cable television company. we are brought to you by these television companies. >> up next is book tv's monthly in-depth program with best selling author elizabeth kolbert. she's the author of field notes, the sixth extinct, and under the white sky. >> so, author elizabeth kolbert, how does some one that studies literature at yale become a prizewinningre writer? >> it's a long and winding road. i spent a number of years, covering politics. my first real journalistic job was at i the new york times. i was pretty quickly dispatched

to all of the need to cover state politics. when you do daily journalism one thing follows. . . interested in this question of climate change which at that time in the early 2000s was still a lot of the coverage was still wrapped up around the question, is this a big deal or not? and i very, very naively thought, well, i'm here at the new yorker and i have a lot of

space and i have the luxury of trying to answer that question once and for all, and i ended up writing a three-part series on climate change that appeared in i guess 2005, and that set me on this road of sort of transforming myself from a political reporter to much more of a science reporter, but in all cases, i guess you could say from the study of literature to political reporting to science journalism, a lot of the basic through lines are the same and a lot of the basic techniques are the same. you're trying to take information, complicated, can be jargony and full of sort of information that insiders are very familiar with and you're

trying to bring it to a broader audience in a way that is interesting and engaging to them. so i don't think there's anything particularly special about being a science reporter. >> host: that three-part series in the new yorker became your second book, field notes from a catastrophe. when did global warming -- when did global warming become climate change? is there a distinction in those terms? >> guest: well, there's actually a kind of a complicated political debate about that. there were some efforts to not use the term "global warming" and use the term "climate change" by people trying to in fact downplay the issue, but then there were other people, scientists who embraced the term "climb change" because global warming doesn't always and everywhere produce warming at the same time.

iting produce exchange weather extremes. some people propose it should be called global weirding. think at this point honestly the two terms are used pretty much interchange by and i myself use them interchange by. >> host: in your writing throughout your books and in your new yorker pieces you use the word enthropsy? >> guest: i'm not sure there is a completely agreed upon pronunsation. in the u.s. is tends to be pronounced anthropacs so tomato, to matto. but the word refers to this idea that humans are now rivaling the great forces of nature in terms of our impact on the planet. so, what has shaped life on

earth and the geology of the earth over time, the forces of vulcanism, tectonics, and humans are now on par with a lot of those forces. so, just to give you one example, humans now move around as much earth and sediment as the major rivers of the world. so that's one of numerous examples i could give you that show how we are sort of now on equal footing with great geological forces. and that word has really caught on. it caught on in the popular literature and in the scientific literature as well, but there is still ultimately the geological epoch we live in is determined by geologists, and in that case there's still a debate going on about whether we should formally

rename this geological epoch. technically we leave in the period since the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago. so, the question is still before geologists, should we formally rename this time period. >> host: in your newest book, elizabeth kolbert, under a white sky, you quote albert einstein and you say that he said, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. what is that referencing? >> guest: well, i have to unpack that a little bit. i don't quote albert i'm stein, i point out it's written on the wall of this great model made of the mississippi river to test out various potential solutions to the tremendous land loss going on in southern louisiana. the fact of the matter is that

it's probably incorrectly attributed to albert einstein. al letter einstein probably never said it but the sentiment behind it i believe is new thinking for a new era and knew thinking -- if you're in the anthro -- you have to think differently. >> host: when it comes to the mississippi river and the delta, which you visited, how does that apply? >> guest: well, the story of what is happening to the mississippi delta is a really fascinating one. starts when at the french settled new orleans which is in a strategically, incredibly important spot, where the mississippi -- right before the mississippi hits the gulf of mexico, and all of the land in southern louisiana, all of the mississippi delta was formed when the mississippi would overflow its banks, which it

used to do all the time and it was carrying a great dole of sediment from the great plains, and it would drop that sediment as it overflowed, and all of the land in southern louisiana is this kind of soupy deltaic soil and those soils require being replenished by the river or they sink, and new orleans is sinking very fast. one of the fastest sinking places on earth because we prevented the mississippi from flooding, quite successfully, sometimes they're disastrous exceptions but basically we prevent the mississippi from flooding so all of southern louisiana is sinking away, and this is obviously particularly a problem in a city like new orleans but it said and it is not just said, this is actually true, that southern louisiana loses a football field's worth of land basically every 90 minutes. >> host: that said, had we not

engineered new orleans with dikes, et cetera, would louisiana continue to grow? >> guest: parts of it would be growing and parts would be shrinking. those are the natural deltaic processes. what happens is the river overflows the banks, lays down this bulge of land which is known as the delta lobe to geologists, and then the river has in effect impeded its own flow. the gradient becomes to steep and the river decides to find a faster route to the sea, and then it flips course, and that's -- that process is known as evulsion, and very carefully reconstructed the history of the mississippi and there have been at least half a dozen evulsions in the last several thousand years, and each time the river laid down a new stretch of land,

and in a natural course of events, those older lobes would be sinking away and the new lobe would be being created. now, what has happened because of the way we have basically put the mississippi in a strait jacket is all the sediment that's in the mississippi gets shot out the end of what is called the bird foot, this spit of land south -- basely to south of new orleans. >> host: so, elizabeth kolbert, you also visited a site upriver a little bit where the actual flow of the river is controlled. correct? am i phrasing that correctly? >> guest: yes. this is old river control you're referring to. >> host: yes. >> guest: so, old river control, this gets back to this idea that the mississippi would like to switch course. it's now at the point where, once again in the natural course of events, it would have an --

experience an evulsion. i'm not sure the verb is. and it would start a more and more water would be flowing down what is now a tributary of the mississippi, and it was recognized back in the early decades of the 20th century that more and more water was flowing down, and the army corps of engineers stepped, in built a huge series of control works about quite a was north of new orleans, maybe 100 miles north even, maybe not quite that much. to basically freeze the river in place. so, at that point 30% of the water that goes -- went by old river control was going down the -- and 0% down the main branch of the mississippi and they decided to keep this in

perpetuity and that was -- every day, that water flow is measured and adjusted accordingly to try to maintain that flow as 3-70. >> that's -- 30-70. >> that's quite an engineering feat. >> guest: yes, nearly ran out of control in the '70s during a huge flooding event in the '70s, had to be shored up, and more controls added. but since then i think it has kept control of the mississippi. 70% of the water is still flowing past new orleans and down into the bird's foot. but how long that can go on is unclear. certainly it can be perpetuate for a while but in the grand scheme of geology it can impact. >> host: another engineering

feat happened and you talk beaut this "under a white sky." we changed the direction on the chicago river. >> guest: so that's another great story. that is where the book begins. so, chicago grew up somewhat later than -- roughly a century later than new orleans, on the banks of the chicago river. a small river but a key one to the city of chicago, and chicagoans just used it as a sewer, as an open sure. the repository for all of the city's human waste and has this agrees stockyards of chicago grew it was also the repository for the animal waste and it was said that's chicago river was so thick with filth a chicken could walk across it without ever getting her feet wet. and this was a problem not just because it was just disgusting

obviously, but because the chicago river was running east into lake michigan, and chicago draws its drinking water from lake michigan. so, you can easily do the math on that. there were constant outbreaks of water-borne disease so around the turn of the 20th century, it was decided that the -- something had to be done, and what the something turned out to be was an enormous construction project that reversed the flow of the chicago river. so now if you go to chicago, the chicago river is not flowing east into lake michigan. it's flowing away from lake michigan and into a tributary of the mississippi. >> host: is that good thing? >> guest: well, it's a good thing for chicago's drinking water. when this project was completed and finally opened it was basically a canal that then connected the chicago river to

