TRANSCRIPT
Lawrence Douglas:
Good morning. Good morning, everyone.
Audience:
Good morning.
Lawrence Douglas:
Hi. So I am Lawrence Douglas. I teach in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought here at Amherst College. And the college is honored to welcome Elizabeth Kolbert to campus this weekend to receive an honorary degree.
I should say it's a particular pleasure for me to make this introduction as Betsy has been a close friend and family friend for a long time. Betsy Kolbert, and yes, it's Kolbert, not Kolbert, is a Pulitzer prize-winning science writer and journalist who, for more than two decades, has specialized in alerting us to the realities and complexities of climate change.
In following experts into the field, Betsy has intrepidly traversed the globe, reporting from the frontlines of this crisis. She has a gift for crafting gripping and enlightening narratives that explain scientific matters with clarity and a sense of urgent purpose. Her work never hectors, yet her mordant wit and her ironic touches challenge her readers to consider our complicity in the dire problems facing our planet.
Betsy Kolbert has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1999. Before that, she worked at The New York Times, where she served as the paper's Albany bureau chief. She's perhaps best known, in addition to her New Yorker pieces, for her triumvirate of books on the climate crisis, Field Notes from a Catastrophe from 2006, The Sixth Extinction, which received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, and her latest, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, which was named the Best Book of 2021 by the Washington Post, TIME Magazine, Esquire, Smithsonian, and a host of other publications.
She's been the recipient of many other accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright, a Heinz Award, two National Magazine Awards, and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts. And while Betsy attended Yale, she wisely married a Amherst graduate, John Kleiner. And her older son, Ned, graduated Amherst in 2016.
So we're delighted that tomorrow Betsy will finally be able to join them as a degree recipient from Amherst. Her talk today is titled A Man in the Anthropocene. So please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Kolbert to Amherst, or back to Amherst.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Lawrence, for that lovely introduction. Thank you all for being here on a beautiful morning. As Lawrence said, we are half an Amherst family in our house, and it's a pleasure to be here.
Congrats to all the graduates in the room, incipient graduates, and congratulations to their families on this wonderful occasion. So, as Lawrence said, and as you can see of there, the title of my talk today is Man in the Anthropocene.
And I want to just start by introducing this word, which has become essential and kind of ubiquitous but didn't exist just a very few decades ago. It was coined in 2000 by the Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, who, a few years earlier, had won a Nobel Prize for his work on ozone-depleting chemicals.
So, in 2000, Crutzen was attending a scientific conference in Cuernavaca, and participants kept referring to the Holocene, which is the geological epoch that began at the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago. So in places like Amherst, mass started to emerge from the ice.
"We're no longer in the Holocene," Crutzen told his surprised colleagues. "We are in the Anthropocene." And the term sort of appropriately enough, as you can tell, is kind of a mashup of geological lingo and Greek. And what Crutzen wanted to convey with it is that we have entered a new geological age in which humanity is the dominant geological force on the planet.
This is truly an epochal change. In the Anthropocene, the Age of Man, people are still, as they were in the past, subject to nature. We see this all the time, every time there's a flood or a heat wave, or an earthquake. But the weird thing about the Anthropocene is that nature is also subject to humans.
So, in 2002, Crutzen wrote a short article about the Anthropocene that appeared in the journal Nature. And in it, he pointed out that the signs of the Anthropocene are everywhere. Here, I'm just going to run very quickly through a few of them.
So we have dammed or diverted most of the world's major rivers. People now cause more soil erosion than all natural processes combined. In our fertilizer plants, we fix as much nitrogen as all terrestrial ecosystems. Humans now outweigh all wild mammals, all of them, by a factor of nine to one.
And if you throw in our mammalian livestock, so that's mostly cows and pigs who weigh a lot, that ratio climbs to 24 to one. We are transforming the climate, which, in turn, is melting the world's ice sheet, altering its coastlines, and even changing the tilt of the Earth's axis.
In the Age of Man, there is nowhere, and I really mean nowhere, you can go where you cannot find evidence of human activity. When Japanese researchers descended to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the Pacific, some 36,000 feet down, they found plastic debris.
So for the last 20 years or so, as Lawrence mentioned, most of my work as a journalist has been devoted to documenting this phenomenon. My reporting has taken me all around the globe, to the top of the Greenland ice sheet and to the southern edge of the Great Barrier Reef to the Mojave Desert and the Amazon rainforest.
