long and winding road i spent a number of years covering politics myis first real journalistic job at "the new york times" and i was pretty quickly dispatched to albany to cover state politics.

so doing journalism one thing follows another we spent many years following state local national politics' i went to the new yorker in 1999 and i was supposed to cover a column about city hall. i did for a while. but i became increasingly interested in the question of climate change which at that time in the early 2000's was still a lot of coverage was wrapped around the question is this a big deal or not. i very naïvely thought i'm here at the new yorker i have a lot t of space and the luxury to answer that question once and for all and put it to bed. i ended up writing a

three-part series on c climate change that appeared in 2005 and that set me on this road of transforming myself from a reporter to a science reporter but in all cases i guess for the study of literature to political reporting to science journalism, allied of the basics techniques are the same you try to take information, it can be complicated or jargon and full of information that insiders are very familiar with to bring it to a broader audience. i don't think there was anything particularly special about being ate science reporte.

host: that three-part series became yours second book notes from a catastrophe when did global warming become climate change? is there as? distinction? >> there is a complicated political debate about that. there were some efforts not to use the termhe global warming for those that were trying to downplay the issue but then others embrace the term because global warming doesn't always produce warming at the same time it can produce strange weather so i think at this point honestly the two terms are used pretty much

interchangeably and so do i. host: throughout your books and your writing and the new yorker pieces, you use the word and prophecy. in my pronouncing that correctly? >> i'm not sure if there is i have heard it pronounced teethree but it refers to the idea that humans are rivaling the great forces of nature in terms of our impact on the planet so what has shaped life on earth and the j geology over earth over time 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 major rivers of the world showing that we are now on equal footing with the great geological forces. and the word enthropacy has caught on in popular literature but ultimately the geological epoque is determined by geologist and in that case there is a debate goingg on whether we should formally rename this geological epoque that technically we live in the period since the last i.c.e.

age 12000 years ago. so the question is still before geologist should be formally rename this time. host: in your newest book, under the whitehi sky, elizabeth t13. einstein said we cannot solve the same problems with the same thinking from when we created them. >> i don't quote albert einstein i point out it is written on the wall of the great model of the mississippi river to test out potential solutionsan to the tremendous land lock in southern louisiana. the fact is it's probably incorrectly attributed to albert einstein. he probably never said it but certainly the sentiment behind it is new thinking for a new

era so you have to think differently. >> when it comes to the mississippi river and the delta which he visited how how does that apply? it's fascinating and it starts when the french settled new orleans which is the strategically incredible thought where right before the mississippi hits the gulf of mexico and all of the land was formed when the mississippi would overflow the banks which it used to do all the time and carrying a great deal of sediment from the great plains and it would drop the sediment as it overflowed and all of the land would be this soupy

soil that requires being replenished by the river and new orleans is thinking very fast one of the faces one - - places thinking the fastest because they preventedll it sometimes their disastrous exceptions are basically we prevented the mississippi from flooding so louisiana is thinking away and particularly this is for a problem like new orleans that this is true that southern louisiana loses a football field with of land every 90 minutes. host: had we not engineered new orleans with dikes would it continue to grow? >> parts of it would be growing parts would be

shrinking that is the natural process the river overflows the banks to lay down land known as the delta lobe to geologist and then the river has then impeded its own flow the greeting becomes too steep so the river decides to find a faster route to the sea and then it slips course that is known as he motion and geologist have very carefully reconstructed the history of the mississippi there have been half a dozen devotions the last several thousand years and each time it lays down a new stretch of land in the natural course of events those would be sinking away and a new one created. now what was happened because

he put the mississippi in a straitjacket that all the sediment that is in the mississippi gets shot out the end of the birds but the spit of land south of new orleans. host: elizabeth t13 you visited the site upriver where the actual flow of the river is controlled. correct? >> i yes. >> it is called old river control this gets back to the idea the mississippi would like to switch course. now it's at the point once again to the natural course of events it would have the abortion and more and more water would be flowing down the distribute terry.