the mississippi water shed. there was a sort of facetious headline in the "new york times" that i won't get exactly right but ran something like, water in the chicago river resembles liquid again. so you did get water flowing through the river again, and you got the city's waste moving away from the drinking water. so it was in a public health -- from a public health perspective, a grant grand success. but what it did, which people were not thinking about very much at the time, was it connected these two great water sheds, two great drainage base sins their great lakes and the mississippi drainage basin which previously had been separated. so if you were a fish or a crustacean or some oregon figure you could not move from the' lake michigan to the

mississippi. >> host: whoa there are electric fences on the chicago river. >> guest: the electric barriers as they're called were constructed precisely in order -- because what happened was during the course of the 20th century, after this project was completed, both the great lakes and the mississippi became highly invaded water systems. so, lots and lots of invasive species, some of which were introduced purposely, a lot which were introduced nat vert tently in the balast of ships and were wreak havoc, so about 20 years ago, i guess, the congress said to the army corps of engineers -- they're involved in a lot of to these projects -- we need to do something about this. can't this these invasive

species go from one basin to another. that's going to wreck both basins. so the army corps of engineers was assigns the task of figuring out some way to keep these organisms in their respective waterways and it looked at a whole list of possibilities and thought of you could zap the water with uv radiation, you could install giant filters, all sorts of ideas. use some kind of toxin, ideas where explored and dropped in favor of this idea of pulsing a great deal of electricity through the water and the hook here is that when a first or another aquatic organism comes into this part of the river that is electrified it will feel -- get a shock and decide to go back home, good back in the direction it came from as opposed to crossing over these barriers. and i myself have taken a trip across the barriers and they're

huge billboard like signs that warn you, keep your pets near, do not go in the water because there's a high danger of electrocution. >> host: this is all due to a variety of asia carp trying to get into the great lakes or potentially getting into the great lakes? >> guest: well, honestly the barriers were put up initially to try to keep a fish from moving from the great lakes into the mississippi. the fish called the round goby, very voracious consumer of other fish's eggs and that fish by the time the pair years were completed, that fish had already crossed. so i think i say in the book it was matter of closing the barn door after the fish was already out, and -- but then it turn out that moving in the opposite direction were several species

we refer to asian carp. people think they're one species but it is several species. several species of asian carp moving through the mississippi water system and people really don't want the carp to get into the great lakes. so, that -- the barriers are really at this point, as you say, aimed at keeping these asian carp out of the great lakes but that was interestingly enough not the original reason for their construction. >> host: so, elizabeth kolbert, how did asian carp end up in the midwest and what the danger of getting into the great lakes. >> guest: asian carp have an interesting history in the u.s. they were introduceed -- various species at various times but all roughly around the same time in the mid-60s, early 1970s they were introduced because it was

hoped they would perform some form of what we call biocontrol. so one species is a very voracious herbber voyeur, eats plants? and the hope as that species known as the grass carp would eat aquatic leaves and then we wouldn't have to do you remember herbicides into theyard. another species was introduced because it was hoped they would eat basically take care of some of the newt trent loading that -- knew trend loading that occurs with insufficient treatment. so different species were introduced for different reasons and weren't really introve duesed. they were put into research stations, but they very quickly got loose. when they have baby fish, they're very tiny, called finger

lings and got through the mesh and they were quickly in the tributaries of the mississippi and then started to move all over, all through the water system, and what they do is they're -- as one of the army corps of engineers staff members spoke to about this put it, they're very good invaders, very, very adaptable, they do very, very well in that water shed. they take over the water system essentially in some parts of the mississippi river system at this point, i asian carp make up but three-quarters of the biomass so they sort of elbowed out native species of fish, and another habit they have, one of these species, which is known as silver carp, has this unnerving habit of when it's startled or scared it flings its up out of

the water. so you viewers can go online and find these extraordinary pictures of carp jumping quite high into the air, and i've seen this many times now, and it's sort of a beautiful, sort of frightening sight and people have been very grievously injured by flying carp. meat lot of fish aremen -- one of the sounds they don't like is the up there of an outboard motor so if you go boat 0, stretches, carp-infested stretches water you chance of getting hit in the face with a carp are pretty high, and people have had very serious injuries as a result. so that is another reason why people around the great lakes don't want them in the demonstration. >> host: we have talk about the mississippi delta, the chicago river, but we're talking about billions of dollars in economic damage or in infrastructure ,

aren't we? >> guest: you mean that have been -- >> host: hat been invested. >> guest: to try to correct for these problem order prevent these problems or -- yeah, absolutely. well, billions of dollars were spent initially to connect the equivalent probably of billions of dollars were spent to connect the mississippi and the great lakes water shed, and now more billions of dollars will be spent to try to correct for the damage that was done when that -- when the original billions were spent. >> host: so, is there another solution out there? >> guest: well, are we still talking but the great lakes in the mississippi. >> host: you can talk about those or any others, yes. in the case of the mississippi and the great lakes, this goes back to to to study by the army corps of engineers -- what man has joined, man can pull asunder

so you could in theory separate the two basins again. that would also cost billions of dollars, and be an enormous construction project, and that idea has essentially been dropped because chicago has become so dependent, both for flood control and for its water treatment, on the way things are right now, and also navigation. you can now navigate from the des plaines river into the great lakes. so, for a lot of reasons, a lot of new infrastructure has grown up around this old infrastructure and it's very hard to turn back the clock. >> host: so, you and i are both on the east coast, you're numb williamstown, massachusetts, we're near d.c. why should we care about a pup fish in the mojave desert? >> guest: well, the pup fish your eluding to is the devil's

hole pup fish, which is considered to be the rayest fish in the world, found only in one pool in a canyon, very magical canyon, in the middle of the mojave, and it is a small blue, lovely really beautiful fish, lovely blue fish. numbers are maybe several hundred fish exist in the world. and why should you care whether it survives? well, there are a lot of different ways to answer that question. one thing that's interesting about the devil's hole pup fish is it survives at very high temperatures. the water in this canyon, in the pool at the bottom of the devil's hole canyon, is a constant 93 degrees fahrenheit.

so, that's very, very difficult for most organisms to live inch most f-would not be able to live in that. the devil's hold pup fish thrives there one answer i could give is we might have something very interesting to learn from the devil's hole pup fish but the more row found reason is every species is sort of -- you could think of it as a library book, it's an answer to the question of how to live on planet earth, how to survive on planet earth. each species has a somewhat different survival strategy encoded in its genome and by tilling off the devil's hole pup issue and the myriad counselless other species on the brink of extinction right now we are basically burning through the library of life and that's something that people don't want

to do for ethical reasons and not something they want to do for practical reasons because much of what we ourselves depend on, our food supply, oxygen supply, all products of biological systems. so when you start unraveling the web of life you don't know exactly what you're going to get, and the dangers are pretty high. >> host: well, from your book "under a white sky" you write, one way to make sense of at the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. the history of life has, after all, been punctuated by extinction events both big and very, very big. >> guest: yes. i go on. i do gone goh on -- do go on and talk about why people don't want to do that, part of the reason is because as i mentioned, it's

simply ethically unacceptable and to a lot of people and another reason is it's a very scary prospect to think of unraveling the web of life. we could just say, well, forget it, that's what we are going. do he don't think most people would think that's wise. >> host: just to be fair, i didn't mean to cut off that quote but you do go on and you write that: but for whatever reason, call it biofeel ya, call it care for god's contraction, i call is heart-stopping fear, , people are reluctant to be the asteroid so we created another animal, creatures we have pushed to the brink and then yanked back elf. the term of art for such creatureses cancer vegas reliant and might also be called the stockholm species. >> guest: exactly. we tend -- part of this to be honest is our legal system. once a species is in really big

