to class, I did, I wrote a bunch of stuff. I wrote stuff for the Times travel section.

I was a Stringer for the Times. Could you explain what a stringer is, by the way? Sure. A stringer is, you know, there was at that point, you know, one correspondent, he was in Bunn in those days. And, you know, you couldn't be everywhere. So, for example, that was the year that, um, They were, the Reagan administration was putting Persian missiles in, in Germany. And there were a lot of demonstrations, pretty fierce demonstrations.

So, you know, I would go out and cover the demonstrations in Hamburg, and then I would just feed it. I would just, I guess, probably feed it to the recording room in those days. You would call up and, you know, just dictate your notes to someone. And they would pass them on to the person who was actually writing the story. So that's a stringer. That's a stringer, basically. eyes and ears basically. Okay, string people along.

Okay. But then, and you, you know, worked at the times for quite a while in the Metro desk and anything else. And then you eventually moved to the New Yorker in, what, 1999, I think. Now, I was going to ask why, but I suppose the New Yorker's kind of a dream job. Is that the reason? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that, you know, everyone,

in journalism. Everyone who writes, you know, 800 words or 1,000 words, you know, as you do at the Times, wants to write, you know, 10,000 words and everyone wants, 10,000 words want to write 100,000 words. So I guess everyone always thinks they have more to say and then maybe they do. But anyway, I thought I had something to say, too, that was beyond the thousand word scope. And so as soon as I got the offer, I, you know, knew I would take it. Yeah. If you don't, I'm asking, what proceeded getting an offer? I mean, you were working at a Metro desk and, and I don't know, that doesn't, to me,

it doesn't sound like sort of a launching pad for a kind of thoughtful writing career. So it was just people like your writing in the Times? Is that that was? Well, I had been writing something called the Metro Matters column, which doesn't exist anymore, but which was local politics. And I was actually hired at The New Yorker by David Remnick, who had just become the editor of the New Yorker,

to revive a local column, a local politics column that had been called around City Hall. I think it was called Around City Hall. And it had been written by a woman named Andy Logan who had just sort of retired and it had the column that sort of, you know, just drifted into oblivion.

And David got the idea of reviving it when he became editor. And so since I had been writing this column, I was a somewhat natural choice. Sure. Yeah. Now then, and then that led five years so later, to your first book, Prophet of Love, which seemed to me, it's a story about politics, isn't there? You know, politics.

Yeah, that book is actually really a collection of stories about New York politics, almost all of them about New York politics. Some sort of answer to that, but that were written in that period of the first years that I was of the New York book. Okay, yeah. But then, but then this is the thing that gets me. There's like a phase transition, not a catastrophic extinction. But something like it. 2004, you do that. And then 2006, you come out with field notes from a catastrophe, which is the beginning,

you know, presages the obviously beginning of what is what you're most well known for and what you've continued to do, which in some sense is right about science and nature. What caused that shift? I mean, it must have been percolating for some time, I assume. Well, it has, you know, it has like all origins. a little bit fuzzy and multifaceted, I suppose. But one thing that happened was that the web took over the news, you know, right around the time I got to the New Yorker.

And so you had to kind of rethink things because, you know, we were weekly, we close on, you know, close stories, let's say, on Thursday. They won't come out until Monday. the political term was getting really, really fast. And I started to think of things to do that, you know, wouldn't be dated by the time they came out. And I have always been interested, even when I covered, you know, politics, I covered a lot of environmental issues, environmental politics, the closing of, for example, the fresh kills landfill on Staten Island, things like that,

PCBs in the Hudson and I had this idea right as as George Bush withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol you know in 2001 that I would try to write something on climate change and I actually went to Greenland in 2001 and that made a big impact on me and then I filed my piece on Greenland literally on September 10th, September 10th, 2001. So, you know, it didn't run for months. It obviously got, you know, shoved aside by the events of September 11th. We all, everyone at the New Yorker got really thrown into September 11th coverage, including me for a year, really.

And when I emerged from that, I proposed a piece to David Ramek, the editor of The New Yorker, and I said, I want to write this piece on climate change in the Arctic. And he said, and I listed all the compelling reasons why climate change was an important issue, blah, blah, blah. And it was really David, who said, you should write a series on that. You should write a three-part series on that. And I didn't really know what the three parts were going to be, but you can't really turn down that kind of an opportunity. So I did.

I wrote a three-part series. and that's what became, that appeared in 2005. That took over a year to write. And then, you know, as you know, once you sort of get on the climate change beat, it sort of takes over. So that's really what happened. So once you've done that, you sort of became the go-to person for climate change stories. And but you have, but as you say, you hadn't, but let me go back then. I wanted to talk about, you know, sort of take that broad brush history, but you said you were kind of interested in science when you took that physics class.

But did you, what about it earlier in your life? What did, were your parents any, were they technical at all or? My dad's a doctor. My dad's an eye doctor. So, you know, I would. And so yeah, there was, you know, and when I was in high school, I would not have, you know, I took a lot of high school math, high school, you know, science, but, and I was fine. But what I realized when I got to college is I really didn't have a very solid deck and I didn't have a lot of, you know, talent. I didn't have a lot of, I was fine at, you know, what you could.

memorize and I didn't have a lot of physical intuition and that was a real problem. Now, but did you, did you read a lot of science? Did you read any science when you a kid or no? Not not wildly. I mean, I really read, you know, novels. I really liked to read novels. And, you know, I not, when I look back on it and, you know, my own kids have now all gone through college and one was an English major for better or worse, you know, reading novels is, you know, if there are any college students listening to this, I'm not sure reading novels is what you should do with your college education. I wish I had taken more science and even done badly.

And it probably would have been better than a lot of the class I took more useful. Okay, well, that's interesting to know. But I must say you've taken to it well. I mean, you're not just a lovely writer, and you are a lovely writer. I just, I enjoy reading you a lot. But yeah, you're a great explainer of science issues. And I think it's, you know, I often, I like, when it comes to real deep science, I like to read things by scientists writing about science, because I, especially physics, because I like to go to the horse's mouth. And I think people do. But what is nice, though, is when someone doesn't have a background of science who writes, because they, a lot of scientists don't recognize exactly what it takes to explain, you know, what people want to hear or where they're coming from. And that's one of the hardest things you get to, you know, I've had a lot of experience and I think I know that. But I'd say most many of my colleagues,

it's hard to recognize. And if you and if you don't have a science background, you know, my editors for my first bunch of books were not, all of which were science books, were not scientists. And I found that particularly useful because when I wrote it, they could read this and say, well, what's that all about and why and why should I care? And so I think it's great in that sense. Yeah. I mean, I do think that not being a particularly, you know, talented scientists, I do bring a pretty average reader's, you know, perspective to things. So I think that that is helpful, you know. Yeah, it is. That and I think the two things that, and they're characteristic of those books and writing in general, the two things that I guess, I don't know

whether I'd say admire most, but I'm always so impressed by is your willingness to travel to all the places, which has got to be a lot of fun. I mean, that's partly it. But but I mean to go in depth and to actually visit and see and explore in ways that you know I've gone to visit and see and I say gee whiz you know if I'd been interested in ox would I have found a boat to take me to that island and I'm always impressed that you know well those are the tricks of the train wise yeah yeah I guess so that and also the background research I'm very you know there's a lot of and some of the science some of the history I'm very familiar with some I'm not but I'm really impressed by the by the ancillary research. So those, those are, and that's great. And I think that's important. One of the things, I want to, I want before we got, by the way, in case listeners are wondering where we're going, Betsy's last book, Under the White Sky is what I, is what I really want

to get to because it's a compelling discussion of current issues. And I want to go through that in some detail. But I want to preface it by going through some of the stuff from the sixth extinction, which you're pooled surprise when he wrote. Because, I think it leads. nicely into the next phase, which is under the white sky in ways, at least I found, intellectually leads into them. And so therefore, I thought it would be useful in a narrative sense. One of the things that I hadn't appreciated so much, that it's early in your book,

but was this sudden shift, it seems so natural, as I think you say in the book, but it seems so natural for anyone, anywhere of us to realize things go extinct and things change in the earth. But to realize that that realization is fairly recent. And very, and as intuitive as it seems now, it was equally non-intuitive early on. You look out, it looked like the earth, nothing changed much over human time. And you quote, none other than Jefferson, which I really blew me away, this quote from Jefferson, who you think of as the, you know, as the prototypical scientist, politician in a way. And he said, such is the economy of nature that no instance can be produced or have, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct, of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken. What a definitive statement about the fact that things never change.

And that, you know, and that's remarkable, an educated, intelligent man at that time. to write that tells us that obviously the notion that the things had become extinct was an essential part of realizing not just evolution but realizing the impact ultimately the impact not just of changing conditions in nature but human impacts on nature. I wonder whether, you know, obviously I've talked about how, what an amazing impact on me it was. Did it equally surprise you? You mean this notion that that extinction was a relatively new concept? Yeah.

Yeah, the history, I mean, it's interesting because, you know, everyone sort of knows the story of Darwin and the sort of, you know, birth, as it were, of a concept of, you know, evolution or descent with modification or whatever you call it. But the story of extinction is never, is very rarely to hold, you know, the discovery of extinction, which predates. by a generation Darwin and was quite, I think probably quite significant.

He was obviously very familiar with these debates. And I think one of the reasons that that's the case is because the person who's really responsible for having, you know, promulgated, I guess, the notion of extinction and really made that sort of common knowledge was a guy named George Cuvier, who was a friend. naturalist, a towering figure, you know, the Darwin before Darwin, the by far the most famous

naturalist in Europe, a generation, or even really two generations before Darwin. And he was a constant, he's a very complicated figure. He's not a Darwin figure where you say, oh, you know, just about everything they said turned out to be correct. Many things he said turned out to be incorrect. And he was involved in all sorts of complicated disputes. And he was very much an enemy of Lamarck and Lamarck had this sort of proto-evolutionary theory and, you know, really tried to stomp that out and really was quite mean to Lamarck, actually, and delivered quite a devastating eulogy of him. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting history there, but it's not a neat story of scientific discovery. It's a story of someone who had many brilliant insights and also many

insights that, you know, were not true. But it's a good example of the fact that, you know, we tend, the public romanticizes scientists, certain scientists, and think of them as sort of individuals working alone late at night and having these aha moments. And that's just not the way science is done for the most part. And Darwin, just Einstein wouldn't have been Einstein without Maxwell, 30, or 50 years earlier. And Darwin wouldn't have been Darwin, I think, before maybe Cuvier. And also, as you point out, I guess it's what's his name, Linnell or what is his name? Lyle.