it was recognized in the early decades of the 20th century that more and more water was flowing down so the army corps of engineers stepped in to build a huge series of control works quite a ways north of new orleans may be around 100 miles to freeze the river in place. at that .30 percent of the water that went by old river control was going down 70 percent down the main branch of the d mississippi they decided to keep thist in perpetuity so every day the water flow is measured and adjusted accordingly to maintain the flow at 30

seventies. >> that is quite an engineering feat? >> yes and old river control very nearly ran out of control in the seventies during a huge event in the seventies. had to be shored up and more controls added. but since then 70 percent of the water is still flowing past new orleans into the birds foot. but how long that can go on is unclear. certainly it could be perpetuated for a while they in the grand scheme of geology i think eventually that cannot be maintained. host: another engineering feat happened you talk about this in your new book under a white sky we change the direction of the chicago river. >> yes. that's another great story and

where the book begins. a centuryy later than new orleans on the banks of the chicago river, a small river that key to the city and chicagoans just used it as an open sewer as a repository for all the human waste and a great stockyard also the repository for the animal waste. it was said the chicago river was so sick with filth and so thick a chicken could walk across without getting their feet wet it was a problem not just because it was disgusting but because the chicago river was running east into lake

michigan and a draw the drinking water from lake michigan. so you can easily do the math. they were constant outbreaks of waterborne disease so around the turn of the 20th century it was decided something had to be doneso. it turned out to be an enormous construction project that reversed the flow of the chicago river. so now if is not flowing east into lake michigan of flows away and into a tributary of the mississippi. host: is that a good thing?>> [laughter] >> it is a good thing for chicago drinking water. when this project was completed and finally opened it was basically a canal that connected the chicago river to the mississippi watershed. there was a facetious headline i won't get it exactly but something like water in the

chicago water resembles liquid again so you do get water flowing again and you got the city's waste moving away from the drinking water. so from public health perspective, that was a grand success but what it did, which people were not thinking about much is it connected the two great watersheds the great lake and the mississippi drainage basin which previously were separated. 's if he were a fish or crustacean you could not have moved from the great lakes to the mississippi and now you can. host: why are there electric fences on the chicagoth river? >> electric barriers were constructed precisely in

order. during the course of the 20th century after the project was a completed, both the great lakes and the mississippi became highly invaded water systems. lots of invasive species some of which introduced purposely some introduced inadvertently into the ballast water of ships and establishing themselves in the waterways and wreaking havoc in different ways. so 20 years ago congress said to the army corps of engineers we need to do something about this we cannot let all of these invasive species go from one basin to the other and back those basins. so the army corps of engineers was assigned the task to

figure out some way to keep these organisms in their respective waterways and looked at a whole list of possibilities they could sap the water with radiation, install giant filters, all sorts of ideas, toxins all ideas were explored and then this pulsing electricity through the water in the hope is that when a fish or another organism comes into this part of the river that is electrified it will get a shock and decide to go back home and the direction it came from as opposed to crossing over these barriers. i myself have taken a trip across the barrierslb. there are huge billboard signs that warn you. keep your pets and kids. do not go in the water.

there is a high danger of electrocution. host: this is a friday of asian carp trying to get into the great lakes? >> on - - honestly the barriers were put up initially to keep fish moving from the great lakes into the mississippi there was a fish called the round go v which was a voracious consumer of cother fishes eggs. by the time the barriers were completed, that fish had already crossed then it was closing the barn door after the fish was alreadyou out. but then it turned out moving in the opposite direction were several species we refer to asian carp they think it's one species but there are several that were moving to the mississippi water system and

people really don't want the carp to get into the great lakes. so the barriers at this point are aimed at keeping the asian carp out of the great lakes but that was not the original reason. host: elizabeth colbert, how do asian carp end up in the midwest in the us? what is a danger of them getting into the great lakes? >> asian carp has an interesting history in the us. introduced various species at various times all roughly around the same time in the mid- sixties or early seventies. they were introduced because it was hoped they would perform bio control. one species is a very

voracious herbivore eating plants so the hope was thats species known as the grass carp would eat aquatic leaves they were also invitation to on - - invasive species we would have to pay herbicide into the water. another species introduced it was hoped that it would take care of the nutrient loading when you have insufficient sewage treatment. different species introduced for different reasons. not really introduced but put into research stations but very quickly got loose. they have baby fish they are very tiny they got through whatever mesh was supposed to keep them in and pretty quickly in the tributaries of the mississippi then started to move all through the water

system. and o what they do is one of the armyem corps staff put it, they are very good invaders and very adaptable. they did very very well in the watershed. they take over the water system essentiallylynt and some parts of the mississippi river asian carp make up about three quarters of the biomass. so they elbowed out the native species of fish. and another habit they have one known as silver carp has the unnerving habit that when it is startled or scared it goes up out of the water your viewers can go online to see these extraordinary pictures ofui carp jumping quite high into the air. i have seen this many times