trouble, if that species can get listed on the endangered species act, then one of the provisions, key provisions of the act is you have to have a recovery plan for that species. so, i should say that the devil's hole pup fish is one of the earliest lists species on the act so once by law has to have a recovery plan iwant to go to a recent new yorker article you wrote. this is from january. quote, the pandemic which has brought down carbon emissions has also illustrated how tough it is to make significant cuts. with much off the world under lockdown global emissions were 6% lower in 2020 than they were in 2019. though this drop was the largest on record, it was still not enough to put the world on track to meet the 1.5-degree celsius goal set out in the paris

accord. >> guest: yeah. so, covid has brought carbon emissions down pretty dramatically. at the start of the pandemic, emission drops dramatically and then have started to continuing up again. but what i was trying to explain in that piece was in order for us to reach some of these targets, the targets enshrined in the praise climate accord from 2015 there was a goal of making every effort to keep average global temperatures from risings more than 1.5 degrees celsius which is almost three degrees fahrenheit so pretty significant climate shift already. you need to basically bring carbon emissions to zero very soon within the next few decades

to have a reasonable chance of hitting the goal, and 6% a year doesn't get you there and we're not expecting to see 6% a year. we're expecterring to see if and when this pandemic ends we expect to see a big rebound. >> host: can you explain the danger of the planet warming? >> guest: well, the danger over planet warming is people are seeing it right now. we saw california burning this fall. that was a human and -- disaster, i think all californians would agree on that. now that -- there are many factors that went into that terrible, terrible fire season but the fundamental one is that california is getting warmer and it's drying out and that is just increasing the odds of devastating forest fires. so that's one danger in one part of the world.

hurricane season this summer was quite devastating. it's unclear whether climate change will lead to more hurricanes but seems clear one thing it's going to do is lead to very rapidly intensifying hurricanes. so go to bed one night and the hurricane is a category 1 storm and you wake up and it's category 4. those are extremely dangerous storms because it's vert hard to get people to get out of the way of the storms that intensify so fast. so that is another tremendous danger from climate change. sea levels are rising as a product of climate change, that's a product of two forces. one of them. is that as the oceans warm and they are warming, that's just indisputable, warm water just takes it up more space. so that's just called the thermal expansion of water and that's pretty predictable, easy

to predict how much the ocean -- hutch more space the oceans will take up as the warm. then also melting a good deal of ice off of the major remaining ice in the world, greenland and antarctica. so all of our major cities, you're in d.c., quite a bit inland, but boston, new york, emerges all are now trying to figure out how they're going to deal with rising sea levels and depending on how much co2 we pour into the atmosphere and how much sea levels rise that could be manageable or catastrophic. so the lest of reasons people should be concern but a warming climate unfootball goes on and on. we could spend the next two hours talking bow them. that's a sameling. >> host: unfortunately we have on scratched the surface but we want to open up the phone lines and allow you to participate in this conversation.

(202)748-8200 for those of you in the east and central time zones, 2027 488201 in the mountain and pacific time seasons. other ways to reach us and getting a a question into miss kolbert include texts. 202-748-8903. text carefully and if you would, make sure to include your first name and your city. 202-748-8903 is for text messages only. plus we have several social media sites where you can make comment, facebook, twitter, instagram @ boosts booktv is our handle --@booktv is our happen and finally our e-mailcracy address, boost@c-span.org. we'll get to those as quickly as we could. elizabeth colbertes the author and yesterday store. the profit of love is her first

book in 2004 and other tales of power and d see expect then the science books, field notes from cat strife, man, nature tour and climbed change, six pulitzer prize winning the sixth extinction came out in 2014, and her most recent, just out this year, "under a white sky the nature of the future 'owhich we have been talking about today i. also want to bring in another topic before we -- more -- a little more on 0 to the climate change issue, and here is senator james inhofe. he is republican from oklahoma and he has been critical of efforts to control climate change. here's a little bit from him on the senate floor. >> one of the universities here in virginia commissioned a poll to be done of all the

weathercasters of -- on tv, they came back that 63% of the weathercasters said that any global global warming that occurs is a result of natural variation and not human activities. so, when i hear people -- i have good friends -- that really believe this and i think that you sometimes have to open it up and realize, there is another side to this story. so when they say that 97, 98% of scientist agree is just isn't rue true mitchell good friend senator whitehouse had an amendment, it says global warming -- i'm sorry -- climate change is real, and -- it is not a hoax. well, there's a rule against talking about your own books on the senate floor is so can do that but that hoax came from a totally different

interpretation. the hoax was the idea this happening, but it's due to man-made gases and in other words, man is caughts that. so what i said on the senate floor today, said hour arrogant for people to say that man can do something about changing climate. >> host: elizabeth kolbert that was from 2015. >> guest: yeah. i'll be frank and say i think it's really dangerous to even rebroadcast that. i don't think it's a good idea. i think that that's just basically like spewing a lot of these theories about qanon. people can believe as we learned in recent years, just about anything, and if james inhoff wants to believe the world is warming owing to natural causes that's his right as an american but it is simply not true, and i will give you a very basic reason why the climate is

warming. carbon dioxide, which is a byproduct of any combustion of fossil fuels and also what we breathe out all the time through our own terms of combustion as it were, is a green househouse gas. i traps heat near the surface of the planet. this has been understood since the 1850s. if we had no greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, it's pretty easy to calculate the temperature of the planet and the planet would be frozen. so, we are here because of the composition of the atmosphere and we have a lot that we owe the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. the more of them you put up there the warmer it's going to get. it's as simple as that. >> host: so is this a case where climate change is 90% man-made, 100 percent,.

>> guest: 100% and this is somewhat complicated issue. there are also other things that we are doing, other pollutants that we're putting up that have a cooling impact, but i think that the -- once again, the scientific consensus would be 1 machine%. >> host: let's show -- 100 percent. >> host: that's show senator shelton who ishouse, from this year. >> this long run began in the dark days of 2012 after speaker appealing pel had pass -- speaker pelosi peaced a serious climate bill and the senate had refused to take up anything, when speaker pelosi passed the bill in 2009, over on the house side, we had here in the senate

a fill bust-under fillbuster proof majority and this climate change and just walked away. i was told then that was because the obama white house told leader reid to pull the plug. after the obama care wars, the white house was tired of conflict, didn't want another big battle, wasn't going to take on any fights that wasn't sure it could win. and then years went by. in which you could scarcely get a democratic administration to put the words "climate" and "change" in the same paragraph. in which thought whether to call

it climate change or global warming in which the bully pulpit, the great presidential mega phone in the hands of one of our most articulate presidents stood mute. >> host: elizabeth kolbert that's a topic that senator whitehouse has talked about quite a bit on the floor. >> guest: yes, senator whitehouse gave a weekly speech, starting in 2012 on the floor of the senate. he he had sign that said it's time to wake up. his own form of protest, and he finally retired his sign, getting pretty beat up, just a few weeks ago when joe biden, president biden, signed a bun of executive orders, indicating that he took climate change very

seriously and so i think that we have -- we do -- are open up i hope in this country a new chapter in the way that we talk about and discuss and debate and hopefully deal with climate change, but a -- to say a great deal of work remains to be done is the unstatement -- understatement of the centuriy. >> in fact trying to convey the problem, is it your view it's almost impossible to get it back, the -- you'll know what i'm trying to see, the genie back in the bottle. >> guest: the genie of carbon emissions or the jeanie of a changed climate. >> host: yes. >> guest: the latter. we're not getting the climbed back. the un -- the climate back. the unfortunate exact the reason why climate change is -- why