I have interviewed scores of scientists who are working to understand human impacts on the planet. These include geographers and glaciologists, oceanographers and ornithologists, conservation biologists, and climate modelers.
And even after all this time, all these conversations, all these reporting trips, I still have trouble getting my mind around the Anthropocene, and so do the scientists. Time and again, researchers have told me that they are seeing change on a scale and at a pace that they were taught in institutions like Amherst could not be witnessed, could not take place in the course of a human lifetime.
Time and again, they've expressed to me shock and horror at their own discoveries. Some have watched their study subjects, a species of frog, say, or an entire glacier disappear over the course of their working careers. One scientist I interviewed who was working on the effects of ocean acidification told me when she realized the significance of a discovery she had made, she went into the bathroom and threw up.
So the general public often sees journalists as overplaying the dangers of the crisis or, if you prefer, in this particular case, crises that we are facing. They imagine that we are exaggerating for the sake of drumming up an audience or selling books or generating clicks, or maybe receiving honorary degrees.
Would that were the case. In fact, if anything, I would argue journalists and the scientists they rely on have tended to underplay the extraordinary challenges that are taking place. A few years ago, a group of scientists and sociologists wrote a paper on this phenomenon. They called it Erring on the Side of Least Drama.
And so if there's one message I'd like to convey to you this morning, it is this, that what we are doing to this planet is beyond extraordinary. It defies both conception and description. It is unprecedented in the 3 billion year-plus history of life on Earth. In everything that I've written, it is this hugely important but also very scary message that I've been struggling to get across.
But, of course, journalists are not primarily message deliverers. Our real business is not piling up statistics as I've just done. Our work is as storytellers. It's our job to create the narratives that people can follow. And that is what I'm going to do with the rest of my time this morning. I'm going to tell two brief stories about the natural world and our increasingly crazy relationship to it.
And everything that I'm going to relate is true, but I would invite you to think of both of these stories as sort of Anthropocene fables, that is to say, stories that point beyond themselves.
So the first fable that I'm going to tell is about this fellow, this toad, whose technical name, formal name is Rhinella marina, and whose common name is the cane toad. So cane toads were originally restricted to South and Central America. That's where they evolved, and that's where they remained for many, many thousands of years.
And then humans came along and changed that. And the reason we did this is because we love sweet things. So sugar cane, which is also an imported crop in most parts of the world, it's actually native to New Guinea, was moved around the world. And starting in colonial times, as you know, it became a very valuable cash crop. And other animals besides humans really love sugar cane. Beetle grubs, in particular, found sugar cane very tasty. And so farmers were looking for a way to cut down on the beetles.
And in the 19th century, someone, we don't know who, came up with a bright idea for dealing with the problem. To protect this imported crop, they were going to import these toads. And so people started moving cane toads all around the world. They brought them to Puerto Rico. They brought them to Hawaii. And most consequentially, they brought them all the way to Australia.
So the first toads arrived in Australia in 1935, and they were released in Northern Queensland, so then the northeastern corner of the country, which is Australian sugar country. So this map shows you what happened next. It's a map of how the toads hopped their way, at first slowly and then more quickly, around the perimeter of Australia.
So nowadays, as you can see, they're as far south as Sydney, they're as far north as the Cape York Peninsula, and they've made it all the way west to the wonderfully named city of Darwin. And they continue to expand their range. So those barred lines there on the map show what their eventual range is expected to look like.
And this is, in many ways, a story typical of the Anthropocene. Brown rats should be restricted to Central Asia. Now, thanks to us, they're everywhere. The European green crab belongs on the Atlantic coast of Europe. Thanks to us again, it can now be found on both coasts of the US and in the southern coast of Australia and on the southern tip of Africa. The brown tree snake is native to Australia and New Guinea. It was brought to the Island of Guam probably during World War II and is driving many of Guam's native birds to the edge of extinction and beyond.
So moving species around the world is something we now do all the time. We're very used to it. It seems to us very normal. Many of us have deliberately planted non-native species in our gardens. We have non-native species as pets. But, of course, when you think about it in the context of evolutionary history, there is nothing ordinary about moving animals around the world. It's a very new phenomenon.
Without human help, it's very difficult for a toad to cross an ocean, and it's very difficult for an aquatic species to cross a continent. So when we move species around the world, we're bringing together evolutionary lineages that evolve separately and often have lived separately for many millions of years. And in a way, by doing this, we are running geological history backwards and at a very high speed.
So around 250 million years ago, as all you geology students in the audience know, all of the world's land masses were squished together into one giant supercontinent, which geologists have named Pangea. And then, owing to the marvels of plate tectonics, the continents drifted apart, and we got the world as we know it today.