now it is sorta beautiful and sort of frightening and people have been grievously injured by flying carp i met a lot of fishermen they don't like the sound of the outboard motor so if you are voting on a carp invested stretch your chance of getting hit in the face with are carp are pretty high and people have had very serious injuries as a result. that is another reason why the people of the great lakes don't want them in the great lakes. host: talking about the mississippi delta, the chicagoss river, but we're talking about billions of dollars of economic damage or infrastructure? that has been invested. >> to correct or reduce the

problems? >> yes initially millions were spent to connect to the equivalent to connect the mississippi and the great lakes watershed and now more billions of dollars spent to correct for the damage that was done when that happened. host: is there another solution? >> are we still talking about the great lakes and mississippi? >> or any others. >> in the case of the great lakes and mississippi, one proposal that has been made going back to a study of the army corps of engineers, what man has joined can pull asunder so in theory separate the two basins again. that would also cost billions of dollars in be an enormous construction project.

that idea has been dropped because chicago has become so dependent for flood control and water treatment on the way things are right now and also navigation to navigate into the great lakes. so for a lot of reasons, new infrastructure has grown around the old infrastructure and it's hard to turn back the clock. host: were both on the east coast you're in massachusetts we are in dc why should we care about a pup fish in the mohave desert? >> the pup fish you are alluding to is considered to be the rarest fish in the world found only in one pool in a canyon, very

magical canyon in the middle of the mohave. and it is a small lovely beautiful iridescent blue fish, very low numbers right now may be several hundred exist in the fis world. and why should you care if it survives? there are a lot of different ways to answer that question. one thing that's interesting is it survives a very high temperatures. the water in this canyon at the bottom is a constant 93 degrees fahrenheit. so that's very difficult for most organisms to live in but the pup fish thrives in that.

so one answer i could give is my have something interesting to learn. but a more profound reason is every species you can think of it as a library book, an answer to the question of how to live on planet earth and survive on planet earth each comes up with a survival strategy that encoded in its genome. by a killing off the pup fish and the myriad of countless other species we are basically burning through the library of life i don't think that something people want to do for ethical reasons or practical reasons because much of what we ourselves depend on , our food supply and oxygen

supply are all part of the biological systems so when you start unraveling the web of life, you don't know exactly what you will get. the dangers arere pretty high. >> from your book under a white sky you write one way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. the history of life has beente punctuated by extinctionve, both big and very very big. >> g yes. but i doo go on and talk about why people don't want to do that and part of the reason is it is ethically unacceptable and another reason it is a very scary prospect to think of unraveling the web of

life. we could just say forget it that's what we will do. h think most people would. host: just to be fair i didn't mean to cut off the quotation what you do go on and say but for whatever reason, care for god's creation or heart stopping fear, people are reluctant to be the asteroid so we create another class of animalal creatures we have pushed to the brink and thenen yanked back the term is conservation reliant but they might also be called the stockholm species. >> yes. exactly. to be honest part of this is the 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

key provisions of the endangered species act as you have to have a recovery plan for the species so the pup fish was one of the earliest on the endangered species act so once again by law has to have a recovery plan. host: going to recent new yorker article that you wrote, from january "the pandemic which has brought down carbon emissions has also illustrated how tough it is to make significant cuts with much of the world under lockdown global emissions were around 6 percent lower in 2020 than they were 2019 this drop was the largest on record still not enough to put the world on track to meet the one.5-degree goal set out with the paris accord. >> yes. covid has bright carbon emissions down pretty dramatically at the start of the pandemic.

emissions dropped very dramatically now they started to pick up again. but what i was trying to explain and that piece iss that in order for us to reach some of these targets enshrined in the paris claimant accord from 2015, there was a goal of making every effort to keeping average global temperatures rising more than one.5 degrees celsius which is almost 3 degrees fahrenheit so pretty significant climate shift already. you need to basically bring carbon emissions 20 very soon within the next few decades to have a reasonable chance of hitting that goal. 6 percent per year does not quite get you g a there. we are not expecting to see 6 percent per year but if and when the pandemic ends there

will be a significant rebound. host: can you explain the danger of the planet warming in layman's terms? >> the danger of the planet warming is people see it right now. we saw california burning this fall. that was a human disaster i think all californians would agree ongr that. there are many factors that went into that terrible fire season but the fundamentalt one is that california is getting warmer and drying out increasing the odds of devastating forest fires. that is one danger in one part of the world. hurricane season this year was quite devastating.