climate scientist have been raising the alarm for decades now is because co2 is not a pollutant like a lot of pollutants, for example, when we decided we wanted to try to reduce smog in american cities and we mandated cat lick continuing converters on cars, skies cleared up relatively quickly . co2 by contrast once you put it up into the air it really hangs around for quite a long time, for all intents and purposes, forever, and it continues to exert a warming influence. so, it's very, very difficult. this is something i do discuss in my -- the in "under white sky" but very difficult and only a few ideas out there, and they sound kind of far out for how you could actually get the

climate of the past back, but when we talk about reducing emissions and even getting emissions down to zero that unfortunately does not mean we'll get rid of this problem. just means we'll stop making the problem worse. >> host: let's hear from our viewers. let's begin with glen in freeland, michigan. you're on with author elizabeth kolbert. >> caller: thank you very much. miss kolbert, one thing first, hopefully -- i hope this isn't crossing the idiotically. the terms -- you might have addressed this before. i only began watching at about half hour in. so, anyway, global warming and climate change, why did that change, if global warming is the problem and i agree it is.

why call it climate change? i think that confuses lots of people. the climate is changing and at least little ways -- >> host: glen we got your point. >> guest: that gets back to -- with did talk about that a little bit of the top of the hour and sheldon whitehouse mentioned where we fuss over what to call it, and as i said there were some of that debate does have a political prominence where some people south climate change sounded more benign than global warming and those were people who didn't want us to do anything about global warm budget i think they -- the term "climate change" also, as we discussed, gained kush currency among scientists bass the effects of globalling are not

always warming. they can be these temperature extremes , so in some ways climate change is a better term, but i think at this point that you could use either one and everyone would know what you're referring to. >> host: well, deb in wisconsin texts, something we talk but a little bit but maybe a further explanation, could you explain why republican congressmen sorry luck tan to believe and awe -- reluctant to believe and offer a republican solution for climate change? >> guest: that is such a good question. i wish i did have an answer. the answer that is often given is follow the money, look at where people campaign contributions come from and you'll learn a lot. i think there's a lot to be said for that, and also increasingly we have divide in this country just between parts of the world which are big either oil or coal

producing states and states where they don't get any income from fossil fuel can extraction. i live in massachusettsth. there's no one in massachusetts who is making a living off of fossil fuels so it may be easier for politics to take a strong stand on fighting climate change. but i think that -- this is one woman's political opinion -- it's becoming increasely untenable. untenable at this point to say the climate is not changing and we don't have to do anything about it, and very interesting state, i think, to watch will be florida, which is as everyone knows, a swing state, not a fossil fuel producing state, but a state that is going to be hit vary hard by climate change. >> host: and as sheldon whitehouse indicated, democrats have not moved forward with this as well, and you wrote in the new yorker in april of 2020,

that environmental problems that have emerged since 1970 have simfully gone unaddressed. congress has not passed or even really come close to passing a sing piece of legislation aimed at addressing climate change. >> guest: yes the bill that shelton whitehouse was alluding to in the clip we saw was a bill that was called a cap and trade bill. so one of the ways that people have proposed trying to reduce emissions is a similar technique to what was used to reduce sulfur emissions back when acid rain was big environmental concern, and it was very effective. what you do is you give your major emitters an allotment. this is what you can emit. this is a limit, and then if you are going to emit more than that you have to buy the credit. so you create a market mechanism

for reducing emissions and then you can ratchet down those limits over time, and that would be a way to -- it is hoped, bring down emissions. that bill passed, cap and trade bill, passed the house in 2009, and then it -- as senator whitehouse pointed out never came before the senate. that fight was never even really fought, in part presumably, i think he is correct because the obama administration just didn't want the fight at that point. they had emerged bloodied from the obama care fight. >> host: let's here from john in salt lake city. >> caller: thank you for take michigan my call. i'm curious if you believe that humans can controlling the earth's plate tectonics, a

source of co2, heat, and a major contributor of glaciers in antarctica and greenland melting. >> guest: i do not believe that the -- humans can control plate tectonics. that's one geological force that is beyond our control. the way that plate tectonics contributes to the climate and one of the major drivers of climate, before we got involved in burning fossil fuels is through vollannism, the way that we -- vulcanism, the way we got co2 into the atmosphere before humans decided to burn fossil fueled but if you look at the output of volcanos versus the output of cars and airplanes and factories, volcanos put out about 1% of the co2 we now put

out through our activities. so, even though we don't control plate tectonic we still control the climb -- we don't control the climate but we are responsible for climate change. >> host: brian is michigan go ahead. >> caller: i was wondering, the blizzard climate change and all this stuff -- the paris climate change is everybody equal, india, china, and to so forth and that's a pick stumbling block. i hear that a lot of times. 'll be blunt i have no use for communist countries, and i've been up close and personal throughout the decades with them so i have no use for them. but china is part of everything, obviously the part of the earth. is everything dollar amount equal across the board for the major polluters on this earth with no exceptions.

>> host: thank you, brian. elizabeth kolbert. >> guest: well, the paris accord is a complicated document. everybody brought to the table in paris what they said they were going to do. no one was forced to do anything. everyone sort of like -- i think i described it as a pot luck super. you came with a contribution that you felt your country could make. what is important to understand about the background to paris and the background to climate change and this gets back to the fact that co2 eking mys hajj around for a long tomb. what we are interested in when we apportion responsibility for climate change is who put the most co2 up there that is in aggregate and the u.s. is the major contributor to the

additional co2 in the atmosphere right now. we are about 4% or 5% of the world's population and put up 30% of the co2. so that's really huge, and makes us give -- in my view, gives us a lot of responsibility for trying to solve or ameliorate this problem. the chinese now are the world's biggest emitters on a annual basis, but they stiff haven't caught up to us on aning a degree galt basis and also have more people so on other per capita basis the u.s. is just -- just has a tremendous responsibility. don't think there's any way to get around that. now, our arguments for why we shouldn't have to do anything as well as everything doing the same thing. well, there are many, many countries, many country in world

where the average person is responsible for a tiny, tiny fraction. less than 1% of the co2 we as the average american is responsible for so i don't think this appropriate and shirt not gee politically identifies able so aeveryone has to make the same contribution to solving the problem because they didn't make the same contribution to causing the problem. >> host: elizabeth kolbert are electric cars one of the best answers? >> guest: well, there are a few major sectors that are referred to is in this conversation that are responsible for the big part of our missions globally and transportation in the u.s. in fact transportation is number one. so even bigger than electricity generation.

and electric cars are complicated because they're only as good as your electrical grid. so, electric cars are more efficient than gasoline, intern combustion engines so you get an immediate benefit that way, but in order for them to really make a big difference, you need a grid, an electrical grid that is not producing a lot of co2, so we kind of need to do both simultaneously and make transition to electrical cars and we also need to clean up our grid very dramatically. >> host: another text for you, reminder if you intend a text, please include your first name and city. cue cite countries ahead of the u.s. in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. >> guest: yeah. absolutely. most northern european countries, denmark, sweden, germany, countries that have

invested alet. norway is just read recently something like half of a new car is being sold for example, are electric vehicles. so denmark gets a almost of its power -- don't know exactly the percentage -- has invested a lot in wind power. germany is investing a lot in solar and wind power, so, those are the countries that get sort of the highest marks in terms of having both made a signaturant effort to reduce emissions and having succeeded to a certain extent in that juneteenth george in pennsylvania. >> caller: thank you. i'm looking at a news article that says global wheat production is expected to reach a new record of 780 million-tons in 2021 according to a -- by the

food and agricultureol organization of the united nation. in addition the fao is expecting an new and higher production of cereal productionsing for rice in india and wheat hard visit in european union, kazakhstan and russian federation. second point i'd like to make is regarding einstein and this idea of consensus. reporter went to einstein and said, i know 100 scientists who don't agree with your theories and einstein said, why 100? you just need one. in order -- in other words, have one who has verifiable scientific evidence there is out in one scientist who has any very final scientific evidence that fossil fuel, co2 has caused any measurable warming, sea level rise, ice melt,.