Charles Lyle. Yeah, yeah, the geologist. And I think that's really important to recognize that is that you have to be at the right, you have to have to have the right talents, but you have to be lucky enough to be born at the right time, too. And I think that's really just the way science works. Yeah, no, there's a lot of interesting, there's a lot of interesting history. of science, you know, in that time between, you know, the French Revolution and, you know, and Darwin, you know, as you know, just amazing strides made in many, many fields. And, you know,

once again, some people who turned out to be, you know, completely right about one thing and completely wrong about another. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's, yeah, I'm a big fan of history too, I guess. So that's probably why I, but, but I think it's important. to realize that, you know, I really think it's important to sort of overcome misconceptions people have about science, and that's certainly one. Science is a social activity. It's not socially constructed, but it's a social activity, and it depends crucially on that interaction and ideas moving around at the time. Now, I, you know, I'm not going to do a whole review of the extinction, but the thing, because it anticipates ideas that come up under the white sky,

extinction, or at least the two extinctions that are perhaps most significant, which you talk about, you talk about a lot of extinctions, but globally where life was almost wiped out in many ways, are the Permian extinction and the Cretaceous extinction. The Cretaceous being the most famous one, the one where the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid. And I, you know, you do a lovely history that. And I remember living through that time when Alvarez was, you know, you read about it. You went poo-pooed it. No, it's just, it's just these dilettantes, these. And, you know, physicists assuming they have the answer for everything. And then, and then turning it to be right. And it's amazing to watch that become part of cognitive culture. And we'll get, and I think that anticipates

something I want to come to at the end of our discussion. But the Permian is what people don't realize. It's a much bigger one. When, when almost all, with 90% of, like, life, it almost got wiped out. And it was, it was, it was, it was a, quote, a natural event. And you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, maybe you want to talk a little better about it here, because it anticipates, you know, some of the concerns that may be related to the modern human era. Yeah. So, you know, the end permanent extinction and sometimes called the mother of mass extinctions. It, it was a, as you say, a huge event. It came, you know, frighteningly, was wiping out multicellular life altogether. And no one, you know, I think the really honest way to describe it, which is no one really knows exactly what happened. But the sort of most popular theory has to do with this sort of volcanic province in Siberia,

this, you know, many, many, many year eruption, not of a volcano, but of a whole. huge sort of as I say it's not a normal volcano with one center I think it put

enough lava I remember someone once saying to cover the United States to two or three feet or

yeah huge it's a huge lava it's not even a field whatever it's many

whatever thousands of square miles and then one theory is it sort of also burned

through coal deposit it sent a lot of CO to into the air more sur two than people can kind of figure out how exactly that happened. But the one thing that we do have is evidence of carbon levels changing very dramatically during. And people have tried to date it. It's happened to 30 million years ago.

It's hard to pin it down anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 years the span of time. And we know that things got very warm. We know that the oceans got super warm and that they acidify. So those are things that I think are pretty much agreed to. And then there's questions about whether other sort of toxic gases, you know, hydrogen sulfide were released. They could have had really acute poisoning impacts, you know. But the thing that's, you know, obviously very scary is it was definitely an episode of global warming, very serious global warming, global heating, ocean acidification. And, you know, paralleling in many ways what we're doing now, people who have looked at this as carefully as you can would say that the amount of CO2 that was being emitted on an annual basis was less than we're now emitting.

It went on for many thousands of years, but on an annual basis, it was less than what we're emitting. So that's frightening. And until the modern time, probably the most dramatic injection of carbon dioxide. at least that we know of in kind of history that we know of, so quickly. 20,000 years may seem like a long time, but in a geological sense, it's quick and too quick in many cases for species to adapt or in any way.

And that's probably one of the reasons that so many species died. But yeah, now we are injecting more on a much quicker level. And so you can try and say that might be an experiment that we might be repeating, but it's not an experiment. We're repeating a more dramatic experiment, as we'll get to. And I said, I wanted to just, so those two big things frame it. But you talk about lots of separate extinction, some of which are due to humans and some of which aren't, but those aren't, but the ones due to humans, which you sort of the, I mean,

or to modern hominids, the extinction of Neanderthals. I've got to mention the ox. After the program's over, I want to, I want you to tell, I'm going again, as you know, I was just in Greenland and Iceland, but I'm going back again. and I want to see the Ock, and I might need your help. The Ock at the Iceland Museum. Yeah, I'll need your help with that. Yeah, I'm not sure if he's out of storage or not,

but I can put you in touch with the right people. Okay, and mammals, sort of individual episodes of extinctions of related to hominids, and then, of course, more dramatically, the carbon dioxide issue, and you focus a lot, not just on, you know, the issue that a lot of people do,

which is global warming, but in that book the acidification of the oceans. And the claim that, you know, the oceans had a pH of 8.2 that was down to 8.1. If it goes to 7.8, you quote in the book, a number of people saying that's a turning point from which. And that 7.8, when people are talking about the Permian, the ocean became very acidic and most many species could survive. And the suggestion is that 7.8 is about the level where things sort of turn around. right? Yeah, that is a big concern, you know. And, you know, this is at the surface waters, but the surface waters are where a lot, a lot of things live. So, yeah, there's a real fear that

things like coral reefs can't survive a pH drop, you know, very much beyond what we already have. Now, the sad thing, the really sad thing is that, you know, some people would point out, well, it's unclear we're going to get to the point of running that experiment because coral reefs are already being so devastated by global warming, you know. Yeah, although we'll talk about that. I mean, there's some good news in the last little while since I think your book was written. I'm going to take a quick one minute break. My little dog, who's 15 years old, came out from under sleeping here.

She just fell the other day. And I'm going to take care of her downstairs so she can go down for dinner. I thought she'd sleep through this. She usually does. But I'll be right back. Okay, okay. Thanks. Sure. And yeah, as I say, usually pretty good about sleeping through that. But yeah, so that 7.8 is a number we'll maybe come back to. But, but yeah, as you said, we don't know whether we'll get there. Where it's a long ways around. But it's important to realize that, you know, in case people didn't realize that global warming is just which sort of the word has occupied people. But but ocean's two points. zero is another significant argument.

And someone, I think someone had said that, I can't remember which book now it was in, that if it got down to that point, the oceans would look like they did in the pre-Cambrian era, were basically before her. Yeah, there's a guy, an Australian guy who wrote it, Pete. And yeah, it will be slimy, he said, yeah, no, we're, you know, I mean, I think one of the, I definitely think one of the points of that of the sixth extinction. one of the things I learned in the process of writing it and that I hope comes through in the book is, you know, the pressures that we are putting on the non-human world. You know, climate change is just one of them.

And right now, I would say it's not even probably the most serious one. The most serious one is simply we're taking the resources that other species need. You know, where are you going to live if you used to live in the rainforest? And the rainforest has been converted into a soy field. know, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to realize that a lot of those species are not going to make it. Yeah, no, absolutely. Okay, I think that certainly comes through. You know, it's an interesting book because it's not just a direct gloom and doom book. This is the end book, but it talks about this in a broader context.

And one of the things that will come again in the new book, and I wanted to ask you about this, because I remember I almost ran the first time you came to when I was at ASU, when I had you come speak, we were, I think, talking about running a meeting on the Anthropocene, which at that time seemed like a new word shortly after I got there. And I guess the chemist Crutson was a Nobel Prize winning chemist had first suggested the Anthropocene as a new geological era. Take us to that for a little bit, if you wouldn't mind. So the word, it's a little bit unclear who came up with it, but it was definitely, as you say, popularized by Paul Carl Carl Carson, who was one of the guys who won a Nobel in 95 for having discovered ozone depleting chemicals and really saving the world from, you know, really, really serious consequences.

I mean, there are serious consequences, but worse consequences by, you know, eliminating. or phasing out chlorocarbons. And he came up with this idea, or he popularized the idea, how's that? That we were living in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. And he proposed this in 2004 in a very short, one-page thing in nature called, I think it's called the Geology of Mankind or something like that,

very short, but quite forceful little essay, you know, where he just ran through the ways in which humans are becoming. I mean, I think he put it, you know, a force that rivals what we consider the great forces of nature, volcanism, you know, erosion, the forces that have defined geologically epochs of the past. And it sort of just took off. I mean, it really just took off because it was a word that encapsulated, you know, It's one word to describe something that's an immensely complicated phenomenon. Yeah, now he, there was a lot of discussion following it, which you described in that book.

And people talked about, you know, the Anthropocene being basically the point, the era where humans globally changed the characteristics of the earth in, in some ways that could or should be defined. But talk about it going, some people saying going back a few million years, namely the early rise of hominids, itself as being the beginning of the Anthropocene. And nowadays, I'm not sure that anyone, I do have to say Lawrence, I'm not sure anyone would say that it goes back a few million years. I think there's this early Anthropocene, you know, sort of hypothesis that it dates back to the origins of agriculture.

That that's when we really started to do what, you know, very broad scale burning a forest, cutting down a forest. and we changed the world on a geological scale at that moment. Okay, I thought somewhere in the book, you said that 2.6 million. I thought, wow, I'd never heard that before, but maybe there was some discussion early on of updating it back to the point of hominids. But yeah, no, certainly the point of,

it's more, you know, when humans have dramatically been changing the environment other than causing the extinction of other hominid species when homo sapiens have been, certainly the rise of agriculture, which I'll talk about in a second. But the reason I wanted to bring it up, you went at that point in the book, it's just 2014 or 2000. I forget when it was, that 2014. You say, and there's going to be a discussion of what's the definition of the Anthropocene, which is actually what the topic that we were going to have my scientific meeting on at the origins project when I was in charge of that.

And you say, what's going to, it'll be, we'll wait and see if in 2016 there's supposed to be a discussion. Nowadays, I've always been, it seemed to me, more familiar with the notion of the Anthropocene is effectively beginning with the rise of nuclear weapons when humans had a produced a long-term impact by, you know, radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere. So I wanted to ask what happened in 2016 after your book was written. Was that? Yeah. Yeah. It did not. In that World Conference of, you know, they have this like stratigraphy, I think it's quadruly.

genial and they did not formally recognize. In fact, if I do another edition of the book, I need to change that. So they did not formally recognize the Anthropocene. Stratographers are extremely conservative and one, you know, naming a new geological epoch is not the thing they do lightly. But one of the points that people would make is, well, look, you ain't seen nothing yet. You know, if humans were just at the very beginning of this epoch, a way to nothing. you know, a thousand years and then you're really, then you can name it. So while it is

informally extremely widespread, it's all over the scientific literature, it is not, you know, if you if you still look at the geological official geological time clock, we are still in the hall of scene officially, which is, you know, the period since the end of the last ice age. Yeah, yeah. As I say, what I've heard among my colleagues anyway is being the clear example was radio, which is really recent, obviously, there's explosions in the atomic bomb. What happened was that people, and these guys are stratigraphers,

and they really went out and they, and they were trying to find what's called this globally synchronous, like how would you define the beginning of the end of the scene so that geologists a million years from now, could see it. And one of the things,

the best signal that they came up with that was synchronous all around the world was radioactive. That's right. In fact, some people have argued in a different context I have written and talked to people as we look for the life elsewhere in the universe for signals in atmospheres. With the new JWST telescope will be looking for, you know, oxygen and methane and other things. But some people have suggested that another signature for advanced civilization is radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere. That's an interesting idea. Yeah, I think it is. Okay.

I want to get to the new book, but the end of, I think presaged, as I say, by some remarks at the end of the, at the end of your new book, which, so I want to read them, if you don't mind, then ask you to comment on it. But you say, and I'm picking it one possible. So in an extinction event of our own making, what happens to us? One possibility, the possibility implied by the Hall of Biodiversity, which you talk about in that chapter, is that we too will eventually be undone by our transformation of the ecological landscape. And then I'll skip down. Among the many lessons that emerged from the geological record, and perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance has no guarantee of future results. When a mass extinction occurs, it takes out the weak and also lays low the strong.