it is unclear if climate change leads to more hurricanes but it seems one of the things it will do is to very rapidly intensify. you go to bed one night and o the hurricane is category one you wake up it is category for. those are extremely dangerous storms because they are hard to get people out of the way and they intensify so fast. that's another tremendous danger from climate change. sea levels are rising. that's a product of two forces as the oceans warm and they are warming it is indisputable warm water takes up more space that's aat thermal expansion of water and is pretty predictable and easy to predict how much more space the oceans will take up as they w warm but then also melting a great deal of i.c.e.

with the remaining i.c.e. sheets of greenland and antarctica. all major cities in dc i am in land but boston, new york, miami all are now trying to figure out how to deal with rising sea levels. depending how much co2 we put into thehe atmosphere how much the sea levels rise could be a manageable issue or catastrophic the list of reasons to be concerned unfortunately goes on and on we could spend the next two hours talking about them. host: unfortunately we have only scratched the surface with oururpe guest elizabeth t13 but we want you to participate in this conversation.

history of social media sites you can make a comment at booktvkt is our handle. elizabeth t13 author of four books editor of one profit of love is the first book 2004. field notes for my catastrophe 2006. pulitzerr prize-winning the

sixth extinction 2014. the most recent this year under a white sky which we have been talking about a little bit today. i also want to bring in another topic as we are more on the climate change issue. here is senator inhofe a republican from oklahoma and has been critical of efforts to control climate change here's a little bit from him on the senate floor. >> through the universities here in virginia commissioned a poll to be done of all the weather testers on tv. they came back that 63 percent of the weather castor said any global warming that occurs is

a result of natural variation and not human activity. and those that really believes this and sometimes you have to open it up and realize there is another side to the story 97, 98 agree it just isn't true. my good friend senator white house the amendment was one sentence s. global warming i'm sorry climate change is real and it is not a hoax. there is a rule about talking about your own books in the senate but the idea is it is happening but due to man-made and man is causing that. so i said how arrogant is it for people to say man can do

something and it's dangerous to even then rebroadcast that. and basically that's like spewing the stories like teetwelve so if he wants to believe it's only warming to natural causes that is his right as an american that it is simply not true. and i will give you the basic reason why climate is morning one - - warming carbon dioxide from any combustion of fossil fuels and is a greenhouse gas

near the surface of the planet. this is understood since the 18 fifties. if we had no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is pretty easy to calculate the temperature of the planet and it would be frozen. that composition of the atmospheree, the more of them you put up there the warmer it will get it is as simple as that. >> is this a case where climate changes 90 percent man-made? >> 100 percent this is a complicated issue that has had a cooling impact that

scientific consensus would be 100 percent. host: that show video one moree senator white house democrat from rhode island. >> this lot runs in the dark days of 2012 after's speaker pelosi had passed a climate bill that the senate refused to take upth anything speaker pelosi pass the bill in 2009 on the house side we had here in the senate and this is climate change.

and we just walked away. and i was told because the obama white house told leader read to pull the plug. but after the obama care wars the obama house was tired of conflict didn't want another big battle and wasn't going to take on any fights that wasn't sure it could when. and then years went by that you could scarcely get a democratic administration to put the words climate and changes at the same paragraph. and we fast whether or not to collect climate change or global warming the great

presidential has a megaphone stood mute. host: that is a topic that senator white house has talked about a lot on the senate floor. >> yes. he gave a lengthy speech starting in 2012 on the floor of the senate. he had a battered sign it's time toe wake up and then his own form of protest and finally retired his sign it was pretty beat up and then a few weeks ago with joe biden signing a bunch of executive orders indicating he took climate change very seriously so i think we are do opening up a new chapter in this country in the way we talk about and discuss and debate

and do with climatete change that was an understatement of the century to say there's work to be done. >> just to convey the problem so is it impossible to get a back like the genie back in the bottle? >>. >> the genie of the emissions? >> were not getting the climate back. the unfortunate fact reason why climate change or a climate scientist have been raising the alarm for decades. it is not a pollutant like

other pollutants and then to reduce smog in american cities and then mandated catalytic converters.el and by contrast when she put co2 into the air it hangs around for quite a long time for all intents and purposes and has a warming influence it's very difficult is something that i discuss the ideas of how you could get the climate of the past back but talk about reducing emissions down too zero doesn't mean

since i would get rid of the problem but just making the problem worse. >> thank you all very much. so you have addressed this before global warming and climate change why did that change if global warming is a problem why a call it climate change? that confuses lots of people the climate is changing.