But by bringing together all these lineages that evolve separately, we are, from a biological perspective, bringing the continents back together. And some biologists have named this phenomenon the New Pangea. So, back to our friends, the cane toads, for toads, cane toads are very big. This is a cane toad that was just recently captured in Australia, got a lot of press, and it became known as Toadzilla.
So cane toads are, in some people's eyes, ugly. I'm going to leave that for you to decide. For sure, they are poisonous. So they have these two glands behind their shoulders where they store this kind of milky-colored toxic goo. And in its raw form, this goo is... Will make you sick. It's potent enough to make you sick. But when toads are attacked or agitated, they produce an enzyme that bumps up the potency of this toxin by a hundredfold.
So, in many cases, invasive species are a problem because they're predators. So that's like the brown tree snake, which is eating Guam's birds. They prey on native species. With cane toads, the problem is the reverse. To a lot of Australia's native species, cane toads look like an easy dinner. So these animals try to eat the toads, and generally, they wind up dead. This extends to people's pets.
So the spread of the cane toad has really been an ecological disaster in Australia, which, precisely because it's so isolated, has a very unusual and hugely interesting fauna. So Australia has its own unique fauna. It also lacks many whole groups of animals, one of which is toads. So no creature in Australia has an evolutionary history with toads or has learned to avoid poisonous toads, which is why so many native species are attracted to the cane toad.
So the list of native species that have crashed owing to consuming cane toads is very long and varied. It includes several species of very, very vicious snakes, several species of giant lizards, and perhaps most notably, this very cute but actually very ferocious carnivorous marsupial, which is known as the northern quoll.
So Australians have really thrown themselves in the task of trying to get rid of cane toads. They shoot cane toads with air rifles. They whack them with hammers. They bash them with golf clubs. They purposefully run them over. They stick them in the freezer until they solidify. And they spray them with a chemical chloroxylenol. But as that map that I showed you a couple of minutes ago indicates, this has not slowed down the toads. We brought the toads in, but we cannot get them out.
And this is a pretty typical Anthropocene outcome. Humans are very good at altering nature, but when it comes to anticipating the consequences, we are pretty astonishingly careless. We move species around without bothering to really investigate what the consequences will be. And then, surprise, surprise, we often find we don't care for the consequences.
But by this point, the cat, as they say, is out of the bag. It's very difficult, indeed close to impossible, to get rid of a successful invasive species. And so some scientists in Australia are trying to take a new approach. So this fortress-like building is called the Australian Center for Disease Preparedness. And it's located south of Melbourne, in a city called Geelong.
And if you've seen the movie Contagion or maybe rewatched it during the pandemic, there's a shout-out to Geelong, to this center in the film. One of the panicky scientists says, "Oh, we just sent a sample to Geelong." It's one of the world's most advanced high-containment labs. It has 520 airlock doors, and its concrete walls are thick enough, I was told, to withstand a plane crash. And one of the scientists told me, "It's where you want to be during the zombie apocalypse."
So I visited the center because researchers there are working on a totally crazy-sounding but very real project of gene editing the cane toad. So what they're at work on is inventing a version of the toad that's less toxic, a toad that would not kill quolls or anything else that eats them.
And the plan is to rewrite the toad's genes to disable the gene that provides the enzyme that bumps up the potency of that poison goo. And key to their work is CRISPR. I'm sure you've all heard about CRISPR. It's really revolutionized gene editing, made it a lot cheaper and a lot easier. How's that?
So, already, scientists in Geelong have engineered a less toxic toad. This is one of them, a CRISPR-edited cane toad. And these toads have not been released into the wild, but that is the ultimate idea. It's very far from clear, I should say, whether this will work. But this is the logic of the Anthropocene and why I think the story of cane toads makes a good fable.
In the Anthropocene, change begets new and even more extreme forms of change. We changed the natural world when we brought cane toads to Australia, and now we're thinking of changing it again, engineering a creature that never existed in nature to replace the one that we put there.
So the second story or fable I'm going to tell this morning is about a project called Orca. So Orca sounds like the name of a whale, but it's actually the name of a machine or really a collection of machines that have been installed in Iceland.
And the Orca story begins, in a way, all the way back in the 18th century with the invention of a different machine, the steam engine. So by many accounts, including Paul Crutzen's, the invention of the steam engine is what launched the Anthropocene.