>> host: whoa did you cite the food production to beginning your question? >> caller: this has to do with all these aliving alarmist clime existential threat, that things are becoming worse and worth. >> host: thank you, sir. let's hear from elizabeth kolbert. >> guest: one of the claims is it could -- i haven't read the latest fao food production put wore very good at agriculture and it's quite possible, it seems to me, not at all contradictory to say that food production is increasing and to say the climate is changing in ways it could threaten food production, don't steam be initially exclusive. the second point that no one has any evidence of this, this just gets back to i have to say a kind of ridiculous argument.

people have tons and tons of evidence, entire libraries of evidence. if people don't want to believe itself i can't make them believe it. >> host: where did you come with the title for the newest book "under a white sky." >> guest: well, the title refers to this idea, we talked about before how it's very difficult to do anything about climate change quickly because of the long life of co2 in the atmosphere, and one proposal, one of the few proposals how you might do that is to produce a form of global cooling to counteract global warming. this is known as solar geoengineering or solar raidation management and the idea is you would spray some kind of compound either sulfur

dioxide or diamond dust in this stratosphere and this would create a kind of reflective haze that would bounce sunlight back to space and cool the planet. the reason we know this is a viable possibility is because this is what volcanos do. volcano eruption puts sulphur die die ox i'd up there you -- sulfur dioxide you get beautiful sunsets and a dip in global temperatures temporarily. one of the possible side effect offered this scheme is it would change the appearance of the sky. so the sky would appear whiter. that's what the -- where the title comes from. >> host: it whats 2015 that elizabeth kolbert won the pulitzer prize for this book "the sixth extinction. an unnatural history ."

without get doing technical what are the big five and what -- what do you man who by the sixth? well, the big five refers to the five major mass extinctions of the last half a billion years, so since the multicellar life appeared. ... people are familiar with this is the event that did in the dinosaurs about 66 years ago part what again it's a very broad in impact. on the sixth would be, the

sixth would be the extinction event we ourselves are responsible for, right now in 2021 come extinction rates are extremely high. there are hundreds perhaps thousands perhaps tens of thousands of times higher than what are referred to as a background extinction rates. in the normal course of geological history's new species involved in a species come extinct. it's a very, very slow process. but now all of us, human being a human lifetime basically should not be able to watch a species go extinct. we all know, we all read all of the time about species. that suggests just our basic fact suggest something very unusual is going on. and what is very unusual is us.

we are the major driver of extinction right now. >> host: sews winning a pulitzer life-changing? [laughter] is a very flattering it's a great honor. i would not see my own personal case it's life-changing. we went let's move on and hear some reviewers. john is in new jersey, hi john. select yes. actually global morning can turn on a dime you took of the famous explosion of 1850 where there is a frost in each of the months of the year, the global temperature dropped an astounding 2 degrees. when yellowstone froze were likely to have a nuclear winter for for five years. of which we might starve to death. that does not even include a

meteorite asteroid paired we are long overdue for one. we've had some close calls in terms of astronomy were razor thin. we just had one last friday i believe. >> host: john yoo seem to fall this issue pretty closely, why is that? >> caller: this is the we do not view this in itsco totality. the asteroids, the comets, the other things the ones that come from the sun we cannot even track. >> host: that is john and new jersey, elizabeth? >> guest: there's a long description of the impact inmate latest book under the white sky because that is precisely why we narrowed it, these major erections have a very serious cooling effects. the caller is

correct. i don't think we want to bet the future of humanity or other forms of life on the next major volcanic corruption. the other problem here is we cannot forget, the other issue here is those are temporary impacts for those are significant impacts that last for a couple of years as the haze we were talking about thoughts out of the stratosphere. once that happens after let's say two or three years temperatures go right back to where they were. stricklin from connecticut, a text sent to you why is population control not a topic of discussion? more people equals more of every issue contributing to carbon emissions. so i had zero population growth disappeared from the conversation? >> that is another complicated questioner that has a lot of political -- there's a lot of

politics behind population control and a lot of coercivee population control that people find in the past i guess. i don't know that it's still going on, i don't think so but people found very disturbing. so population control is a some what politically vexed .ssue the fact of the matter is from the perspective that worked hockey about, a lot of parts of the world where people, tension is very high consuming to have pretty low birth rates at. this point. in fact in many european countries and japan, places like that below placement level birthrates those are countries of the very high standard of living. they are still those that have pretty high birth rate significantly above replacement levels those tend

to be very low consuming countries.th so the collective impact on planet earth is a function both of how many people there are and how much each of us is consuming. think we need to think about both sides of the equation very seriously. [screaming]n 's in the 60s wasn't at the book the population bomb the population explosion book came out and we were all worried about hunger et cetera? >> yes event the green revolution which successfully fed many, many, many hundreds of millions of people some of the most dire predictions of population did not come true. we have almost tripled our population just since that book was written. population is a pretty significant issue. >> host: anthony is in muller place new york, anthony were

on with author elizabeth kolbert. subject thankk you, thank you for filling our question so eloquently and being patient with this. i am on board with trying to protect the planet and save the environment. i am not a naysayer. i feel that nuclear power and the fallacy that it is good for us or can be contained especially if this point when you consider all the accidents it's a multitude of accidents, but aside from what's going on in japan, what's gone on in chernobyl, what's been going on with the military whether it's your submarine fairly what we have done with nuclear power in breach containment and overtakes. it's almost like putting curtains on the titanic the real icings all the reactors down to 100 years when they're supposed to be shut down or mothballed after 30 per they refueled them thereby putting all of the waste and to

contain the pools and then re- upped or reloaded the reactors. so now you have double the waste and it's now deemed unsafe. thereby there's no place to store the vast quantities of waste that are now on the shorelines of the world over. all the reactors are leaking it's an impossibility to contain the byproducts produced. smrekar and anthony think wect got the point is this something elizabeth discusses in her most recent book under a whiteli sky. >> well, nuclear power is a tough one. we in the u.s. get roughly 20% of our electricity from nuclear power right now, it is declining as anthony said, a lot of plants have been relicensed. a bunch of not been relicensed. so are shutting down.

and then the question becomes, the nuclear is very significant source of low carbon electricity in the u.s. the question of whether would be going to replace them with, it's a pretty live one right now in a way. there's alsoen an argument whether we, if our concern is getting rid of carbon emissions should we be building more nuclear plants? i am not going to take it, stand on that right now. i do share a lot of thewe concerns about nuclear waste. we do not have anywhere to put nuclear waste it's all sitting in containment pools atna the original facilities so even

after 60 years we have not come up with a solution of long-term nuclear waste. the stuff needs to be stored for all intents person purposes once again forever. so i agree there are a lot of risks to nuclear power. and the fact of the matter is, it is a somewhat practical matter in this country in the u.s. at least we are not building nuclear plants because they are just simply too expensive. the risk factors enter that but it's too expensive to build nuclear so no one is building nuclear right now. >> host: greg texan this question, what is your position on natural gas? >> natural gas is now really a major source of, what is powering our electrical grid. i don't of the exact percent but it is quite high.

that's our major fuel for electricity these days. it burns cleaner than coal and there's less co2 per energy of unit of coal. it has men referred to as a bridge fuel between our cold power past and are hopefully carbon free future. but there a lot of people who argue pretty compellingly that it should not be considered a bridge fuel. when introduced natural gas as quickly as possible. from a climate perspective natural gas produces less co2 than coal but still produces a lot of co2. and another problem that has emerged with natural gas is natural gas is essentially methane.

methane itself is a very powerful greenhouse gas. so it leakage from natural gas, depending on how much of the natural gases leaking in the production process, natural gas can be much of a burden for the claimant is coal. so that is a very serious consideration in my mind. any good reason why we should be also trying to phase out natural gas. >> host: elizabeth kolbert's in view does charles darwin hold up? [laughter] >> guest: in my view. i am not an evolutionary biologist. think just about everyone you talk to charles darwin hold up pretty well put i should not see everyone every biologist you talk to would say yes charles darwin someone who really got things pretty calm he pretty well nailed it, yeah. sue and you write it under a white sky he was confounded by.