>> we did talk about at the top of the hour and they mention and the clip and some of that debate does have a political providence for people found it more benign and those who really didn't want us to do anything because of the effects of global warming are not always globale warming so in some ways it is a better term but at this

point that you could use either one and everybody knows what you are referring t to. host: dad in wisconsin tax, can you explain why republican congressmen are so reluctant to believe and offer a republican solution for climate change? >> that is such a good question. i wish i did have an answer. the answer is often given is follow the money. look at campaign contributions. there's a lot to be said for that in parts of the world that are either oil producing i live in massachusetts there

is no one that is making a living off of fossil fuels for them to take a strong stance on fighting climate change. and this is one woman's political opinion is becoming increasingly untenable at this point to say it's not changing we don't have to do anything about it. florida is a swing state. not oil-producing but one that would be hit very hard by climate change. host: and senator white house has indicated democrats have not moved forward with this as well. you wrote in the new yorker april 2020 those problems emerged since 1970 have gone unaddressed congress have not pastor come close to passing

single piece of legislation. >> the bill that senator white house was alluding to in that clip was called cap and trade. and then trying to reduce emissions is a similar technique to reduce sulfur emissions back when acid rain was an environmental concern to give them an allotment if you admit more than that you have to buy the credit so you create a market mechanism for reducing emissions and a way

to bring down emissions it did pass the house in 2009 and then as pointed out that never came before the senate. that fight was never even fought. in part because the obama administration didn't want to fight at thatt h point they emerge bloodied from obama care. host: john from salt lake city you are on the air. >>caller: thanks for taking my call. i am curious if youm believe that the humans can control thend tectonics and the heat contributing of glaciers in antarctica and greenland melting. >>.

>> i do not believe that humans can control plate tectonics. that is one geological force that is beyond our control. and the volcanism was the way that we brought co2 into the atmosphere before humans decided to burn fossil fuel of those put out we put out to your activities. even though we don't control plate tectonics we still control the climate. i shouldn't say we control the climate that we are

responsible for climate change. host: michigan go ahead. >>caller: i am wondering the paris climate change, is everyone equal? whether india or china because that's a big stumbling block i hear that a lot of times but i will be blunt with you. i have no use for communist countries i have been up close and personal throughout the decades with them.na china is part of everything is that for the major polluters on the earth? >> the paris accord is a complicated document everyone

brought to the table in paris what they said they were going to do nobody is forced to do anything with a pot luck suffering the felt your country could make so it's important to understand about the background to paris and to climate change that co2 emissions hang around for a long time and a major contributor to the additional co2 in the atmosphere right now. and to put 30 percent of the

co2. in my view a lot of responsibility for trying to solve or ameliorate the problemth the chinese are the biggest emitters on an annual basis but still haven't caught up to us on aggregate basis and also have a lot more people so the us has a tremendous responsibility. i don't think there's any way to get around that. there are many countries to be responsible for a tiny fraction less than 1 percent

don't think it's appropriate and certainly not to politically feasible and they do make the same contribution to causing the problem. host: are electric cars one of the best answers? there are some sectors that are responsible that are a big part of the emissions globally and transportation in the us even bigger than electricity generation there only as good as the electrical grid even with the internal combustion

engines and to make a big difference you need an electrical grid that is not producing a lot of co2. and then to make a c transition to electric cars and we need to clean up the grid dramatically. host: please include your first name and city if you send a a text, could you cite countries ahead of the us with greenhouse gas emissions? >> most northern european countries, denmark, sweden, gery those that have invested a lot. norway like half of the new cars just being sold for example denmark gets a lot of

its power and investing ally and wind power germany has invested a lot of solar and wind power those are that get the highest marks that made a significant effort and having succeeded to that certain extent. >> pennsylvania hello george. >>caller: reaching a new record of 780 million tons in the forecast issued march 4th by the food and agricultural organization of united nation. with that the world serial projection in west africa and

rice in india and causing stand. and the second part regarding einstein in the idea of consensus. reporter said i know 100 scientist you don't agree with your theories and einstein said why 100? you just need one. in other words one who has verifiable scientific evidence. not one scientist who has any verifiable scientific evidence that fossil fuels or co2 has caused any measurable warming. host: so why did you cite food production? and with those climes.