The steam engine was originally invented to pull water out of coal mines. It was subsequently adapted to propel rail cars and tugboats. And in this way, it helped usher in the industrial revolution, which, of course, in turn, increased the demand from coal and eventually other fossil fuels like oil and natural gas.
So burning fossil fuels, as you all know, changes the world. And one way to think about this change, again, is in terms of geological history. Fossil fuels contain a lot of carbon, carbon that has been sequestered underground for tens and, in some cases, hundreds of millions of years. And so, by digging up these fuels and burning them, we are returning that carbon to the atmosphere in a matter of centuries.
So here, again, we are running geological history backward and at a very high speed. CO2 levels in the air today, as I speak, are now higher than they have been at any point in at least the last three and a half million years, which is to say, long before modern humans evolved. And those levels, once again, as you know, continue to climb. And the rise in atmospheric CO2, once again, this is all something that you know, is having devastating effects all around the world.
So this is another instance of the pattern I sketched earlier. By burning fossil fuels, we have, without intending to, changed the world. Now we realize this change is not to our liking. We would prefer, indeed we desperately want, the climate to go back to the way it was.
But how is that supposed to happen? The ancient carbon that we've extracted from the ground and put into the air is going to stay there for a very long time unless, that is, someone can figure out a way to get it out. And this is the idea behind Orca. The point of Orca is, in effect, to re-reverse geological history.
So these machines here that look like air conditioners are known as direct air capture units. And they work roughly like this. You suck ordinary air, so what's outside. It flows through those units. You suck them through those fans. And inside those units are chemicals that bind with CO2.
And when the chemicals are saturated with CO2, they get heated up. And the CO2 gets forced off, and it gets collected, and then it gets piped underground, very deep underground. So the units at Orca in Iceland are collected to a borehole that's been drilled down a mile into the rock.
And once it's a mile down, the CO2 reacts with Iceland's volcanic rock to form calcium carbonate, basically limestone. So this is a core that was extracted from beneath the project, which shows that vein of calcium carbonate in the black volcanic rock. And that is proof that this is working.
So direct air capture would allow us, in theory at least, to put back in the ground the carbon that we've put up in the air by burning fossil fuels. And the setup in Iceland is, in fact, already removing CO2 from the air. It's removing it at the rate of roughly 4,000 tons of CO2 per year, which is impressive, at least until you measure it against current global emissions.
So current global emissions amount to roughly 40 billion tons a year. So roughly speaking, this project is extracting one ten-millionth of the CO2 we are putting up every year. Or you could put it differently and to say what we're adding to counteract or we're adding every year, we would have to have 10 million versions of the Orca project.
And you're going to hear a lot... I will just diverge for a moment and say you're going to hear more and more about carbon capture. It is built into a lot of the scenarios that people talk about, that we have to get carbon out of the air. But it's not so easy to do, as you can see from the scale of that project.
So another possible way for us to take control of this situation is a technique called solar geoengineering. And there are no geoengineering facilities that have yet been built, although you may have read about a sort of wild project where someone has been sending balloons up into the stratosphere in California. That is sort of a do-it-yourself geoengineering project.
But there is a lot of discussion about geoengineering and more and more research going on into the topic. And in movies, at least, it's already happening. So the idea behind solar geoengineering comes from volcanoes. A major volcanic eruption blasts a lot of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. So if it's a powerful enough eruption, you get that sulfur dioxide all the way up into the stratosphere.
And then it gets blown around on stratospheric winds. It drifts around. It forms these tiny droplets that are very reflective. And these droplets or aerosols reflect sunlight back to space. And the result is that literally less direct sunlight hits the Earth, and global temperatures fall. So following a major eruption, the cooling effect usually lasts for about a year or two until the droplets fall out of the stratosphere.
And this is what happened after Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991. The effects of Mount Pinatubo were measured very precisely with our latest instruments. But we also have a lot of historical records. Mount Tambora, in what's now Indonesia, erupted in 1815. This was a huge eruption, one of the biggest in recorded history. And this is a picture of it, obviously a painting.
And the next year, 1816, became known as the Year Without a Summer. In Massachusetts, in Williamstown, where I live, there was frost in the middle of August. And probably not coincidentally, that was the year that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. She and her husband and Lord Byron were stuck in a villa that they had rented on the shores of Lake Geneva, and it was cold and gray all summer or long. And so they decided to write ghost stories.