[inaudible] was that mean? suspect at the time as we saw during the voyage of thehe beagle when he was a young man , no one had a good explanation for how you get a coral reef. coral reefs are found in these extraordinarily deep water there built by these tiny little gillette nest animals. no one had a sense of how they could create, you can come upon them very deep water how is it built these extraordinary structures? and darwin actually was the person. so in addition to his phenomenal theory of natural selection is also the first person to understand how coral reefs worked.

sue and couple actually several laugh out loud moments in your writing i don't have adequate to science whether that's important or not, but this is one that makes them laugh out loud. coral is a rare and amazing site. how did you witness that? >> guest: coral have a variety of different ways of reproducing. one of their major modes of reproduction is they release for their hermaphrodites there these tiny little creatures, they sort of look a little bit like anemones. when they are very squishy. they are basically a mouth and a bunch of tentacles. once a year they produce this little bundle that looks like a little glass bead that contains both eggs release it

into a water in a synchronized way. they haven't released the egg and sperm find each other in this slick that forms on the water. but as these beads are rising through the water, millions and millions of them it looks like an upside down snowstorm. it's really a fantastic site. specter your research you visited the coral reef off of austria but how would you describe its current condition? >> the barrier reef is the largest in the world. it's essentially at stretches on the east coast of australia. they had to study its inside entirety it's so big it's been

estimated that just over the last 30 years, something like half of the coral on the great barrier reef has been lost. >> host: you talk about bleaching. >> guest: yes. so coral bleaching what happens with coralap bleaching, coral are, these tiny little gillette tennis transparent creatures and inside their cells there what's called stormy corals. corals that build reefs.ui inside there cells their e bodies they made a tiny little plant. the made food with photosynthesis there like plants on land. these plants help quarrels sorted in return for the

protection they basically donate a lot of the food they are producing to the corals. while them to produce reefs which is an energy intensive activity. when they get very warm hot summer which increasingly reallocating moree and more of according to climate change the plants start to produce oxygen radicals which are dangerous for the t corals. they're basically depriving themselves of their own food source are one of their major food sources. and so if this bleaching event, if this warm spell does not last too long, then they will recruit new symbionts and

survive. if last too long they will essentially starve to death. so as you are getting these bleaching events that are becoming faster and faster and are more extended in time can be multiyear events now. you are getting these coral die off. and the bleaching, the term bleaching refers to the fact the seasonal plants give coral their color. normally they are transparent. the what you're seeing is the skeleton the calcium. the good they're turning white that's with a cup coral bleaching. >> host: finally before we leave went to acknowledge one of the people in your book and

hawaii in a while very dynamic woman originally from the uk. back in 2016 shoe was on a project that had been nicknamed the super coral project. so i do talk about pretty extensively in the book is that we have these rising water temperatures. were going to get more and more coral bleaching. were not getting the heat out of the ocean in any foreseeable timeframe. if you want coral reef to survive, to the corals were gonna have to do something tot. make corals more heat tolerant. and that involves trying to breed up hardier corals

hardier symbion's. so of that effort is actually going on i went to visit some experiments that were going on in australia. just last year. very tragically ruth passed away basically in the middle of this project in 2018. >> host: next call for elizabeth kolbert comes from paul in idaho falls, idaho. please go ahead paul. >> caller: thanks, ms. kolbert a bike affected nuclear. are you familiar with the work of bill gates in the small modular reactors? and our endeavors outit here at the iml? >> host: she shaking her head yes what your view of those projects? imposes a midtier from paul.

pulpwood is your>> view of thos? >> caller: and very much in favor like bill gates points out we cannot get rid of 20% of our power base in the united states in hopes of windmills and solar supporting that 20% of baseline power. sue and thank you sir, elizabeth kolbert. >> guest: let's get back to but we're talking about nuclear is very -- has a lot of risk associated with it. we've been told for a long time that we are going to getaf this much safer modular reactors. i guess at what i can say is i hope it's true. sue and john from corpus christi, texas breed hi john. smither is like to ask was been done with the corpus christi area becoming the ground zero for the fight against man-made climate change. this area becoming

environmental disaster but i'm a member of three environmental groups in this area.. we have obtained a map that shows how the powers that be are planning on bringing in 15 new refineries to these plants in this area. it's going to economically going to environmentally destroy and economically destroy it. it does not benefit the local population part out dozens benefit wall street. but it is going to turn this area into a total environmental disaster. they are deepening and widening the port to bring in these massive, massive supertankers in the port of corpus christie. vardy become the number one exporter of oil even more so than the houston ship channel per like to know it's been done to focus on this area? >> host: john before go to a gas, what groups you belong to? and what are you doing to oppose this? >> caller: one group is cape it's a close alliance to protect the environment.

another group of the surfrider foundation and another group is for the greater good. i'm trying to speak out because the way people uproot i've studied weather and climate ever since i was a boy's a hobby of mine. see the effects of man-made global warming every day. gotta degrade agriculture and i am into landscaping but i know a lot about tropical plants. except the recent big freeze we had. those events are much less frequent than the used to be. much less frequent her were normally able to grope tropical stuff here in texas wanted 50 years ago for that time she climate has changed. 150 miles south of your, brownsville you can grow stuff he could not even think of going there just 30tu years ago. but as time she climate has changed in 30 years time. subjecting you sir elizabeth? systemic i'm sorry but i cannot speak to the specifics

of corpus christi and what's going on. just don't know enough about it. i would say over the few decades the u.s. has once again become a major oil producer. not out of conventional oil bit unconventional toilet places like north dakota did not used to be major oil-producing states. and that is a big economic force these days. but really the idea of pouring a lot of money into any form of fossil fuel infrastructure these days is unfortunately in my view kind of crazy. so maybe there is hope with the new administration that some of these projects will be looked at again. i cannot give to the specifics

i'm sorry. >> host: elizabeth this is a text from nick fortune. i read the sixth extinction and use it to teach high school social studies and world geography. my question for you involves nitrous oxide and its role alongside co2 with regard to global warming. can she speak on modern andnd industry effect with waste runoff eter cetera. >> nitric office site is aghast soo any increase in that production is having a claim effect. i'm afraid once again i'm not of an expert to speak to that. i can say in terms of and, egg is a big sugar to climate change. but for a n number of ice cream

anytime you cut down a forest and plant corn, or soy, or whatever, that carbon that was being taken up by those trees is once again being released into the atmosphere. d4 station for aggie is a big, big climate problem. another reason people advocate for chronological reasons we eat less beef is because of one unfortunate fact that when cows digest, they burp a lot of methane. that gets back to the natural gas question, methane is a very, very powerful greenhouse gas. so cows and dairy a unfortunately eating a lot of those is contributing to climate change.