>> so one of those is quite a positive that we are very good at agriculture and it seems not at all contradictory it is increasing to say it is a threat and and for the second point that no one has any evidence of this that i have to say a ridiculous argument at this point that people have tons in terms of evidence and entire libraries if people don't want to believe that i'm afraid i can't make them believe it.

host: where did you come up with the title of your newest book? >> it refers to the idea and to talk about climate change quickly with the co2 in the atmosphere. . . . . and you alsy

global temperatures. >> and it was in 2015 that elizabeth won the pulitzer prize and this unnatural history without getting too technical, what do you mean by this? >> it refers to the major

extinctions since this life appeared and the first of these occurred quite a long time ago roughly during a period the last one, number five people are familiar with the event of 66 million years ago and when again it brought the scientific consensus. >> and sixth would be? >> we ourselves are responsible for. there are thousands perhaps tens

of thousands than what you would refer to as background extinction rates in the normal course of geological history new species evolve and go extinct but it's a very slow process. now all of us, you shouldn't be able to watch a species go extinct, but we read all the time about the species that are so that is a basic fact you get something very unusual going on and that what is unusual is us. we are the major driver. >> does winning a pulitzer, is it life-changing? >> it is flattering and it's an

honor. i wouldn't be in my own personal case if it wasn't life-changing. >> let's move on and hear from some more viewers. as you take the famous explosion and which there was a frost in each of the months of the year and the global temperature dropped. when yellowstone rose, we were able to have a nuclear winter for four or five years in which we might starve to death. that doesn't even include a meteorite asteroid and in terms of a astronomy were razor thin. we had one last friday i believe. >> host: you seem to follow this issue pretty closely.

why is that? >> it's the fact we don't view this problem into totality. in fact, the asteroids and the ones that come from the sun we can't even track. elizabeth kolbert. >> i, there is a long description in my latest book because precisely that is why we narrowed it. absolutely that is correct. i don't think that we want to bet the future of humanity and other forms of life the other problem here that we cannot

forget they are significant impacts andre last for a couplef years once that happens after the two or three years, temperatures go right back to where they were. >> linda from connecticut says why is population control not a topic of discussion where more people equals contributing to the carbon emissions, so why has the zero population growth disappeared from the conversation? >> that is a lot of political politics behind population control and a lot of coercive population control that people find very in the past i guess

and people found very disturbing so population control is a somewhat politically vexed issue. these issues we are talking about that a lot of parts of the world are they tend to be very high consuming and i do have pretty low birthrate at this pointe in fact in many european countries and japan and places like that, it's below with hundreds of high standards of living and then there are countries that still have pretty high birth rates, significantly above. those tend to be very low consuming countries, so the art sort of collective on planet earth is how many people there are and how much each of us is consuming and i think we need to think about both of those sides

of the equation very seriously. >> and it was in the book that the population explosion came out and we were all worried about hunger et cetera. >> guest: there were many, many millions, hundreds of millionsdr of people so some of the most dire predictions didn't come through but we've almost tripled the population. so, you know, the population is pretty significant. >> host: and then he is in miller place, new york. you are on. >> caller: thank you for fielding all of our questions so eloquently and being patient with us. i'm on board with protecting and saving the environment so i'm

not a naysayer but this policy that it is good for us or that it can be contained and what's going on with the military on a whole as the marine failure, but what we have done with nuclear power into the breach containment i think it overtakes. n it's like putting curtains on the titanic. relicensing the reactors when they i were supposed to be shut down after 30. they've refueled them, thereby putting all of the waste and reloaded the reactors, so now you have double the waste. yucca mountain is now deemed unsafe, so there is no place to store the vast quantities of waste that are on the shorelines of the world over.