So, anyway, the idea behind solar geoengineering is to produce a manmade version of a volcanic eruption. A specially designed aircraft would fly up into the stratosphere, and they would release either sulfur dioxide or some other reflective material. The particles would drift around just as after a volcanic eruption. They'd reflect sunlight back to Earth and cool... I'm sorry, reflect sunlight back to space and cool the Earth.
And in this way, the artificial eruption would offset the warming effects of dumping CO2 into the troposphere. And one side effect of this would be to alter the color of the sky. The sky would become whiter. And that's why I called my most recent book Under a White Sky.
So if messing with the stratosphere to solve a problem created in the troposphere strikes you as scary, as kind of monstrous or Frankensteinian, you are certainly not alone. Many eminent scientists share your concerns. Solar geoengineering has been described as "dangerous beyond belief," as "a broad highway to hell," and as "unimaginably drastic."
It even worries the scientists who are researching it, like Frank Keutsch, who's an atmospheric chemist and who's head of Harvard's solar geoengineering research program. "When I started this, I was perhaps oddly not as worried about it," Keutsch told me, "because the idea that geoengineering would actually happen seemed quite remote. But over the years, as I see our lack of action on climate, I sometimes get anxious that this might actually happen. And I feel quite a lot of pressure from that."
So solar geoengineering may be a terrible idea, but once again, it's another idea that is not going to go away. Going backwards on climate change is somewhere between fantastically difficult and impossible. And so, like it or not, we find ourselves push forward towards schemes like carbon dioxide removal and geoengineering.
Whether or not these approaches will work, whether we can intervene in time to counter the last interventions very much remains to be seen. Humans are very smart and very stubborn, but the world is very big and very complicated, and things rarely turn out exactly as people had anticipated.
So these two stories that I've told this morning are, in certain respects, very different. One is about a toad and genetic engineering, and the other is about fossil fuels, volcanoes, and stratospheric engineering. But as fables, their outlines are quite similar. They're morality tales about human actions that have had planet-altering consequences no one remotely intended. They're about our efforts to change the world in one way that ended up changing it in a totally different way.
And they're stories about people trying to make changes to counteract the effect of the original changes. And that, I think, is what makes them Anthropocene fables. In the Anthropocene, the human and the natural can no longer be disentangled. In the Anthropocene, there is no way back, unfortunately, that isn't also a way forward. And that's a thought I'm going to end on, and I'm happy to take some questions if people have them. Thank you. I think we're just going to shout questions.
Lawrence Douglas:
Yeah, shout questions out. [inaudible 00:31:03] to circulate a microphone. So questions for Professor Kolbert.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Shoot.
Lawrence Douglas:
Do you want to be responsible for-
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yeah. Fine. Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1:
I don't know if you just didn't have time or if you didn't want to scare us too much, but could you give us a [inaudible 00:31:22] explanation of why people are so scared of the solar geoengineering?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, I think there's a lot of reasons why people are scared of it. There's one group of people who are scared of it because it seems to license further carbon emissions. So there's a group of scientists who would say, "We should not be even talking about this," because the moral hazard argument... It's perhaps not exactly a moral hazard, but it seems to be like, "Don't worry. Keep doing it."
And the more CO2 you put up there, the more sulfur dioxide or whatever you have to put up there, so you get this insane situation where you really have to ramp that up. So that's potentially very dangerous. And why is it dangerous? Because you don't get back... Dumping a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere and then counteracting it with silver dioxide, you might get a temperature regime, even though you might be able to... To actually counteract all of the global warming, you'd really have to dim the sun pretty significantly.
But some people talk about counteracting part of it. Anyway, you don't get the exact climate back. You might get a very different regional weather pattern. So you might cause lots of conflict. I mean, there's all sorts of... We could go on and on talking about the potential problems here. And just to put it bluntly, you have less direct sunlight hitting the Earth, which has a lot of implications.
So there are a lot of people looking at it in the modeling world. And as I say, you're going to hear more and more about it because I do think we're heading to the moment where people are going to start to do actual stratospheric experiments. Yes.
Speaker 2:
What changes in our attitude and the way we think about things gives us a chance of being sensible about all this?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, that gets to the heart of the matter.
Speaker 3:
[inaudible 00:33:20] repeat the question?
Lawrence Douglas:
Do you mind just repeating...
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Oh, sure. The question is, "What changes in our attitude might give us a chance to respond sensibly to what we've insensibly done?" I suppose. Yeah. Well, if I had the answer to that, I would definitely give it to you. I think that the fact of the matter is that all of these changes that we have effected, many of them have been done in the name, and probably we could get into a whole long conversation about this if you want, but let's talk about it, and Lawrence has taught a whole seminar on this, of progress.