And then you say, then there's another paragraph. Another possibility considered by some to be more upbeat is that human ingenuity will outrun any disaster human ingenuity sets in motion. I found this particular prescient given the next book you're going to have. We'll talk about. There are serious scientists who argue, for instance, that should global warming become too grave a threat, we can counteract it by re-engineering the atmosphere, blah, blah, blah. So the idea that human ingenuity will outrun any disasters.

that human ingenuity sets in motion as the other option, which really in some sense could be quoted in the epilogue of your new book. But anyway, then you say, obviously the fate of our own species concerns us disproportionately. But at the risk of sounding anti-human, some of my best friends are human, I will say that it is not, in the end, what's most worth attending to.

Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. And I might as well read the last sentence, too. The sixth extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust, and giant rats have or have not inherited the earth. So you talk about us being destroyed and then you talk about whether human ingenuity will address it. Two important questions. You don't come out on either side.

What you come out is the amazing present. And I wanted you to comment on that a little bit because I'm going to ask you near the end of this interview, a question that came from my brother-in-law, who is a huge fan of yours and I asked him if you wanted to ask you a question. So I'll let I'll ask his question to the end. But what do you think? What about that sort of the pessimistic, the optimistic, or the or the thrill of the present? Well, I, you know, there's a quote from Jonathan Shell's very famous, you know, you know, future, I think something like futurism has never been a respectable profession.

I mean, making, you know, I don't consider, I don't have any great. greater access to the future than anybody else. And my predictions are very often wrong, so I don't put much stock in them. I think that what I really want to impress upon people right now is that what we consider to be ordinary, ordinary life is extraordinary in the history of life on Earth. And that should be very, very sobering to us, right? I mean, digging fossil fuels out of the ground, you know, burning through them, that seems just really ordinary. You go to, you know, mobile station, you fill up your car, you drive around, what could be more ordinary than that.

But it is really extraordinary. And it is changing the atmosphere. It's changing the chemistry of the oceans, as we discussed before, at a rate that is probably unprecedented, perhaps with the exception of the, you know, asteroid impact in the history of life on Earth. And, you know, what are the odds that that's going to end well? Well, but they don't seem that great, you know, to be honest. They just don't seem that great. And they're certainly not ending well for a lot, a lot of other species. And then, you know, that does get to the question of, you know, what do we care about and how much of the natural world, how many other species can we lose, you know, and just merrily glide along

ourselves. And those are questions I can't answer. Yeah, no, but you raise, and I think that's really important. And in some sense, as I say, I think the new book addresses that very issue. And again, if I already said, you know, there's one paragraph, one sentence that pre-ages the new book, which is technology solving the problems of technology. Another is two pages earlier. You talk about this crow's sex life, Kenohy's tragic comic tech life, provides more evidence, if any more was needed of how seriously humans take extinction. Such is the pain of the loss of a single species caused, such is the pain of the loss of a single species causes,

that were willing to perform ultrasounds on rhinoceroses and hand jobs on crows. Certainly, the commitment of people, you quote two people Terry Roth and Barbara Durant, and institutions like the Cincinnati and the San Diego Zoo could be invoked as a reason for optimism. And if this were a different kind of book, I would, you point that way out. which now takes us to the new book,

which is in case anyone, I don't want to give the misconception, in case if anyone thinks of it as an optimistic book, it isn't. But it does address this question. But it is a lighthearted, a lighthearted take on global calamity. Yes.

Yeah, it is a light, in some sense, lighthearted, and it's not a gloom and gloom, but it's a sober, it constantly asks the question, almost at the end of every chapter. The book is about, and I think you described at the end, but I would say how technology can be employed to try and fix the problems that technology has produced in some sense with varying results, very varying results, and often bad ones. But to point out the good ones, which I, you know, aren't sometimes stressed, there's one now and then I want to at the end talk about one that isn't in the book that I wanted to ask you about. But the ozone layer, which we discussed earlier, is a great example of humans devising technology to solve the problems that technology created and doing it very successfully. Really? You would say that, I mean, what solved the ozone solved and is not solved was stopping doing something.

Yeah, no, right. I was thinking about that. And then I decided, no, I don't agree with that. It was stopping doing something, but it was also developing alternative ways, alternative technologies. that could do the same thing allowing you to stop. Otherwise, we wouldn't have been able to stop. So I think there's more than just that. I think of getting rid of Freon, getting rid of those fluorocarbons would have been necessary. But we were able to at the same time develop technologies that allowed us to make that transition easily or relatively easily. Yes. I don't disagree with that.

I mean, you know, along with these sort of whole, you know, Rube, gold, approach to everything that we take. You know, some of those alternatives have proved to be immensely powerful greenhouse gases, and now we're having to phase those out. So we don't, you know, the idea that we get something for nothing, it's pretty rare. Yeah, it's not nothing. You're lucky when you get it. Yeah, well, you're lucky when you get it.

But ozone, I think so far is a success story, at least. But, well, it's, it's staved off one huge problem. And you're right. The question is, will it produce others? But, you know, I want to present some optimism. I mean, humans are ingenious, and sometimes we're too ingenious for own good, which is what a lot of the discussion in the book about it. So I want to go through the book now for the next, you know, hour or so in more detail.

Because you give a bunch of, there's three sections, and you give a bunch of interesting examples that give different perspectives of the same problem. The first has to do with Chicago. I mean, I was blown away by that, I must admit by that, and for going from Chicago to carp, that long, that not necessarily long, but, but that long and winding road. Talk about what the problem. I mean, what Chicago got to do with any of this? And why don't you bring us in there? Well, so Chicago was, you know, built along the Chicago River, which drained into Lake Michigan.

And it was really, Chicago was a very puny little river with not much of a flow to it because it's so flat in that part of the country. But it was really crucially importance why Chicago was there. It was how they got rid of their waste. And as the stockyards grew in the late, mid to late 19th century, it became, you know, just an untenable situation of just all this filth in the water. It was, the stench was a terrible, the, you know, water barely flowed. It was, you know, just generally revolting. And there was also a lot of increasingly concern as people sort of started to understand the germ theory of disease about waterborne diseases, you know, typhoid cholera. And there were, you know, there were outbreaks in Chicago.

So it was, it was resolved at the end of the 19th century, people realized you could not keep dumping your sewage in. interior water source. The sewage was going into Lake Michigan. Chicago gets its drinking water from late Michigan. It still gets its drinking water from Lake Michigan. You couldn't do this anymore. So what were you going to do? Well, the answer that they came up with, which was quite ingenious,

was they were going to reverse the flow of the Chicago River. And that is what they did in this huge engineering problem at the very, project at the very end of the 20th century, they were reversed the flow of the Chicago River by digging this canal. that connected the river, putting a lock on the lake side of the river, what used to do the mouth, putting a lock there, and then directing the river into this canal that then flowed basically into the Illinois River, and then from there into the Mississippi. And now, so now the Chicago River is, is, flows into the Gulf, ultimately into the Gulf of Mexico.

And that was a solution to one problem, what to do about Chicago's drinking water. and it has introduced a new set of problems. And that's really what that chapter of the book is about. And the new set of problems are invasive species, basically, in particular, right? Yes. So what happened was those were two watersheds. There was the Great Lakes watershed and there was the Mississippi watershed. And they were not connected.

They were very close, but they were not connected. So it was virtually impossible for an aquatic. creature to get from one to the other. So that, you know, was useful. But then what we did, in addition to connecting those two waterways so that anything could pass between them, what really messed things up was doing things like building the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes, brought in a huge number of invasive species. And then what the chapter is really about is an invasive that was introduced into the Mississippi system in the 60s. And I'm happy to tell that story.

It's kind of a crazy story. Yeah, it's a crazy story. Yeah, the Asian carp, which is actually not one species. It's four species, but they've all been tremendously successful. They've just taken over the Mississippi and they really want to keep them out of the Great Lakes. So that has led to this new round of interventions, which. I go visit in that chapter, this electric barrier that they've put up. Yeah, it was amazing to discover.

Why don't you tell me? I mean, I just couldn't believe that anyone would come up with such a thing. Why don't you tell? Yeah. They pulse a lot of current, a lot of voltage into this canal that they built. And enough so that I was told you could potentially tell yourself if you jumped in the water. And the idea is if fish is moving up stream, who is now upstream. it will get a shock and turn around.

That's the theory. But no one has, you know, a lot of faith in this, and they keep finding fish beyond the fish barrier. They just found one recently. And there's a new barrier. And they're going to spend almost a billion dollars. And the Army Corps of Engineers has just sort of announced plans. They got a big appropriation.

They're going to start in. So they're going to put in a new barrier further south that's going to have bubbles and sound and also electricity to try to keep these fish from getting into the Great Lakes, which may honestly already be too late for that. No one really knows. Yeah. And if they get in the Great Lakes, their discussion, I didn't know about these jumping. The silver carp is it?

Yeah. That's, that's, I, there's a, after I, when I read that chapter, I went online and looked at several videos of people taking boats. through the through rivers and having and being constantly barraged by fish jumping into their faces. It's really yeah. No, they're really it's really, you know, it's scary when you're there and and they, I mean, I talked to a lot of people. I got hit by one.

They're 80 pound fish. You know, there's a little fish and they jump into the boat and they whack you. And I talk to people who had to have reconstructive, you know, surgery on their face because of this. So it's really a, you know, that is less of an ecological problem than a, you know, recreation problem. No one really wants them around. And so, so that's an interesting, I mean, it's an interesting introduction to the unintended

side effects of technological solutions to a technological problem, this case, our garbage problem. But then, and then, but I love the, at the end, the, the, the potential solution to the, these invasive species is to eat them. And so I want to read the last part of this chapter because I found it funny. So you talked about the guy Carter who owns a fish market in Springfield is like irons, another person, a carp eating evangelist. He told me that one of his friends had his nose broken by a jumping carp,

and as a result has had to have eye surgery. We need to control them, he said. If you can catch millions and tens of millions of pounds of them, it's going to help. And the only way to do that is to create a demand for them. He took the strips he'd cut, rolled them into breadcrumbs and deep-frived them. It was a warm late summer day, and by this point, he was sweating profusely. When the strips were done, he offered them around as samples to general approval. And I'm going to jump ahead. It was hard to know how many miles Parola's silverfin

had traveled in their journey from fingerlings to finger food, but I figured it had to be at least 20,000. And that wasn't counting the trip their ancestors made to get to the United States in the first place. Did this really represent the Asian carp solution? I had my doubts. Still, when the cakes came my way, I took two of them. They were indeed quite tasty. So, you know, so what do you think? You think there's, I mean, it seems one, reading this, I mean, obviously there's, there's a, you know, your tongue is in your cheek here. But, but it doesn't seem, one should not be optimistic that that's going to be a solution to saving the problem, especially in the Great Lakes, right? Well, it's funny that you mentioned is.

I wish I gave the shirts to one of my kids because they were a little bit too big for me, but I just got in the mail from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, a T-shirt, two T-shirts that say they have a symbol, as they say, Copee on it. It says they eat, healthy, do-good or something like that. I can't remember the exact. But you can look it up, C-O-P-I. diet. There's just new marketing campaign that Illinois paid for and is promoting to rename Asian carp. People didn't like the name carp. For some reason, carp doesn't have a good reputation in this country. And so they are calling them copi for copious. And they are really trying to get people to eat them. And they, I mean, I don't know if it's, I don't think it's a solution in the sense.

that I think everyone would realize and they would acknowledge you're never getting rid of these fish. They're just too, too many of them. But, you know, once humans go after something, you know, we're really, really good at diminishing its numbers. So, and, you know, it's a very wasteful society that can, what they do now, these fish are so common. I mean, I've been out fishing for them with these guys. They pay people. they're people who basically make their entire living. They go out, they net these fish hundreds and hundreds of them at a time, no problem whatsoever.