all the reactors are leaking and it is an impossibility to contain the byproducts produced in the u.s. we get roughly 20% of the electricity it's declining a lot of those plans. as anthony said. nuclear is right now a very significant source of low carbon electricity in the u.s. and the

question of whether we should be shutting down the rest of the nuclear plants and what are we going to replace them with is a pretty live one l right now in a way. there's also an argument about whether we, if our concern is getting rid of these emissions should we be building new nuclear plants andnd i am not going to take it to stand on that right now. i do share a lot of the concerns about nuclear waste. we do not have anywhere to put nuclear waste as the caller said it's sitting at the original facilities after 60 years we haven't come up with a solution to the problem of long term nuclear waste. this stuff needs to be stored for all intensive purposes, once again, forever. i agree there are a lot of risks to nuclear power.

and the fact of the matter is once again it's a somewhat practical matter in california this question what is your position on natural gas? >> it is a major source of what's powering our electrical grid. i'm not sure i know the exact, but it's quite high. so that is the major fuel for electricity these days. it burns cleaner than coal and is less co2 per unit energy. it has been referred to as a

bridge fuel between the coal powered past and hopefully carbon free future, but there are a lot of people that argue i think pretty compellingly that it shouldn't be considered a bridge fuel and depending on how much of it we need to reduce the natural gas as quickly as possible and i think that is true from a climate perspective. you know, natural gas produces less co2 but it still produces a lot of co2 and another problem that has emerged from natural gas is that natural gas is essentially methane and a very powerful greenhouse gas, so leakage from natural gas depending on how much of the natural gas is leaking in a production process it can be as much of a burden for the climate

as coal so that is a very serious consideration and a good reason we should be trying to phase out natural gas. >> in your view does charles darwin hold up? >> i think just about everyone you talk to every biologist would say charles darwin is someone who really got things he pretty well nailed it. >> at the time darwin was writing during the voyage when he was a young man and no one had a good explanation for how

to get a coral reef because they are found in these extraordinarily deep water gelatinous animals and nobody had a sense of how they could create in very deep water how have the bill to these extraordinary structures and darwin actually was the person in addition to his phenomenal theory of natural selection he was the firstt person to understand how the coral reefs worked. >> there were several laugh out loud moments in your writing. i don't know how that equates to science or how it's important but this is one of them that made me laughm out loud. coral sex is a rare and amazing

sight. site. how did you witness that? >> so, they actually have a variety of different ways of reproducing but one of the major modes of reproduction is they release, they are t hermaphrodites, so they are these tiny little creatures, the sort of look a little bit like anemones and they are very squishy and have these tentacles and they produce once a year these corals once a year they produce a little bundle it looks like a little glass bead that contains both eggs and sperm and they release that into the water and in a synchronized way because these float to the surface of the water, break apart and that is how they find each other in this slick that

forms on the water but as they are rising through the water, millions and millions of them it looks like an upside down snowstorm and it's a fantastic site. a. >> for the research, you visited the coral reef off of r austral. how would you describe its current condition? >> it stretches for 1500 miles down the east coast of australia and its will of studying and it's been estimated that just over the last 30 years something like half has been lost.

>> host: you talk about bleaching. >> guest: yes, as i said, they are these tiny little gelatinous transparent creatures and in the side the cells, there are what are called stony corals that build reefs. inside they have these tiny little plants, one celled plants that make food just like plants on land, and these plants help, they basically return for the protection of the corals before them and they basically donate a lot of the food they are producing and that's a big source of energy and what's allowing them to produce the reefs which is a pretty energy

intensive activity and what happens when water temperatures rise a couple of degrees when you get a very warm, hot summer, which increasingly we are getting more and more of her into climate change, the plants startth to produce oxygen radics which are dangerous and they basically kick them out and so therefore they are basically depriving themselves of their own food source or one of their major food sources and so if this event is a warm spell and doesn'tm last too long, then thy will sort of recruit and survive but if it lasts too long they will eventually starve to death so as you are getting these events that are becoming more and more extended in time they can be multi-year events now and

you are getting these die offs so the bleaching, the term returns to the fact that they give their color, normally they are transparent and you've seen basically that calcium carbonate that is the coral reef and when they expel those, they turn light and that's why it's called coral bleaching. >> before we leave, i want to acknowledge one of the people in your book and that is ruth gates. who was she? >> the head of a marine science lab in hawaii on a law who at the very dynamic woman originally from the uk, and she -- i went to visit her back in 2016 and she was embarking on a