So burning fossil fuels... We would not be here without burning fossil fuels. Half of the planet's population of 8 billion people would probably not be able to eat without nitrogen fertilizer. So these are huge changes that we have affected, and now we have a huge population. And it's very, very difficult to see our way to both feed and clothe and, in many cases, raise the standard of living of 8 billion people on the planet and at the same time reduce our impacts.
I mean, when you think about it, that is really, really hard. So I don't have a great answer for that. I do think that we should, before we plunge ahead to the next round of interventions, think pretty carefully about them. But that does not guarantee a happy outcome here.
Speaker 4:
Who will control this...
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Geoengineering?
Speaker 4:
Yes.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Let's say we were to go that route?
Speaker 4:
Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, that's another... No one knows. I don't know if... Has anyone here read Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson? Okay. That's a book. It's a sci-fi book by Kim Stanley Robinson. And it begins with India experiencing a terrible heat wave, which is not at all... No longer science fiction. I mean, last year, there was terrible heatwave in India. And deciding unilaterally to do geoengineering. And the book has a happy ending, I should...
So people are worried that... There used to be talk that Elon Musk could do geoengineering on his own. I don't think that's really plausible. You have to have an air force. You have to have a very powerful air force. I don't think it's even plausible that one nation on its own could do it because if other nations didn't want it, they'd shoot down the planes.
But I think if a group of powerful countries, if the US and China decided to do it together... Now, once again, that doesn't seem that plausible right now. But then I think it certainly could be done. But the question of governance is one that's... Many smart people are actively thinking about. And it's extremely difficult to come up with a framework that seems to really get input from everyone onto something that will affect everyone. Sir. Yes.
Speaker 5:
So, closely related to finding solutions for [inaudible 00:37:04] for profit. And I've seen a lot of people [inaudible 00:37:13] Bill Gates. [inaudible 00:37:13], for example, lots of people proposing solutions that are going to get funded by people who are going to make a profit by doing this, which may not always produce the best solution, but they might make money.
And so A, is that a accurate perception that there's a lot of the significant players here trying to come up with solutions for [inaudible 00:37:27] profit? And so what do you do about that? Because you can make money at something doesn't mean it's the right solution.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, I mean, that's a huge question. And we live in a world where, as you know, nothing that's not profitable really gets done at scale. And we passed this bill... I shouldn't say "we." The Congress passed a bill just about a year ago, the Inflation Reduction Act. That was the first real piece of climate legislation that we have had, for better or worse.
And it contains a lot of tax credit. It's basically based on trying to make things profitable that wouldn't necessarily be profitable unless you were getting some kind of tax credit. And from that will flow massive amounts of money. And I guarantee you you're going to start reading the stories pretty soon that a lot of it has gone to bad stuff. Absolutely. Because it's now profitable to do things that are quite possibly stupid.
And that's a huge problem. I don't have the answer to that either. How are we going to... You could either mandate X or Y, some technology. You could have a top-down, "This is what we're doing." But not to be a apologist for capitalism, it's very efficient. And the US government deciding, "Okay, this is the technology we should use" is not necessarily the best way to get to where you want to go either. So those are the levers that we have.
But yes, a lot of money's going to get wasted. A lot of government money's going to go to the wrong things. A lot of people are going to get rich. Yeah, all of that. Way in the back there.
Speaker 6:
Do you see propane as a viable [inaudible 00:39:30] of [inaudible 00:39:30]?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
So the question is, "Do I see propane..." Like natural gas.
Speaker 6:
[inaudible 00:39:37].
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yeah, natural gas. So natural gas... This is another huge topic. As we've shut down coal plants in this country, there's been a lot of what's called fuel shifting. And when you look at what's happened to carbon emissions in the US, they are down off their peak, which was about 2007, let's say. And the major reason for that is because we've closed coal plants and opened natural gas plants, fracking, this huge fracking boom that we've had.
And natural gas is less carbon-intensive, so produces less CO2 per unit of energy. And a lot of people... It's been called a bridge fuel by the natural gas industry, I might add, but you are still putting CO2 into the air, a lot of CO2 when you burn natural gas. And that is the gas that's coming out of the lines here in Amherst. It's propane tanks that people have. It's your barbecue tank, whatever. That's all basically some form of natural gas.
So I think, realistically, once again, not to be too dire here, we are at a point where we cannot afford that. We certainly cannot afford more natural gas. We really need to not be burning fossil fuels immediately. And so, to put more natural gas in the infrastructure in place right now really makes no sense. What should we do with the natural gas infrastructure that we have? We should be phasing it out. Sir.