And then they just dump them in a semi. They get ground up into fertilizer, which, you know, isn't a bad, you know, Native Americans use, you know, fish in a hole or whatever as fertilizer. It's a very, very good fertilizer, but it is not the most efficient use of animal protein. So, you know, a society that can do that is a very wasteful society. And if you could get people to eat these fish, which, as I say, are very tasty. And, you know, a carp in China is considered a real celebratory meal a whole carp. So, and it's delicious. So we should be eating more carp.

We shouldn't be, you know, grinding it up into fertilize it. Okay. Well, that's so much for the carp. The next thing you discuss is New Orleans, which is a problem in its own right. I mean, and you raise the question, should New Orleans even be there? But why don't you, well, when you talk about the problem and then, and then we'll have to talk a little bit about the solution. I'll turn it over to you. Yeah.

So, you know, this is another case. I mean, all of these situations as you talk about, they're really about whether technology or engineering, you know, can you engineer your way out of an engineered problem? Can you technologize your way out of a problem caused by technology? And in the case of New Orleans, the problem is that we've engineered New Orleans not to flood. We've engineered the whole Mississippi River not to flood. And the Mississippi Delta was built by the Mississippi River flooding. So now you have arrested a process that has been going on really since time immemorial that built all of southern Louisiana. And now you're saying that's going to stop.

But you didn't think forward enough to think, okay, when that stops, when you're not building land, you're losing land. And Louisiana, it's a crisis. It's called the land loss crisis. You're just, you know, the coast is drifting north. Absolutely. There's just no doubt about that. And New Orleans is, you know, a lot of the western Louisiana is pretty thinly populated.

It's very swampy. You know, it gets terribly damaged. The Lake Charles area just, you know, had terrible hurricanes recently. It may never recover. But New Orleans is a great American city, and we're very hesitant to just say, give up a New Orleans. But it's one of the fastest sinking places on Earth. A lot of it's below sea level. It's in this bowl that you constantly have to pump out the water.

When it rains, even, you have to pump the water up over these huge flood walls and flood defenses. And as you pump, you are contributing to subsidence. So it's a terrible, vicious cycle. And no one has a very, has an answer to it. But the latest idea is to try to sort of create fake flooding, controlled flooding to counter flood control. So we'll punch a hole in the levee south of Norlands. And when the river's running high, it's carrying a lot of sediment, will let that sediment out through these gates. And that hopefully will build land in some of these very marshy areas.

that hopefully, once again, there's a lot of hopefullys here, will help protect Louisiana from storms, surges coming from the south. Okay. Okay, that's a great summary of a complicated issue. By the way, I went to ask you, New Orleans is subsiding. You say it's one of the fastest places.

I wonder, there are a lot of places around the world, that that's a big problem. Besides sea level rise, it's subsiding when I was in Vietnam. I learned that a lot of the country done there. but when I was in Mexico City recently, you can see it. You can see this. It was built on a lake, underground lake, and that's what's been used for water for people.

And you can see the whole streets. And I was told it was sinking sometimes more than a few centimeters a year. I don't, is New Orleans more or less than me at Mexico City, do you know? You know that New Orleans is up there, Jakarta also sinking. Usually it sees deltaic places, but, you know, as you are elubes, you know, when you're sucking up a lot of groundwater and your deltaic or and you have soils, as you say, that are a lake bed that are vulnerable to compaction, then you're going to get subside. So it is a fairly widespread problem.

And as I say, especially in Delta, in the Netherlands, right, where they've, you know, diked up everything and where, you know, the Rhine is completely contained now. and that's completely a river delta, that whole area, the low countries. And so they have the same, they have exactly the same problem. Now, you present the problem, and you describe me the book, I want to read this. You talk about the structures that have been, you know, these huge dikes and other things. You say these pharaonic structures, is that maybe that's a new word for me? I think it's like pharaohs, right?

I don't know, is it? Ferronic structures have kept the city dry through several recent storms. from a certain perspective, New Orleans now appears substantially better protected than when Katrina hit. But what looks like a defense from one angle can look like a trap from another. Quote, you must have a replenished coast, Jeff Hebert, former deputy mayor of New Orleans told me, because as goes the coast, so goes New Orleans. Since the close of the crevasse period, land loss to the south has brought the city some 20 miles closer to the Gulf. It's been estimated that for every three miles a storm has to travel over land, its surge is reduced by foot.

If this is the case, then the threat to New Orleans has grown seven feet higher. Drive out nature, though you will with a pitchfork, Horace wrote in 20 BC. Yet she will always hurry back, and before you know it, it will break through your perverse disdain in triumph. I was actually surprised you to news that quote from Horace at the beginning of the, in some sense of the epigraphal, beginning of the, beginning of the, I mean, 20 BC, I mean, it really captures the whole issue, doesn't it? Yes, it does. Now, at some point, you basically say, again, I think to end this chapter, and I like your paragraphs at the end of each chapter,

which often give a slightly different perspective. And so you're talking about the famous McPhee, the writer about nature, he said, we included Achifayala in his book, The Control of Nature, published in 1989. Since then, a lot has happened to complicate the meaning of control, not to mention nature. The Louisiana Delta is now often referred to by hydrologists as a coupled human and natural system, or for short, chans.

It's an ugly term, another nomenclature hairball, but there's no simple way to talk about the tangle we've created. A Mississippi that has been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force. It is no longer exactly a river, though. It's hard to say who occupies Mount Olympus these days, if anyone. Well, so I wanted to ask you, that sounds, well, it's question, it sounds less than optimistic. Let me put it that way. When I look at, when I looked, read this chapter, I don't see any solution.

Do you see any long-term solution here? Or do you think we just have to eventually are going to have to give up? I'm New Orleans. Yeah. I think it's very, you know, it depends what time frame you're talking about. I mean, I suppose, you know, the famous, I guess, Keynesian quote from John Maynard Keynes in the long run, we're all dead. I mean, in the long run, all cities will be, you know, you know, you know, Troy or whatever, but New Orleans has probably a shorter lifespan than most cities.

I mean, all low-lying coastal cities are vulnerable and are going to be, you know, undergoing massive efforts to protect themselves. And in some cities like New Orleans, where you add subsidence to the mix and not having any bedrock underneath you, you get an extra set of problems that is very hard to see how you get around that. And another city I should add, which I don't talk about in the book, but which I've written about fairly extensively is Miami, which is built on, you know, old limestone, very porous, very hard to keep, you know, someone said to me, a piece I wrote about Miami, the water comes out of us

from six directions, you know, you're getting water from, from everywhere. And one of the places you get water is from below. So if you just increase this sort of pressure on, you know, of the sea, the sea is the seas rise and the pressure grows, you know, you just get water bubbling up. And this lens of freshwater also that Florida depends on for its drinking water also gets, you know, there's salt water intrusion. So there's a lot, tons of problems also facing that kind of geology. Well, yeah, and in fact, and one of the things I don't want to stress, which isn't stress so much because of focus on it, it's the problem.

But these cities like New Orleans and Miami benefit from being part of a rich country that can build massive dikes or who knows what, and maybe it may be necessary for New York City as well. but the same problems, exactly the same problems, are facing huge populist third world countries. Like, you know, the reason I wrote my last book on climate change is a visit to the Delta in South Vietnam. And that whole country is, well, sea level and sinking.

And, you know, Vietnam may have the resources, but Bangladesh probably doesn't. But all these countries, and it's similar things. it's sea level rise compounded by most these countries are also subsiding because they have huge populations. And there are many countries in the world where adaptation will not be possible. The same problems exist, but there's no clear solution. Whereas you can imagine technological short-term fixes at least to these American cities. Yeah, no, absolutely. And, you know, a different book and a very important book. And, you know, many books have been written,

getting a different aspect of this problem are, would absolutely be looking at, you know, that side of the problem. And there's just a book I have by a British journalist whom I admire gay events. It's called Nomad Century. It's about, you know, how many refugees are going to be on the move.

Sure, implied in refugees. Yeah. So I think that is a huge, you know, yes, as you say, there's one question, can you solve, you know, these engineering problems with engineering if you have the money to do it? And then what do you do if you don't have the money to do? Yeah. And then the other, you just hit one. I wasn't going to go up, but the other, the other unanticipated consequences, often geopolitical consequences. And the climate refugees are a big one. I tried to get Australia to be in the time of a former conservative government, what they called the liberals there. when I was on TV, you know, talking about the fact they were, at that time,

there were both people and they were shipping them off to, as you know, to this awful place. They don't want to let them into Australia. I said, well, that's a few thousand. But, you know, look at the countries near you. When you have 100 million climate refugees, where are they going to, where's close to place to go? If you're worried about it now, you might want to consider it later.

But for some reason, that kind of long-term forward thinking of the future just doesn't seem to work. Well, you know, as many people have pointed out, one of the, you know, reasons that were in the rather disaster situation or potentially disaster situation that we're in is that both our economic, you know, year-end profits and our electoral cycles are not, do not encourage long-term thinking. We're just not very good at it. And it is interesting to think about, you know, because definitely we are all beneficiaries. You know, I mean, as you mentioned, I grew up in New York, the New York City water system, which took, you know,

basically a century to build, but people had a lot of foresight and bought up that land for the watershed. And, you know, had they not done that, I don't know what people would be drinking in New York, but we seem to have increasing trouble. The better we see into the future, the harder time we have of doing anything. it's kind of an interesting question as to why as a society we're so, you know, paralyzed,

even as the world is changing really, you know, rapidly around us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But now let's talk about, well, I'm not sure it's an optimistic story, but it harkens back to that sentence you had about talking about praising those people, about how sensitive we are to certain extinctions and how people are working really hard and you might, and those

people are you admire so much that that um that um that um you know it's it's surprising to see and that the the example is the devil's whole pupfish which i i found an interesting side story of course obviously i'd never heard of the devil's old pup fish um but boy it's a lot of work trying to try to save that little little bugger why don't you why don't you talk about that for a second Sure. So the devil's hole of fish is a, it's been called the rarest fish in the world. It probably is. It's, it's only, um, habitat is this one, um, freshwater pool in the middle of the Mojave, which is actually part of this really interesting, huge underground aquifer. And it's, it's sort of one moment where the aquifer hits the surface, a very small little surface, but it's very, very deep. And it's heated. It's geothermal heated. It's over 90 degrees of water.

Terrible conditions for fish, you know, low oxygen. Most fish couldn't survive. But this one little fish, which is sort of the apex predator in this ecosystem, is somehow there. No one knows how. And has been there. But in the 60s and 70s, people withdrew water, started withdrawing water from the aquifer to grow, you know, alfalfa. And I mean, just things that should not be. done honestly in the Mojave and the water level dropped and the fish really suffered and so what

happened is really it was not just the best you know intentions of humans to be to be honest it was the Endangered Species Act kicked in and they were one of the first listed species and when you're on the Endangered Species Act there has to be a recovery plan that's like the law. And since these fish only have one habitat in the whole world, well, one of the things was to try to restore that habitat, very difficult. You can't restore that aquifer, which is so humongous. You can't just raise the water level. So what they ended up doing as the fish continued to decline despite a lot of, a lot of effort, was they built them a fake habitat, an totally enclosed indoor pool to try to replicate.