so when people say what can i do to try to reduce my own carbon impact, one of the things you can do is reduce fewer hamburgers. reduce your beef consumption. because unfortunately farming is also a big greenhouse gas source. and i would sit on a more hopeful note there a lot of people working to try to reduce the impacts of agate through different varieties of agricultural production. >> host: is this in a sense though playing around the edges? to reduce impact on agre everything? >> host: were doing these different things. in your view to something major have to occur? >> i don't think it is just my

view. i think any one has looked at this problem seriously would say as we discussed stop making the problem worse. it's not good enough to reduce your emissions. because that means the analogy is often given to about the that you consider the atmosphere of a bathtub filling it was co2. you're still filling the tub adjusting morein slowly. we need to not just turned on the tab we need to shut off the tab. it is at that point only at that point that we will reach a new climate. i won't be a perpetually over

heading towards really dramatic carbon reduction then yes were just playing around the edges. >> host: just a half-hour left with her aghast. you are on the air. >> well thank you. as a study on the east coast that showed that wetlands there were something more co2 or from the atmosphere is a big point in southern california was at one time an ancient redwood forest. as one in alaska and the atmosphere that was threatened by a privatete oil deal from the last administration. do do to preserve and protect your wetlands and maybe even

perhaps bring them back somehow. in the northern hemisphere particularly in the northern hemisphere. >> thank you. that's a really good question. we have lost, a tremendous of otherwise empty it had that there no longer wetlands. they found out there are a lot of efforts to try to bring back try to stop the loss of wetlands. to try to restore some wetlands that had been lost

for a number of reasons. wetlands are crucial water pollution control, water, or nitrogen runoff was in the gulf of mexico had buffering wetlands, that problem also could be narrated. there's a lot of reasons why we should be a lot of attention can be drawn into our wetlands. once again i'm afraid i'm not a wetlands expert and cannot give you chapter and verse and what's being done or not done on the subject space before and your work in the sixth extinction, youou seem to spend a lot of time with frogs and bats, why? >> guest: frogs and bats are both groups of organisms that

have been hit really hard in recent decades by pathogens or by diseases. by people. and frogs, the pathogen is known as bd, it's a package that interferes basically frogs that get and up suffering many species of frogs have been driven extinct by this disease. many are just barely clinging to existence. this is a really big problem, the most endangered class of organisms on the planet this should be a warning assigned to us. and that, as it happens near where i live in western

massachusetts, pathogen has been identified as since killed many millions of bats have spread most of the way across the u.s. not in every state yet but it is in most states. that was probably a pathogen that was imported from europe is the belief. so when you things around the globe on the big forms of extinction right now is globalization. honestly were just moving a lot of things around the world we bring species together that have been involved separately for tens of millions of years. a lot of times nothing happensom but sometimes since we are moving so many species around the world only a small

percentage of them result in disaster you are getting ongoing disaster. we now have in parts of the northeast are very heavily ash these days white ash, green ash. the ash bore has been devastating for the u.s. when we bring species together with a one species may not have any defenses against the other, the may be diseases pandemic is a good example about this we could talk about that too. and get some really unfortunate impacts near

albany new york does not just impact one species of bat. impartially in impacts a lot of species of bats. a lot of the bat populations have really plummeted. >> george is calling in from cambridge, massachusetts you are in with author elizabeth kolbert. select thank you so much for c-span thank you for the work you've done over all of the years. a few years ago a scientific tax code geo therapy was published but it was published primarily to be released at the paris climate talks. geo therapy is the idea of using existing ecological systems to repair the damage that our species has done. i'm interested in whether you know about geo therapy, and whether you have seen the book or looked atap the conferences on all of the aspects of geo

therapy that i have diversity for a livable climate has organized over the past few years. strict george to work in this field? stomach i've been looking at this for a a long, long time as an interested observer since i live halfway between harvard and i mit, i have attended public lectures there. and for over a decade i published a free weekly looking at what's happening at the colleges and universities in the boston area. which as you know is not a big college town. and in the community around energy and environment. unfortunately about the environmental organizations or be interested in mining all of that material. but they have not been. i stopped doing it in september because i was tired of listening to the same people i've heard before talk

about things i've heard before without any action items at the end. >> thank you server. elizabeth any response for that collar? >> i can't say have ever heard the word, have to be i honest. i certainly am familiar with lots of ideas on how we could use natural we can get back to restoring wetlands just as one of many possibilities for enhancing for example carbon take-up from various echo systems that could be a significant contributor to help fight climate change. >> 748-8200 for those in the east central time zones, (202)748-2001 for those in the mountain pacific time zones, got about 20 minutes left purdue also put up our text number if youou do send a text please text carefully to the

right number and include your first name and your city if you would. they cannot geo therapy, but you do talk about genetic engineering and under a white sky. how does that fit into some of the environmental issues that we been w discussing? >> guest: jean editing or genetic engineering has really taken t a dramatic step forward in the last decade or so. going to crisper which is a suite of techniques that allow scientists or even amateurs to do jean editing much, much more cheaply than previously. and one of the questions that is increasingly going to be in front of us is whether we want

to whether we find it acceptable to use jean editing to try to repair or verse i don't know exactly what verb you want to the use, some of the damage we have done. for example in the book i go to australia to talk to scientists who are working on a gene edited version of a king to. the king told is one of the species that was moved around the world. it's native to south america and to central america produce moved around the world and the vain hope that it would help eat the insects that eat sugarcane which is a big cash crop in a lot of places including australia. it's very unlikely to ever to the sugar carpet they have rick ecological havoc in places especially in australia. because they are highly

toxic. any animal that eats them basically drops dead. a lot have no native involved wariness of these toads since they did not evolve with them. so they chomp on them and die certain numbers of a lot of species have plummeted for that reason. these scientists we arees working on producing a less toxic toad. they had successfully produce a less toxic toad prints really interesting question as to whether, i think it will be increasingly salient question as to whether we want to let organisms like that out onto the landscape. at the time i did they did not have the permits to actually these less toxic toes to lead the laboratory they are not highly, highly bio secure facility. >> elizabeth kolbert whether it is visiting and a native down in the delta of

mississippi, or flying to australia and talking to people there, you seem to have a knack for getting in with people. do you approach them, the approach the government when gyou want to talk to the government people? how do you get these contacts? >> think they operate how all journalists tend to operate. we find something you want to talk to and it used to be a lot harder i would say. and they look online and in many cases find their e-mail or your phone number and you get in touch with them. sometimes you have to go through various channels from official channels to try to get to them. mainly researchers mainly, not exclusively and they will talk

to you. it's not a very secretive or sophisticated methodology when you go on a trip to come back with notebooks full of notes? or do you do your writing lawyer out there? >> guest: a comeback with notebooks full of notes into my lecture which is off-camera there are teetering stacks of notebooks. >> host: do you do your writing we are seated right now? >> guest: yes i am right now speaking into the computer or i have spent many, many an hour. where i wrote all of those books we have described. splint michael is go-ahead. >> >> caller: thank you so much your books. especially when you spoke about the corals.