Speaker 7:
I'm taking this in a different direction. I followed your work for the past 20 years and been really impressed and really want to thank you for your writing and your books.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Thank you.
Speaker 7:
You do a wonderful job of taking complex scientific ideas and making them accessible. And I'm curious about your background and sort of what brought you to do this work. And do you have a scientific degree or... Because you do a wonderful job of making science accessible. How do you do that? What advice do you have for graduating Amherst seniors? How [inaudible 00:41:53]?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well that's very kind of you. I have no scientific training. I took one science class as an undergraduate and ran screaming from the room. So I am a complete... English major. Literature major, actually. Not even English.
And I got into this through a weird and winding road that led from the New York Times to the New Yorker, just being in a certain place at a certain time and actually taking a trip to Greenland that had a big impact on me. And I think I always use myself as an example, "Can I understand this?"
So I think that that... In some ways, it helps not to have a science background at all, but in some ways, it can be very, very frustrating. I'm working on a piece now that involves computing and machine learning, and that, really... I know nothing about it, and it's very daunting and very intimidating. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend that people who want to write about science don't have a science background. But that is my own story.
Speaker 8:
So how do you live with a cognitive dissonance? What keeps you going? I think it's a real [inaudible 00:43:23]. And some question there is, what will it take to move the United States? Because we have such a big impact on the world, and we actually have not suffered the major effects to the degree that other countries have just by, I think, by chance. So what keeps you going? And then, I guess, what will move the United States? Because I think a lot of other countries are making big changes, and we're just dragging our feet in a lot of ways.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Let me start with the second part of that question first. I mean, are a lot of countries making big changes? I'm going to say that I fear that that's rather optimistic. I mean, there are certainly countries that are way ahead of the US, some northern Scandinavian countries maybe, but not a lot. I mean, the fact of the matter is, to be honest, a lot of the countries, when we look... We may look towards Europe, but a lot of the world is really...
India is the most populous country on the planet now. India, where per-capita emissions are a small fraction of what they are here in the US, is ramping up its emissions very fast. It has huge coal reserves. And that's really what's happening on the ground.
And because climate change is completely global. It's globally mixed. As the geologists would say, CO2... That it doesn't matter where it gets admitted. So the real problem is that, globally, a lot of countries that were not part of causing the disaster we have now are going to be part of causing the disasters of the future. How's that?
Even though they themselves are very, very vulnerable. India is very, very vulnerable to climate change, but their priority right now is raising people's standards of living. So that's the really depressing geopolitics of it.
What is it going to take to get the US... I think that the sort of "optimist's version," which I offer in quotes, is that if the US really changed its ways, if it invented these technologies and brought the cost curve way down on them, that's sort of one of the points of the Inflation Reduction Act, we will export all these technologies, and the world will change just by virtue of economics. It's just will be cheaper.
And new solar... Putting up solar panels is, right now, it is already the cheapest way to build your electrical grid, but it has a lot of technical hurdles because the sun doesn't always shine. So, in some ways, it's still easier to put up a coal plant, just run it 24 hours a day.
So what is it going to take to move us? I wish I knew. The facts couldn't be starker. They really couldn't be starker. And the fact that we have a divided government now... I'm going to give the Biden administration credit. I think they are really trying. I do think they are trying. They've made some bad decisions recently. I don't want to completely defend them, but the bureaucracy of the Biden administration is trying to push out wind and solar, absolutely.
And what will happen a year from now? What will we be talking about a year from now? Who will even the candidates be, and will climate change even be a part of the campaign? It's a frightening, frightening prospect. So I don't know the answer to that. People are being hit right now in all parts of the US. If you're a farmer, if you live on the Coast, there's kind of no avoiding these tinges. And yet, still, we somehow manage to talk about everything else.
Speaker 9:
I want to just bring it up because you brought up Biden. Do you have any thoughts on the Willow project you can share with us?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yeah, I mean, I do have... It was stupid. It's exactly what I'm talking about. You can't be building new fossil fuel infrastructure. It's not very complicated. You just can't be starting projects that are supposed to produce oil for the next three decades. It just doesn't make any sense. We have a lot of oil that's being pumped. We really don't need to pump anymore. And we don't need to lock in those... We should not be locking in new fossil fuel infrastructure.