It was impossible to replicate because this thing's, you know, 500 feet deep at least. But as best they could, that section of the water, they mostly live in like the top 75 feet of the water. And I visited it and the labor that goes into trying to keep those fish alive is astonishing. It's astonishing to read. I mean, you read about recreating every, you know, exact replica. of the shelf where they tend to breed. And I mean, everything is, it's amazing and shocking to me. It was shocking me that people spent the time

and that anyone had the money to spend on that. And it's hardening in some sense, but one also has to ask, and this is a big question that people ask when they say, oh, you know, what about saving this frog or this or this, or this pupfish? You know, is that expenditure of time and effort while as loving and wonderful and admirable

is it worth it? Well, I mean, I think, you know, I quote this guy in the book, and it's really one of my favorite quotes in the book, and he's a guy who's saved another species of puckfish. These fish tend to have very, you know, can have very tiny ranges. So he saved another species by literally, you know, it's cool was drying out, he took them out in a bucket. Yeah.

And he's now in his 90s, but still quite, quite with it. And people always asked him what, you know, they would say, what good are pupfish? And he said, well, what good are you? You know, and the idea that, you know, what good are these fish doing us, you know, on some level, you know, none. We don't, we don't eat them. If we ate them, you know, they're, they're, you know, I think I say something like, oh, their combined weight would be like that of a, you know, fish burger or something. But, you know, you're saying, why do we spend all this money? Why do we spend other stuff? We spend it on crypto.

We spend it on, you know, terrible, terrible things. So I would say why shouldn't we spend it on this? I mean, if you told me, you know, at the end of the day, you know, there's only X number amount of money to spend on trying to restore ecosystems or save species. And we have to choose between X and Y and there's a certain amount of triage. You know, that's true. And that's happening all the time. We are triaging without consciously or without calling it that.

But, you know, this is several million dollars to build this facility, $4 million or whatever. We spend $4 million on, you know, a bomb. So I don't have trouble. Yeah, exactly. I don't have any trouble saying we should be doing this. Yeah, no, I mean, I didn't want to suggest it wasn't. I wanted to ask the question, is it worth it? And I wanted to hear an answer that.

But I want to read the last paragraph of that chapter because, again, It's lovely literature. That night in my last in Nevada, I stayed on the strip at the Paris in a room with the view of the Eiffel Tower. I know that well. This being Vegas, the tower rose out of a swimming pool. The water was the blue of antifreeze.

From somewhere near the pool, a sound system pumped out a beat that reached me dull and throbbing through the sealed windows of the seventh floor. I really wanted a drink, but I couldn't bring myself to go back down to the lobby past the concierge de toilets, and La Reception

to find a faux French bar. I thought of the devil's hole pupfish in their simulated cavern. I wondered, is this how they felt in their darker moments? I love that. Okay. Next, the Super Coral Project.

An assisted evolution. It's a really interesting idea, and I know it's actually worked in a variety of areas of engineering assisted evolution a podcast. I'll do sometime in the future with a Nobel Prize winning chemist on that. But when do you talk about this project?

I mean, as you talked about in the last book, corals are, you can't help, but not, it's impossible not to know that corals are in trouble. You often read, results saying that the Great Barrier Reef is dead. It isn't, but, and one has to be wary of overstating these things sometimes. But why don't you talk about the problem and this interesting solution? because I think it's fascinating.

So the problem, you know, coral reefs are facing a number of problems. You know, they're, so I guess I should start by saying that coral reefs are built by tiny little animals, you know, called corals. But they're really interesting creatures. They're these very tiny, they're basically just like a mouth and a bunch of tentacles. and they're connected together in their tissue, their clones of each other for the most part. And so they're like this thin layer of living tissue over this calcium carbonate structure that they build.

They excrete that calcium carbonate. So that's what a reef is. It's all these corals working together and excreting this calcium carbonate and building this structure that then is home to all these other hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of species. species. And they, corals actually need pretty precise conditions. They need, they need clear water,

they need warm water, they need not a lot of nutrients in the water. So they have pretty, they're pretty picky. And we are, you know, screwing with them in all sorts of ways, nutrient runoff, turbidity in the water, pollution, you know, fertilizer, blah, blah, blah. But the sort of biggie, one of the biggies is climate change because when they they're animals but they depend for a lot of their nutrition on these symbiotic algae and when it gets warm very warm the algae you know go into sort of overdrive they produce a lot of oxygen a lot of oxygen radicals are very dangerous and the corals expel them and that's coral bleaching this phenomenon called coral bleaching which people are probably familiar with and they turn white

And if it doesn't last too long, then they can sort of, you know, recapture their algae and go on. But if it lasts a long time, they literally starve to death. So this has really, these bleaching episodes are getting, they're getting more frequent, closer together, longer, blah, blah, blah, really having a devastating impact. And people who look at the situation say, you know, coral biologists say, well, the oceans are not cooling down.

That is just not happening. any time in the foreseeable future. So what are we going to do? How are we going to try to save these reefs? And one point that also should be made is that some corals seem to survive. So some, you know, you get a bleaching event. Some corals are tougher than others. So from this observation came this idea.

Could you try to sort of speed along the evolution of heat tolerance, either by the corals or by their symbionts and create tougher corals. And that is the heart of this project that is being run by Australians and Americans. And the woman who is really this, whose brainchild it really was, sadly, a very dynamic woman named Ruth Gates and English woman died a few years ago. But it was really her brainchild. She was in Hawaii. but it is being carried on now by people in her lab and also by a lot of scientists in Australia. Yeah, and you give a quote from one of them, which I found particularly useful.

So hopefully the world will come to its senses soon and actually start to reduce greenhouse gases. Or maybe there will be some wonderful technological invention that will solve the problem. Who knows what's going to happen? But we need to buy time. So I see assisted evolution as filling the gap, being a bridge between now and the day when we're hopefully really holding down climate change or hopefully reversing it. That's a theme that will come up again later in the book, too, bridging the gap and an interesting one. But in the process, you got to have some fun. You got to watch Coral Sex.

I think, and you write a, I just want to write, I mean, it's a long discussion of it, but you say coral sex is a rare and amazing sight. On the Great Barrier Reef, it takes place once a year in November or December, shortly after a full moon. During the event called a mass spawning, billions of polyps release in synchrony in synchrony tiny bead-like bundles. These bundles, which contain both sperm and eggs, float to the surface and break apart. most of the gametes become fish food or simply drift away. The lucky ones meet a gamete of the opposite sex and produce a coral embryo. And you describe the experience of, I guess, swimming and seeing some of this. And it sounded like an amazing experience.

But part of the, but there's the natural version of this, but the reason you talk about this is they've created a whole, in order to do assisted evolution, they've created a whole, once again, an artificial environment for corals where they can stress them constantly and then have them and then corals have sex and then take the ones that survive and stress them and basically do what we've done in many other ways from the from the general from the breeding of dogs to to to to what will be the next chapter which will be genetic engineering more or less engineer harder your species yes the complexity here is

is we could certainly breed tougher corals. We could breed more heat-resistant corals. The question would be we don't breed, your dog would not survive very long out in the woods. It would, you know, coyote food or whatever. And it wouldn't have had a fend for itself. And, you know, well, you know, the corral would have different problems,

but the question is what tradeoffs, you know, in that breeding are you making? And, you know, despite our, you know, immense talents and ability now to, you know, read the genome of the coral, we don't really know. So one of the questions, you know, is so they, what they do is they stress these corals, they cross them, right? They very carefully separate out the eggs and sperm, which are in these same little bundles. They separate them out.

They cross the ones, cross them in all sorts of different ways, subject them to stress, take the tough ones and grow them up. And then you've got to take those. And this is a very, you know, many year process because corals are pretty slow growing. You put them out onto the reef, right? Like you will get like a, you know, basket of them or whatever. And you will have to put them out on the reef and see if they can make it there. So it's a very, you know, it's a fascinating idea. because those are very slow going to actually put it into practice.

Yeah, and then there's the question of, what you can do it. You say later on the chapter, again, you know, presenting the positives and negatives, it was hubris to imagine that people could drive the Great Barrier Reef to collapse without suffering any consequences. But wasn't it just another kind of Ubrus

to imagine that all of the reef scale interventions and all of it? So isn't that, you know, isn't that kind of, unrealistic. And then you say, but in the grand scheme of things, artificial selection was just tinkering at the margins. It was natural selection, indifferent, but infinitely patient, that had given rise to life's astonishing diversity. And, and, you know, of course, relate, you know, then you give the great quote of the final page of Darwin's book. But suggesting, once again, that this technological fix is potentially still maybe a lost cause?

In fact, you say, everyone I spoke to in Australia understood that preserving the Great Barrier Reef in all its greatness was beyond what could realistically or unrealistically be hoped for. Even settling for a tenth of it would mean shading and robotically seating an area the size of Switzerland. What was at issue? Was it best a demand? diminishing thing, a kind of okay barrier reef. If we can extend the life of the reef by 20, 30 years,

that might be just enough for the world to get its act together on emissions. And it might make the difference between having nothing and having some sort of functional reef. And so what struck me here was, again, a theme that comes throughout. If we, first of all, the hope that this is a bridge that will be a bridge to not to nowhere, but a bridge to a world where we've where we solve the other huge problem. But also the other aspect of this that comes throughout is this lack of foresight.

Namely, people presumably knew about the problems as they knew about climate change problems 30 years ago. If those problems had been addressed, I think someone even says it. If 30 years ago that problem had been addressed, then we'd now be talking about, you know, just some minor fixes to keep it going. But we didn't.

So maybe. Yeah, no. I mean, I think that, you know, climate change is a very, you know, the ultimate example of this. You know, we have known about climate change for a long time. And we sat on our hands. And, you know, now, you know, I would say now there is movement. But, you know, the phrase too little too late. And in the meantime, there's 30.

years of emissions up there. And I think that that has to be, you know, stressed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's, we'll get to that. That's the, I tried to stress it in my book. I was going to, you know, I called it the law, I didn't think I called in the book. I decided to call it the Las Vegas effect. That when it comes to carbon, what, what happens in the atmosphere, stays in the atmosphere. But, but that, that gives the urgency that most people don't realize. So, so, but we'll get there. want to stay here for a moment. And I wanted to ask, you know, you certainly make it sound like at best that the Great Barrier Reef is a done deal. Well, I think once again, you know, all of these things like, like, you know, are humans going to go extinct or aren't they going to go extinct?

No, is New Orleans going to survive or isn't it going to survive? I strongly suspect the answer is, you know, none of the above. You know. humans are going to go extinct, but there may be a lot fewer of us, you know, a hundred years from now for various reasons. New Orleans, you know, might not be abandoned, but it may be a very different diminished place. The Great Barrier Reef may not cease to exist, but it will be a diminished place. It's already a diminished place. Okay, Barry Ariefer. Fantastic place, but it's a diminished place. One thing you don't say, and it's relevant back from your previous book, presumably these problems, no matter what you do in terms of assisted evolution,

if the ocean gets to 7.8 pH, there's no, that's, then all of this tinkering is kind of irrelevant, right? Well, I think that that even that would be debated, you know, once again, I mean, you know, there are pockets of, you know, there are corals that exist under, you know, pretty tough pH conditions. I'm not going to get into the chemistry, but corals can regulate their own chemistry. Sure, yeah, yeah. So, or to a significant extent,

certainly some people would say that's it. They're just the energetics of it are impossible. It's not happening. And some people would say, well, some species may, may even be able to make it at that time because they have certain adaptations. So, you know, the world is a very, is a fantastically various amazing place.