think we are experiencing right now everything from trumped to climate change to a genocide going on with covid that we are blind too. it only just now occurred to me a lot of my research as far as inefficiency, why would a species come to the brink of extinction ever? that's a huge inefficiency is also a blindness. we are blind to these things because we are within it. a lot of what darwin said, we taken as competition reading to an authorization that's a falsehood. i don't want to get into politics but we do based a lot of our politics on both sides. we go to the think tanks, i mention your to talk to different parties, we need think tanks on both sides to understand or stop using false science of evolution is choosing optimizing of lucent minimizes for that so you end

up with blind kingfish. right now were facing a genocide of the 21st century that deals with old people and things like that. it is unparalleled and i hate to be so frank, could you speak to that perhaps the fact that evolution does not optimize the fact there is a connection. with grooved interest in self interest. when i write michael differ more guest elizabeth kolbert. speech i'm not sure i feel capable in response to that. i think many people have looked at this question to what extent are echo system participants in everyday competition and to what extent are they relationships of

mutualism. it gives a really interesting question but i don't think i have any expertise that allows me to speak intelligently of a half of one side or another. how's that? >> host: before runout time at which ask about something in the sixth extinction. what is the situation. >> the snakes in glamis are of parody case of an invasive species that had no natural predators that totally took over and echo system. they are basically dripping from every tree. reach an incredible abundance many dozens of snakes per hector don't member the exact

figures. and it's a native wildlife of guam which evolved once again the absence of such a predator was really defenseless. the birds especially were really hard-hit by this invasion. at are still being hard-hit by it. i was also once again another case or people have tried, really tried to reduce the number of snakes. i believe aspirin, feeding them aspirin would do them in. it's all sorts of ways to attract the snakes and right reduce their numbers. i don't know where the effort stands at this point. i do know several bird species that were on guam are now either extinct or found only on the small outlying islands

off of guam. sue went to shep and great barrington massachusetts sent to you, what is the value of a carbon tax? >> a carbon tax? >> host: yes, ma'am. >> guest: the idea behind a carbon tax issueou would make activities that generate carbon more expensive and technologies that don't generate carbon. so let's say solar panels for very obvious example comparatively, less expensive. we would in that way shift are common shift our energy sources to either carbon free or lowering sources. that is the same principle behind putting attacks on cigarettes. i think the theory is if you

you really had an economy wide tax on carbon we would certainly shift most efficient way to reduce emissions. as opposed to imposing a bunch of regulations which is another way to go, absolutely. which means you might not be taking the lowest-cost route for reducing emissions. >> recent u new yorker peace you write about iceland and the lack, the fact there is no

coronavirus there. >> guest: that's a chip i took in may. they had managed to successfully contain the coronavirus for they had a bad outbreak and managed to get basically done to zero. i would interested in how. now that they actually opened up the country into travelers from europe i guess. and they have had subsequent outbreaks. so they were a success story. t i don't know exactly where things stand now i think it's been kind of up and down since then. >> host: is someone who studies this involves this issue, is the fact that a bat spit in wuhan china going to be a unique experience in our lifetime? or will pursue this again? >> once again i'm not an epidemiologist this is not something i've written extensively about.

their auto a lot of really good books on the subject that absolutely predicted covid almost down to its exact detail about how it was going to play out because of the way that we live. so we live in -- covid it is a disease presumably, we aren't sure where it originated or in what species. but let's assume it came from that. either it came directly because humans went and caught a bat somewhere in the virus jumped or probably i shouldn't save are likely or possibly a got into some domesticated animal and it would jump from some domesticated animal print something we eat or live in crowe's close proximity to a made a jump from there to humans. and because of the way we live

in close proximity to domesticated animals and also because how we are encroaching increasingly on animals in the wild, because of the way of higher densities and travel around the world very easily, any time that jump is made is called a spillover event. there is risk that if it is contagious that it will not become just an epidemic but a pandemic. that it will go global. that's exactly what has happened. i think the expert consensus once again to use that word, i'm afraid is that yes were going to see this again. this is certainly not the last pandemic going to these factors. which are very conducive to pandemics. >> host: jonathan pittsburgh, pennsylvania hi john. >> caller: hello and thank you to elizabeth kolbert for being

with us today. i would like to speak about another issue that can have catastrophic consequences. title effect. basically what i think most people discusses the potential for global climate energization just pouring more and more energy into the gulfstream and other macro title effects where you're up could freeze. were you are already seeing massive snowfalls, record temperatures all throughout into new england atlantic, canada, and northern europe part i will be brief because time is a factor. but can you touch on those effects? not only affecting europe in north america but as the systems absorb more heat what is going to happen to coastal areas not just flooding with the total meteorological

system but >> i think what you are referring to is this idea where this possibility. a lot of global circulation of energy is driven by current, warm water which the gulfstream which goes up the northeastern coast of the u.s. and is responsible for keeping the uk at a temperate climate. and then the water, this whole system is sort of driven a conveyor belt system which is driven by the fact that cold salty water off of greenland is constantly sinking. that is sort of driving the system of circulation. and a concern in the "new york times" ran recently a

animation of this process. one concern is that as of the more and more freshwater melts off of greenland, perhaps we are interfering with this. requires a very dense cold salty water to keep this sort of churning. some scientists would argue we are already seeing because of this influx of freshwater off of greenland, we are already seeing a slowing of this current in some scientists saying we don't have clear enough evidence of that yet. but there is a fear the climate t pattern conceived beginning of human civilization in places like

northern europe where it's coming a lot colder thatce would still be a product of global warming. on volusia global warming or climate change. our last call joel from new york elizabeth kolbert's hometown. joe had about 30 seconds. pick up rarely hear discussion about the sun on the planet earth temperatures go up and cycles go up and down. i say just come and go out long before there are any people or engines on the earth. how do you account for those? >> host: thank you sir. >> guest: there a lot of good books on the ice ages which i commend to your attention. the ice age is pretty strong

consensus once again those are caused by changes in the earth's orbit that are governed by a bunch of different forces. but basically during some parts of this cycle you start to get build up of snow the does not melts in the north. and that then reflects this big feedback loop that causes an ice age. that is related not to the output of the sun, but where the sunlight is hitting the earth in different seasons changes in that distribution of sunlight. so yes obviously his orbital cycles have had huge impacts in the past. but something i think we should be very aware of and be actually quite sobering thoughts. these are very, very tiny

changes that have huge ramifications and what we're doing right now by pouring a lot of carbon into the atmosphere is not a small change, it is a big change. we could get very bigf and surprising changes out of that. smut elizabeth kolbert won the pulitzer prize for this book that was in 2015. initial her most recent book came out, under a white sky the nature of the future. she has been our guest for the past two hours on book tv, we appreciate your time. >> thanks for having me. steve x top ten shopper elizabeth kolbert books on the all-new c-span shop owner books and putting her most recent, under a white sky, are available for purchase burden every purchase supports book tv. television for serious readers. visit c-span shop.org today to get your copies of elizabeth kolbert's books.

♪ ♪ specular washing book tv on cspan2 nonfiction books and authors book tv on cspan2 created by america's cable television company today brought to by these television companies who provide book tv to viewers as a public service. under weekly author interview program, "after words", data scientist kathie o'neill interviewed deborah stone about her new book counting in which she argued that numbers are not always subjective. here's a portion of that interview. >> anything that we can do to help people and help our leaders make better decisions is a good thing. i think the good thing about numbers is to measure things, but the system whether it's an algorithm or a simple list of indicators as the exercise of trying to measure things

forces us to think about what we value, will be care about, what is important. and i think the point i want to leave people with is we have got a system. maybe it's better, still got problems that it's better than awaiting it or whatever. anything they can take the burden off is good. we shouldn't stop ever. we should always be trying to improve those systems. and those measurements. i think if we think of numbers as a language what's important who is being hurt and who is being helped, dinner using them wisely. if we think of them as this is mrs. square come this is the end i'm right you're wrong,. [laughter] [inaudible]