That being said, it was going to face a long court struggle, and they were quite possibly going to lose that court struggle. And the Alaskans really wanted it. And that includes the Democratic congresswoman from Alaska. So everyone in Alaska wants it because everyone in Alaska lives off of oil money. So it was a complicated political decision, but I think it was the wrong decision.
Speaker 10:
I think your fables perfectly highlighted this humorous of manmade processes to be undone by more manmade processes. I wonder what you think of attitudes and strategies that hope to engage and appreciate natural geological forces as more powerful but carrying over longer periods of time. Is it possible? Are we at a state where manmade processes are necessary, or can we really hope to work with natural geological forces as well?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
These are all really good questions. I think that we've backed ourselves into a very difficult situation. How's that? And if you look at something like carbon dioxide removal, over vast stretches of time, that's what would happen. All of the CO2 that we put up into the air would eventually become limestone, as the geology students here all know, but who has time to wait for geology? We have this problem now, and we're interested in dealing with it now.
So I think that, in a way, that really gets to the heart of the matter. Geology is slow. Evolution is slow. All these things are very slow processes. And our technologies are very fast. And you could argue the fundamental mismatch here. And how you deal with that, we'll call it a fact, for the sake of argument, is very much the question of our time. And I don't have the answer for what is the right answer here because we are all here, 8 billion of us. What are we going to do?
Speaker 11:
It sounds like we're approaching monoculture in terms population of animals on the Earth.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
I'm sorry, we're approaching...
Speaker 11:
Monoculture.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Monoculture.
Speaker 11:
And basic ecology says that's not stable. And Covid was our first taste of what [inaudible 00:50:25]. Can we simply solve this problem by dying off?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
It's one answer. How's that? Arguably, even... We've set things in motion that will continue beyond us, but certainly, every day that goes by that we continue to emit and plow down the rainforest and plant soy, every day that we increase our impacts, I think that dying off, which is, as you say, with a pandemic, something that is not beyond the realm of the possible, but extremely unlikely. Extremely unlikely that humans are going to... Even in a zombie apocalypse, there are 8 billion of us, and presumably, some of us will survive.
But the question of whether we have unleashed forces that will cause, at some point, I can't tell you exactly when, and I don't know if it's true, radical reduction in human population, it's certainly... That's the subject of a lot of sci-fi, and it certainly doesn't seem impossible. As we saw, we got a taste of it with Covid. If Covid had been a more deadly virus, by the time we woke up... I mean, Covid is an absolutely perfect example. By the time... We saw it coming. You could see it coming. It was like a truck coming at you. And we did nothing until it was everywhere in the world.
Lawrence Douglas:
We have time for one last question.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Okay. Okay. We have a second question from someone. If anyone else wants to ask a first... If not, we'll go with you, sir.
Speaker 12:
One think that I was concerned about after learning about the Permian extinction... What was the-
Lawrence Douglas:
A little louder, please.
Speaker 12:
I'm learning about the Permian extinction. One of the things they talk about about is that the seabed creates a massive amount of various gases that [inaudible 00:52:34]. And at a certain point, [inaudible 00:52:34] caused by all that comes out. Are you concerned about that?
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, so the question is about the end-Permian extinction, which is the worst mass extinction in the history of sort of multicellular life. It occurred about 250 million years ago. And it came pretty close to, scientists will say, eliminating multicellular life. I mean, it was a really bad event.
And there's a fairly robust consensus at this point that it was a major carbon event. A lot of carbon dioxide was poured into the atmosphere. So that's a pretty bad parallel, not what you want. And, in fact, scientists who have looked at the rate of carbon release during the end-Permian would say that it's lower than it is right now. It lasted longer, but on a per-year basis, it was slower.
And the mechanism, the exact mechanism of the end-Permian extinction, how so many... How we managed to kill off... Not we because we weren't around, obviously, but how so much of the world's biota was killed off is still debated. It's really not clear how that happened, but certainly, there were enormous changes in the oceans. The oceans acidified. They warmed up. And some people think they burped, sort of burped toxic gases. And that's how that extinction worked.
Are we getting there? I think people would say we're still a long way from there, but we are certainly messing with the oceans on a really profound level. And if you go online, you will see recently these graphs of how hot the oceans are right now, record-breaking warmth. Because a lot of the heat... The CO2 captures a lot of heat, traps a lot of heat, and most of that heat goes into the oceans. So we are really messing with the oceans very, very profoundly right now. Not what you'd want to be doing. All right. Thank you-
Lawrence Douglas:
[inaudible 00:54:40].
Elizabeth Kolbert:
... very, very much.