That's what's wonderful about it. And some things will make it. They will prove more resilient than we thought. And once again, my guess, my educated guess is, and a lot of things won't. Yeah. Actually, interesting enough, when I was writing the section on acid and water, well, on the oceans in my book, the physics, climate change, I was talking about that, you know, dissolving carbon,

shells by acidity, which seems to be straightforward chemistry. Turns out the chemistry isn't so straightforward. And the person who explained that to me was actually later in the book, Dan Shrag, who we talk about in this book. You know, it's a lot more complicated than you might imagine first. And secondly, okay, certain species will die off. But in fact, there's great evidence that other ones will fill the evolutionary niche. And so one shouldn't be, you know, it's easy.

and tempting to say, all hope is lost. But it's more complicated, and the ability of life to fill evolutionary initiatives is quite extensive. And so it's not, maybe one should move. I mean, I think that one thing that happens with reefs, and we've already seen this time and time again. And another thing that's happening to reefs, I mean, you know, being pessimistic about reefs is unfortunately just being realistic. It's disease gets them. And they are a lot of weird diseases that keep popping up. They're probably linked to warming that and their, you know, vulnerability and their immune systems that just, you know, come in and just wipe things out.

So the Caribbean reefs, which have been devastated by disease, are in, you know, a shadow of their former cells. Yeah, I go down. I haven't dived at the Berry Reef. I've dived down to the Caribbean Reef. I've even seen it over the years. I've been there. Okay. Next chapter has to do with more or less genetic engineering.

and engineering your way out of problems that you've created. I want to preface it, though, by talking about saying that one thing of people, when they talk by genetic engineering, people don't recognize that we've been doing it as long as humans have been human. And it's not some recent, you know, CRISPR is recent and our ability to manipulate the genome is recent directly by, you know, molecule by molecule. But our ability to do genetic engineering has been there since humans have loved. since the dawn of the Anthropocene, if you want to call it that.

Since we domesticated things. Well, even domestic, I would argue even going back before that, well, maybe if you want to call it, since we've domesticated plants since the dawn of agriculture, that, you know, we've been already engineering plant varieties that we could grow as a, when we went from hunting to, to, to, to agriculture. And by the way, people, this is something, someone, actually, I was in a different context. I still don't know if it's true, although he argued with great assertion that it is, that actually when it comes to energy in the terms of climate change, the biggest mistake

that unintended side effect, negative unintended side effect, was the development of agriculture. They argued that agriculture is actually more energy intensive than hunting, gathering, which I was surprised about. So if we were still hunter-gatherers, we'd be spending less energy then so agriculture which was a technology which solved a huge problem allowed people to stay put nevertheless created a huge ultimately led to a huge unintended side product which is the expenditure of energy i thought that was kind of an interesting um i don't know if you heard that argument called it the biggest mistake in human history yeah um well one one thing that it did which is you know very it it fundamentally you know we were just sort of chugging along

with probably a pretty low, you know, reasonably stable population. Each human population is underdathers. Once you can have agricultural surpluses, you can really increase your population. That puts a lot of pressures on things that didn't used to exist. Yeah, yeah. In any case, this chapter is about more recent kind of efforts to genetically modify things and solve problems.

And, of course, I'm having lived, and spent time in Australia, the cane toad is one of the greatest examples of human stupidity in terms of technological efforts to solve the problem that was only exacerbated by the problem. I do love the picture you have in that book, which I said to my wife of that little girl with her cane toad pet. It's just an amazing book picture.

But anyway, so that's a famous story. Cain Toads were introduced to solve a problem, but of course they never solved the problem. All they did was reproduced like crazy and eat everything else out of the way and be poisonous to boot. I don't think I want to go into detail about the cane's problem, which is a problem. And then the question is, how do you resolve that?

Or how do you resolve loss of chestnut trees? Or how do you resolve other invasive species, mosquitoes, mosquitoes, et cetera, and one way out is to engineer in a variety of ways, including their reproductive rights. So why do you talk briefly about it? Just briefly, because I want to move. Yeah, and I think that just to answer your point before that we've been genetically, you know,

manipulating things for a long time, which is certainly true. I think what's new about, you know, gene editing is this idea that we could alter things, you know, in the wild. We could push it out into the wild. And what certainly new about CRISPR is now the idea of gene drive. So, you know. Well, you want to explain for people what a gene drive was going to ask you to do it just briefly.

Yes. Yes. So gene drive is this idea that, you know, we all learned about inheritance in, you know, high school or whatever. You know, you have two pea plants and, you know, one is white and one is red and you cross them. And the odds that any, that, you know, you get the same gene from your mom. dad, you know, you all remember those little charts. Anyway, the idea is that each parent has a, each offspring has a 50, 50 chance of getting one of its sets of its parents' genes. You know, we all have two sets from both of our parents. And, you know, you mix and match and you get all sorts of different combinations. And that's the miracle of sex and the miracle of, you know, nudging evolution along. But there are a lot of genes that do not play by those rules. They don't get handed down 50%

of the time. They get handed down more than 50% of the time. Those exist a lot in nature. They're very clever genes. They have tricks for getting handed down more than 50% of the time. And for a long time, people have been interested in trying to harness that what's called gene drive. But it was really pretty much impossible to do before this new technology. CRISPR came along and made it possible. And now there are, as we speak, gene drive mosquitoes, which passed down basically a sort of form of self-destruction, a form of sterility that you could, in theory, and people have done this in, you know, like an aquarium, drive the population down to zero. And the question with these mosquitoes is, should they be released into the wild to fight malaria?

And that's a huge question. That's a real live question right now. and I don't know what will happen. It's a really complicated one because, you know, people have cooked it up in, you know, Europe and the U.S., and they will want to release those mosquitoes in Africa. And I think that people will be very hesitant. They will be like, why do you want to release them here and not in the U.S.? and in Europe? Well, I mean, in some places malaria or dang fever, I mean,

You know, it's- Yes, I agree. That's what people will say. They will say we want to release it there because you have a lot of malaria. But I think that there will be a lot of our resistance to that. Why are we the guinea pig, you know, our mosquitoes, the guinea pigs, as it were, even though it may be the best way to fight malaria. But I think there will be a lot of social, a lot around acceptance on the ground. I'm not sure that will happen.

You know, it's interesting. Because for me, when I think about technological fixes, that seems to one mean, be one that is relatively cleaner. What a wonderful way to get. I mean, malaria, it just affects so many poor children around the world. And wouldn't you want to, if you could have a fix that could solve that boy, or a dengue fever. I mean, especially because it's poor countries where we know, which, you know, you could help countries that we've, that are too poor to help themselves now or we've created poverty one way or another.

And of course, the unincented side effect could be one answer the question, which I've never really fully known, was what on earth is the evolutionary purpose of mosquitoes? I hate mosquitoes, and I keep thinking, why? I don't see what good they are, except maybe the spiders around can eat them every now and then. But I don't under, I never knew. We'll find out, of course, if they're released in Africa, what their evolutionary purpose is. Oh, I'm sure that they're, you know, larvae are eaten doubtless by a lot of other things. things. There's no food source that isn't, you know, exploited. I don't know, you know, well enough. But I also think another question that comes up, and this is, you know, this doesn't have to do

with social acceptance. It has more to do with just efficacy. You know, it's one thing to do this in a tank. It's another thing to do it out in the wild. And evolution is a very powerful force. And you can evolve the species like, you know, Ms. Enophiles, mosquitoes that are. are evolving, you know, I guess they're gipters. Anyway, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, they are evolving, you know, really have many generations, they're evolving fast, they can involve resistance. And everyone knows that. You know, it's not at all clear that, you know, once they do meet with wild type, they're called mosquitoes, it's not at all clear that this trait will be passed on more than 50% in time or something.

around because there's such an evolutionary pressure. It's a little bit like COVID, right? If you're reproductive success, if you're not going to reproduce unless you figure out a workaround, then the evolutionary pressure to evolve that workaround is extremely high. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the question of what to do or not to do again, you address, I just want to read the last few paragraphs of that chapter because I found it. Anyway, in the 1950s, Hawaii's Department of Agriculture decided to control giant African snails,

which had been introduced two decades earlier as garnered in ornaments by importing rosy wolf snails, which are also known as cannibal snails. The cannibal snails mostly left the giant snails alone. Instead, they ate their way through dozens of species of Hawaii's small endemic land snails, producing what E.O. Wilson has called an extinction avalanche. responding to Brand Wilson has observed, we are not gods. We're not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything.

Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way. We are as gods, but we fail to get good at it. We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children. Kingsworth has also noted, sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something. Sometimes it is the other way around. And I guess that's the conundering.

Andrum, right? I mean, do you do, do you, do, do, if you could see a technological fix, you say, gee, we don't know what its implications are or do you do it? And I think, I think the natural tendency, of course, and my own feeling is to explore all the possible solutions and be careful about what you do to make sure that they might not run out of control, which takes us actually to the last two, actually the three sections of the book, which I want to cover and having to do with the deeper question. of carbon of global climate change. And you start talking about a place that now is near and near my heart because I've visited

as well, Climbworks in Iceland, which is trying to capture carbon. And I think it's evolved since you wrote. I think it's now called Carb Fix and when I was there. That's the Icelandic sort of scientific piece of it is Carb Fix. Yeah. That's where we visited our last trip. And the idea is ultimately, as we have, as we've alluded to, and it's important to reiterate this, is that is that the problem of climate change is not, the urgency is not that

everyone's going to die in 12 years as some activists, unfortunately, including some in the Congress, keep saying, it's not that. It's not that if we don't do anything, well, your children will be dead in five. years or 10 years or 15 years. It is that every year we wait, it becomes harder to solve the problem because we put 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere that weren't there before, half of which stay in the atmosphere, half of which go in the oceans for the most part. And that cumulative effect means that had we just think about it, had we done it 10 years ago, there'd be 100 billion tons of carbon that we wouldn't have had to deal with now. So that's

problem, and that adds to the urgency, but it's made people realize that one of the possible solutions, an obvious one, which would take, which has the advantage of not producing a world that we have never experienced before, rather producing a world that we once experienced, and that is to remove the carbon. We're pretty sure of what would happen if we remove the carbon, it would take us back to where the situation that we've all experienced in the beginning of the industrial era of humanity. So people have talked about removing carbon and your next chapter is about various challenges and ways of trying to remove carbon. Interestingly enough, actually, by the way, you get it with Klaus Lochner. And I think the reason this interested me is that I'm trying to remember when you came to visit me in Phoenix, but for an event, which, but I think at that event was also Wally Brooker, who was a giant in climate change effort.

one of the first people to really point out climate change from Lamont in Colombia. And actually at that event, I don't know if it was, but we ran an event on climate change. I don't think it was because I often had one of the way once. Okay, in any case, we ran an event on climate change. And one of the ultimate things we decided, we produced a white paper, was that we needed at least research should go into carbon capture and sequestration. because so much little was so much so little was being spent on it by comparison anything else with such you know positive potential playoffs and one of the things was to and i was happy to say was to

was to recruit claus lockner to as you where i worked so and you wrote you you met him and talked to him when he was there but um um the the but as he you know and so it looks so so the so the so the There's a few radical climate solutions that are in this part of your book. And the first one is less radical, which is climate change, which is carbon capture, I mean. And I think it's Lochner who said this. Yes, people have fundamentally altered the atmosphere. And yes, this is likely to lead to all sorts of dreadful consequences. But people are ingenious.

We come back to this again. They come up with crazy big ideas, and sometimes they actually work. or these actually work, although in your book, it's a story of mixed results, I think, but here's at least optimism that they might work. And so the question is, what's your impression of carbon capture? I mean, it's a lovely idea.

It just seems like apple pie and impossible. Not that the chemistry is impossible, but the scale of the problem is difficult to address. And so I wanted to ask you about that? Well, there's, there's so much to say about carbon, um, hapsch, or really carbon dioxide removal as I suppose it. Yeah, yeah. Um, and, you know, one thing is, you know, yes, it's great. It's, it's, it's, it's really necessary. You know, it's built into a lot of the models. Any model, any model that says we can still keep, uh, climate, you know, temperatures from rising

above 1.5 degrees. Basically, they all have a lot of carbon dioxide removal built into them already. That's the kind of people don't realize that. Let me interrupt you for a second because I was going to let me read quote you on this. And that varies fact. All of which make negative emissions an idea which is at least resistible, irresistible. The extent to which humanity is already counting on them is illustrated by the latest report of the international intergovernmental panel on climate change.

published in the run-up to Paris. To peer into the future, the IPCC relies on computer models that represent the world's economic and energy systems as a tangle of equations. The output of these models is then translated into figures that climate scientists can use to forecast how much temperatures are going to rise. For its report, they consider more than a thousand scenarios.

The majority of these led to temperatures increases beyond the official 2 degrees Celsius disaster threshold and some to warming as much as 5 degrees Celsius. Just 116 scenarios. were consistent with holding warming under 2 degrees Celsius. And of these, 101 involved negative emissions. Following Paris, that produced another report based on a 1.5 degrees threshold, all of these are consistent with the goal relied.

All of these that were consistent with the goal relied on negative emissions. And what Klaus said is, I think what the IPCCC is really saying is, we tried lots and lots of scenarios, and of the scenarios which stayed safe, virtually everyone needed some magic touch of negative emissions. If we don't do that, we ran into a brick wall. Yeah, so that's the sort of, you know, situation that we're starting from. So, you know, negative emissions are this technology that we really need that we're counting on.

But as you say, that it's not clear, scale-wise, that we can really do. We can do it. you and I both visited this installation in Iceland where a company called Climbworks uses these chemicals to soak CO2 out of the atmosphere. And then because of Iceland's interesting geology, they shove it way, you know, very deep underground, a mild underground and it under pressure and heat and with a lot of water, it gets converted to calcium carbonate. And that is the fate of of all of our carbon emissions over many millions of years, it will get converted into calcium carbonate.

But here we're trying to speed things up, you know, by a factor of hundreds of thousands. And the difficulty here, well, they're twofold. First of all, it takes energy. Carbon, you know, doesn't, you know, to react, to make these chemicals that will react, all these things take energy. So you're taking energy that is precisely our problem

that we make emissions with energy. So you need a lot of carbon-free energy. And then the second problem, which is related to the first, is you need to do this at a huge scale, and you need somewhere to put the carbon. So I guess there are three things. You need the energy, the carbon-free energy, to get the carbon out of the air.

You need a place to put it, and you need to do that on the billions of tons per year scale. And that, you know, the biggest operation that's going right now is the Climbork's operation in Iceland, that's 4,000 tons a year. Now you scale that up to 10 billion tons a year, and you see the order of magnitude problem. Yeah, I mean, it's not the, when you see this operation, you see that in order of magnitude, it's not that much different than the amount of carbon I saved by my solar panels on my house. Yeah.

And it's, and, and, and then there's the issue. optimistically, the goal that's often claimed in cost is $100 a ton, which is pie in the sky right now. No one knows a way to do this for $100 a ton, nobody. But that's the goal. But if you do that and you say, let's say we want to remove the 10 billion tons per year, much less reduce it. So we've got to be taking away as much as we're producing or more. That's a trillion dollars a year.

besides the fact that you might have to instrument an area of the size of Texas. Let me give it. And it's not my job, not my usual role to be more optimistic. But I think that no one would say, you know, we're going to take out 10 billion tons a year. They would say we're going to try to, you know, dramatically reduce our carbon emissions. But there are always going to be carbon emissions. And we need some way to take care of those because we need to get to net zero. So this is part of a.

effort, a many, many multifaceted effort to get to net zero. Now, I think the problem is the first part of that equation, you know, is getting close enough to net zero so that carbon dioxide removal makes sense. Yeah. Okay. And so really good point to make. I was actually going to come back and argue against myself in this regard, too, in the same sense that it used to be that a trillion dollars was a lot of money and one has seen.

I mean, so let's say it's only $100 billion. That's a lot of money, but we've seen already with the pandemic and with ridiculous military incursions, we're already seeing hundreds of billions of dollars applied to those very short-term problems, if you want to call it that. And so that kind of money, when you consider the ultimate result is in some ways on earth that at least can function similarly to the way we function now. Maybe $100 billion or trillion is not so outrageous to think about, especially when you divide it around the whole developed world at least.

Yeah, and I mean, you know, the other thing that, and anyway, we should, we should move on because I know that. Yeah, I know. I want to, I'm going to, we'll go about, we'll go. If it's okay with you, we'll go about 10 minutes longer, it's on 10 or 15, but then we'll go. You know, one of the things that's often talked about, just mention it because I'm sure most of your listeners have heard about it is, okay, we're going to remove

carbon dioxide with trees. You know, we're just going to kind of trees. And I think that that is a lot more appealing in a lot of ways, but I think it's also important to understand the limitation of trees. They grow very slowly. They take up carbon very slowly. And they, when they die, they get that part back up. So, you know, there's been a lot of, I mean, I, I love trees. Trees are great. We should be reforesting, you know, everywhere we can. But there's been a lot of hype about how much carbon you can offset with trees.

And that's going to be a huge thing around net zero. If we ever get close, which, you know, God knows we're actually getting farther every year. Emissions are up in this year. But, you know, all if I plant a tree, is that going to offset my emissions? No, it's not. Yeah, yeah, I know. In fact, I'm always disturbed in my solar panels. They always show me how effectively trees I have planted.

And I just wish they wouldn't do that. But you all do talk another way besides carbon to remove carbon, which is to grow things. And you talk about this plant that makes tomatoes. And the last, again, I'll read the last paragraph of that chapter. From more little bricks of dirt, cherry tomato plants stretched to the roof in helical coils. The tomatoes just a day or two from harvest were perfect in that greenhouse tomato-y sort of way. Russar picked a couple and hand them to me. The burning trash, the acres of glass, the boxes of bumblebees, the vegetables,

raised on chemicals and captured CO2. Was it all totally cool or totally crazy? Question mark. I paused for a second and then pop the tomatoes in my mouth. Once again, raising the question, then moving on to something else. Okay. The next thing is, the last two things are, the next thing is the other solution, which is, I think, inevitable, in my own opinion,

which is geoengineering, solar geoengineering. I used to be an opponent. I actually think on a radio program once. I may have debated David Keith on that program. I think it might have been Science Friday years ago. Before I kind of knew better, the person who changed my mind here again was Dan Shrag at Harvard, who you talk about in this chapter.

But why don't you talk about briefly the advantages and disadvantages of solar geoengineering and then we'll have one question that we'll move on to the end? Okay, so solar geoengineering refers to this idea that we will offset, counteract the effect of dumping a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by dumping a lot of reflective particles into the stratosphere. That's the only idea people have really come up with so far to reflect sunlight back to space. and that has a cooling effect, literally less direct sunlight hitting the earth, and that could potentially counteract some of our CO2. And this idea comes from volcanoes, which produce a lot of sulfur dioxide,

and do have a cooling effect, you know, Mount Pinatubo. When that erupted, global temperatures dropped out the cap of degree for around a year. So the ideas we'll have these planes. They'll be injecting a lot of sulfur dioxide or something else reflective and the stratosphere, they'll have to keep, keep on doing this all year after year after year, and we will counteract some of our, some, I don't think anyone would advocate counteracting all of it, very dangerous, but maybe we could, as they say, take the top off the curve here. And I also, I don't think it's inevitable, but I think it's inevitable that we're going to be sucked

into a long debate about it because, you know, as Frank Coich, who's a chemist at Harvard, a very smart guy, runs Harvard's a solar geoengineering research program, pointed out, we are not doing anything or not doing nearly enough about climate change. So we're never escaping from under this idea of, is there something else that we could do when the, you know, when the proverbial shit hits the fan? And when the shit hits the fan, you know, if there's something, if something terrible happens, you know, you're getting crop failure. There's no quick answer. And Frank's point was, look, there's only one thing you can do on a fairly short time scale.

And that is solar geoengineering. And that's what makes it so dangerous, so attractive, so crazy, so scary. But another point that I should make is this is purely theoretical. No one's den the slightest, you know, because it's so controversial. No one's done. Well, it's not purely theoretical. I mean, the example of what happened with volcanoes and as gives some evidence that, you know, you cool. Yes.

Right. But, you know, it's hard to mimic the volcano. It's not that easy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty hard. A lot of power there. Yeah. And well, but you hit, let me add to the advantages and disadvantages.

Yeah. And I don't know, again, if it was Dan who first explained this to me or made me think about it. The advantage, you see, the problem with climate. change is that you have to have this global, you know, reducing our carbon emissions is a global contract. And humanity has never done a global contract. As far as I can see, there's no evidence we can. We keep trying, but then we don't. We talk and don't do anything. And so, but the advantage of solar geoengineering is also its disadvantage, is that you don't have to do it. One country can choose to do it. One country can say, you know, we're going to take it on ourselves. And that's,

that's an advantage, but it's also a worry, right? Because you don't have to. have if China decides that's what they want to do, they're going to do it. And there's no and you don't have any say in it if you're, and so. Well, you do if you're in an air force. I mean, I think that that is exaggerated. And I believe it was probably Dan Tragg who pointed this out to me. I mean, if you, if the world's most powerful countries with the world's most powerful air force is all agreed to do it, they could do it. Yeah. But if China decided to do it, you could shoot them down. So I don't think, yeah, you got it. Yeah, but you could.

Well, it's easy to say that. But shooting him down is a whole other can of worms, right? I mean, the point is. Absolutely. Absolutely. But I think that I think that the idea that one country is going to do it in a rogue way, you know, I mean, maybe if the world is a different place and falling apart, you know, even more than it is right now. But I do think it's something that a group of countries, a group of very powerful countries.

could decide to do. And you could decide to do it for $20 billion or something like that per year or something. Yeah. It's a minuscule amount of money in the global scheme. Yeah, no, absolutely. And the, you know, one of the many things that prevents might prevent that and might, you know, cause or might not prevent it, but might cause terrible global strife is that, you know, we don't know. If you counteract, you know, if you get, if you have, you know, two degrees C of warming, one degree of cooling, you don't get a one degree of warmer world.

You get this weird world where God knows what happens to regional weather patterns. God knows what happens to the monsoons. So you're going to have huge geopolitical tensions over that. But, you know, there's two, let me, yes, I agree. But let me give the two another positive, which we keep calling Dan, but again, the reason, what turned me around. was the realization that the unknowns that you point out are severe unknowns, but the really good thing about aerosols is unlike carbon, they have a half-life of a year or so.

So if you put these things and you see bad things happen, you have a year or two of bad things. You don't have a century or a millennium. And that is certainly a real positive, for me, heartening enough to make me think that, at least in some small scale, the experiment may be worth worth doing. The other one is an argument you quote from David Keith, who says,

Keith believes the world will eventually cut its carbon emissions, if not all the way down to zero, then close to it. He also believes carbon removal technologies can eventually be scaled up to take care of the rest. But all this, quite possibly, will not be enough. During the period of overshoot, and in all these models, even the ones that have, you know, that keep us to two degrees or 1.5 degrees C, there's this period of overshoot you go above and you come back down. During the period of overshoot, a great many people will suffer

and changes that are, for all intents and purposes, irreversible may occur like the demise of the Great Barrier Leaf. So the idea is that, first of all, it's only in there a year or two. Secondly, this may, and secondly, as you point out, it works quickly. It's not a 20-year thing. You put it up there, it has an immediate effect. And thirdly, it may address the problems that can't be addressed otherwise, because of overshoot.

Right, but I just do want to say that that is a, you know, we're not talking about a year. I mean, any scenario of overshoot, we're talking about minimum of decades. Yes. And with very, you know, so one of the many, many, many, and there are many, many ethical arguments against geoengineering is you're basically committing future generations. Now, of course, we're committing future generations to warming. But as David Keith, who is also at. Harvard and is really the key person in this whole field that he would not say he advocates geoengineering, but he's certainly the key advocate of research on geoengineering. As he himself pointed out to me,

there's a difference between something you've done, you know, blundered into like climate change and something that you consciously decided to do like geoengineering. Those do have different ethical bars, as it were. Yeah, they certainly do. And but, you know, I will at least next, now quote, shrug directly in your book. He said, people have to get their heads away from thinking about whether they like solar energy engineering or not, whether they think it should be done or not. They have to understand that we don't get to decide. The United States doesn't get to decide.

You're a world leader, and there's a technology that could take the pain and suffering away or take some of it away. You've got to be really tempted. I'm not saying they'll do it tomorrow. I feel like we might have 30 years. The highest priority for scientists is to figure out all the different ways this could go wrong. And one of the ways that it won't go wrong, but of course relates to the title of the book, which I had never really realized is the following paragraph.

The more particles injected into the stratosphere, the greater the chance of weird side effects. Researchers who looked into using solar geoengineering to offset carbon dioxide levels of 560 parts per million, levels that could easily be reached later in the century, determined it would change the appearance of the sky. White would become the new blue. The effect they noted would cause the sky over formerly pristine areas to look similar to the sky over urban areas. Another more felicitous result they observed would be glorious sunsets, similar to those seen after large volcanoes. The title of your book, Under a White Sky.

So the question is, do we want to get rid of the, do you want children to say, what's that blue in that painting? Mom, why do they came to the sky blue? Boy, that seems an awful thing to think that our children might see white skies. Okay, last section has to do with, again, a place that is of great, I don't know what a personal interest to me because it's Greenland and Camp Century and the fact of what's happening in Greenland. And you talk about this camp that was built for actually for military purposes, but had a side benefit, which was to allow, ultimately allow scientists

as a front to dig an ice core. And ice cores turned out to be for us an amazing source of information. I talked a great deal about him in my last book. By the way, you probably know this. You talk about Willie Dansgard in your book, who's the sort of dean of ice cores when they first started getting done and used the military industrial complexes to allow him to do science that you wouldn't do otherwise. But one thing I have to tell you, because I studied this for the lectures I gave.

of Greenland. The first people to do ice course was actually one of my scientific heroes, Alfred Veginer, in Greenland, who was, of course, also the father of climate change. He died in the process, but he was the first one to suggest that these might be useful as a way to probe the past. And what these ice scores, sorry, go on. No, there's, there's a, you know, Wagner, as you know, Vigner died on the ice sheet. Yes. And he is somewhere, you know, somewhere. And once I there there were when one of the trips I took to Greenland they the guys were always joking that you know they were that they were going to come across his body you know eventually his body will be yeah yeah coming he'll be travel across the coast from west to east and come out east and when I was there by the way one of the one of the

scientists there well I know the speakers it wasn't quite a scientist had said actually he discovered in the ice um uh one of the one of the objects that was in a picture that was taken a Wegener there. So some of the objects are already coming out. And so it's, it's remarkable, but one of the things that came out of that is incredibly sobering. And that is that, you know, for people who say, oh, it can't happen or dramatic things can't happen, certainly, there was a time in recent times in the history of Greenland where not only did the Greenland sheet disappear, but more importantly, temperatures changed over the period of centuries or less by 8 to 14 degrees. and fluctuated back and forth.

And this was so surprising when it was seen in the first ice course that other ones had to be seen. And over and over and over again, it's been validated. No one quite knows how those rapid fluctuations happen. But they would be devastating if they happened. And that is enough to cause, you know, I often like to use the example of dirty hairy. Do you feel lucky punk? And so we don't know. there are a lot of risks about what might happen in Greenland.

And a lot of people say, well, there's so much uncertainty. But it seems to me, if there's that much uncertainty and not only the likelihood, the possibility of wild fluctuations of 8 to 14 degrees, then we should, those uncertain should drive us to action more than if they didn't exist in the first place. If that kind of extreme thing is a possibility, then risk analysis would suggest that you at least take that option in terms of what you're doing globally. But I was surprised Sir, go on.

No, that brings us back to the famous Well, I broke her quote, while I broke her came up before Climate is an angry beast and we were poking it with a stick. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But I was intrigued that you made your own, you didn't interpret that way,

but you talked to a climate scientist or someone looking at this, the ice course, and came up with your own sort of technological fix to a problem and he shot you right down. He said, I brought up the issue of climate change perhaps I suggested hopefully it would ward off another ice age and more DO events. At least we could dodge that particular disaster. And immediately you got shot down.

He said he was unimpressed by my suggestion. He pointed out that if you believe the comment to be inherently unstable, the last thing you want to do is mess around with it. He recited an old Danish saying whose pertinence I didn't entirely understand, but which nonetheless stuck with me. He translated it as, Pissing in your pants will only keep you warm for so long. Yeah, that's a great one.

I often use that, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that brings us really, you know, you talk about interfering with glaciers and, and, and, and then you basically say at the end, and I want to read the last part of your book, the last, a few quotes from the last part of you book. You know, after you talk about first you speed up an ice cream by melting and then you try to slow it down by wrecking 300 foot. tall three mile long concrete topped embankments. You say this has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In the course of reporting it, I spoke to engineers and genetic engineers, biologists, microbiologists, atmospheric scientists, and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work.

But as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt. And I jumped down. It's in this context that interventions like assisted evolution and gene drives and digging millions of trenches to bury billions of trees have been assessed. Geoengineering may be entirely crazy and quite disconcerting, but it could slow the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet or take some of the pain and suffering away or help prevent no longer fully natural ecosystems from collapsing. Doesn't have to be considered? Andy Parker is the director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative,

which works to expand a global conversation around geoengineering. His preferred drug analogy for the technology is chemotherapy. No one in his right mind would undergo chemotherapy were better options available. We live in a world, he has said, we're deliberately dimming the blank sun might be less risky than not doing it. But to imagine that dimming the blank sun could be, and I use an F word there, could be less dangerous than not dimming it, you have to imagine not only that the technology will work according to plan,

but also that will be deployed according to plan. And that's a lot of imagining. As Koich, Keith, and Shrague all pointed out to me, scientists can only make recommendations. Implementation is a political decision. You might hope that such a decision would be made equitably with respect to those alive today and to future generations, both human and non-human.

But let's just say the record here isn't strong. Suppose that the world or a small group of assertive nations launch a feat of sales, that's a geoengineering term, which we didn't get into here, but it doesn't matter. And suppose that even as the sails are flying and lofting more and more tons of particles, global emissions continue to rise. The result would not be a return to the climate of pre-industrial days or to that of the Pliocene or even the Issine,

where crocodiles bast on Arctic shores. It would be an unprecedented climate for an unprecedented world where silver carp glisten under a white sky. So I And you say in your epilogue Recent books about the environment Which tend to be not exactly painful Then at least gloomy

Usually end with what I would call The Additional Three Pages And I think my book by the way is one of them After driving just how bad things are For insects and orangutans Or ice caps or the plant in general The author explains where there's reason for optimism Often the final chapter includes steps

For the concerned reader to take plant native trees, ride a bike, take to the streets, or if all else fails, you camp to Mars. The last impression left is, if not exactly upbeat, then at least unpleasant. I'd like to end it that way, but I can't. And because implicit in all of these things is that is the complexity of the natural environment. And your book is all about the fact that technological solutions need to be explored, but it's hard to envisage all of the results of them. and are you so i want to end with the question from my brother-in-law john doll who asked i guess my one

question for elizabeth would be if she felt any sadness or pessimism when she wrote her book or does she merely feel a sense of joy in looting to our own species short spotlight in the sun so why do you answer it and we'll close on that oh my god yeah i mean terrible pia at those and I mean, I see the book as a very, you know, dark comedy. But certainly, you know, in the course of reporting it, you know, it was often, you know, just dark. How's that? I tried to write it as a dark comedy. But, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of darkness to what we're doing to the world.

Yeah, but at the same time, I think the new book at least points out. that there are a lot of people who are working hard to try to be ingenious. And some of those things may pay off. And I mean, it's really important to point out. I think the book, while it's a testimony to the dangers of screwing with mother nature, it nevertheless is testimony of the ingenuity and perspicacity and endurance and drive of humans to keep trying. And even that problem doesn't work for another one.

Yes, and that's why I, I mean, I think that even optimism and pessimism are probably the wrong words. You know, dichotomy is I think that, you know, there's, you know, big trouble, you know, coming at us. And increasingly, that's apparent and increasingly in a lot of places already there. But the answer isn't, not the answer, the end result isn't, you know, it's not going to be this, you know, It's not going to be doom and it's not going to be a solution. It's going to be something a lot messier. The future will be messy.

It'll be different and none of us and in a sense that's a cause for pessimism. But for me, it's also a cause for optimism in my own life. The realization that I don't know what I'll be doing in three years or what the world will be doing in three years is a source of concern but also wonder because gosh, it would be a boring world if we knew what the future. It's not going to be boring. I can guarantee you that. Yeah, and as you know from the Jewish expression, God protect us from an interesting life or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Well, look, but on the other hand, you know, my last sentence, I think in my last book was Fortune Favors to Prepare Mind. And we are all blessed, and I'm certainly am, but I think all of us are blessed by you're helping to prepare our minds with your wonderful books.

And it's always, it's always enlightening and a pleasure to spend time and talk to you. And I think this has been, I'm just so pleased we had this chance to go do a deep dive into your book and into your ideas. And I look forward to being on Galapos with you in a year. So thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people, who are driving the future of society in the 21st century, and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world.

To learn more, please visit Originsproject Foundation.org.