project that had the nickname the super coral project and i do talk about this pretty extensively in the book that we have these rising water temperatures. we are going to get more and more coral bleaching. what canre we do if we are not marketing the heat out of the ocean in any foreseeable timeframe and if we want them to survive, theee idea was we are going tosu have to basically do something to make them more heat tolerant and that involved trying to breed hardier and symbion's, so all of that effort is going on and i went to visit some experiments that were going on in australia just last year

but very tragically, ruth passed away basically a sort of in the middle of this project in 2018. next call comes from paul in idaho falls. go, ahead. >> caller: thanks. i would like to go back to nuclear. are you familiar with the work of bill gates and the small modularr reactors and the endeavors out here at the iml -- >> she is shaking her head yes. what is your view of those projects? >> i apologize, i meant to hear from paul. what is your view of those? >> i'm very much in favor as bill gates points out that 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. inc. you, sir. >> that does get back to what we were talking about. nuclear is very has a lot of risks associated with it. we've been told for a long time that we are going to get these much saferuc modular reactors. i guess all i can say is i hope that's true. >> host: john in corpus christi texas. i would like to ask what's being done about the corpus christi area becoming the ground zero for the fight against man-made climate change. this area is becoming an environmental disaster. i'm a member of three environmentalist groups in the area and we have obtained a map that showsea how the powers that be plan on bringing in 15 new refineries and industrial plants to this area that's going to just economically,

environmentally and economically destroy because it doesn't benefit the local population. all it does is benefit wall street but it's going to turn this area into a total environmental disaster and they are deepening and widening the port to bring them in these massive supertankers into the port of corpus christi. we've already become the number one exporter of oil even more so than the houston ship channel now so i would like to know what is being done to focus on this area. >> before we go to the guest, what groups do you belong to and what are you doing to oppose this? >> one group is a coastal alliance to protect the environment and another group is the surfrider foundation and another is for the greater good and i'm trying to speak out constantly and wake people up. i've studied weather and climate ever since i was young as a hobby and i've seen the effects of man-made global warming. if have a degree in agriculture

and i'm into landscaping so i know a lot about tropical plants and we are able to grow stuff with the exception of this recent big freeze that we had which those are even much less frequent events than they used to be, much less frequent so we are normally able to grow tropical stuff you couldn't even think of in brownsville texas 150 years ago. that is how much the climate has changed. 150 miles south of here we can grow stuff here you couldn't even think of growing 30 years ago. that's how much the climate has changed in 30 years time. >> swell i'm sorry but i cannot speak to the specifics of corpus christi and what's going on. i just don't know enough about it. i would say one of the things that has happened over the last just a few decades is the u.s. has once again become a major

oil producer not as certain conventional oil but unconventional oil like out of places like north dakota which didn't used to be major oil-producing states and that is a big economic force these days and really the idea of pouring a lot of money into any form of fossil fuel infrastructure these days is in my view kind of crazy so maybe there is hope with a new administration that some of these projects will be looked at again but i cannot speak to the specifics i'm sorry. >> this is a text from make a fortune i read the extinction and used it to teach high school social studies and world geography. my question for you involves

nitrous oxide and its role alongside co2 withe regard to global warming. can she speak on modern agricultural industries affect of the forest land, waste runoff et cetera? >> well i mean, it is a greenhouse gas and you know, so any increase in nitrous oxide production is having a climate effect. i'm afraid once again i'm not enough of an expert to speak to that but i can say in terms of the effects, it is a big contributor to climate change. it's not as big as transportation or electricity production, but for a number of reasons, one is that we clear up a lot of land and so any time we cut down a forest and plant corn or soy or whatever, that carbon

that was being taken up is once again being released into the atmosphere so d forest ration is a big climate problem. another reason that 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 and that gets back to the natural gas question of methane as a very powerful greenhouse gas, so cows and fudairy unfortunately eating a t of those is contributing to climate change, so when people say what can i do to try to reduce my own carbon impact, one ofin the things you can do is reduce if you eat hamburgers, reduce your beef consumption

because unfortunately it's also a big greenhouse gas source, so and i would say on a more hopeful note there are a lot of people working to try to reduce the impact through different varieties of agricultural production. >> is this in a sense playing around the edges? >> we are doing these different things, but in your view, does something major have to occur? >> it's not just my view. i think anyone that took this problem seriously would say as we've discussed if you want to stop making the problem worse

unfortunately since the co2 has such a long lifetime in the atmosphere it isn't good enough to reduceo your ambitions becaue that means that the analogy is often given if you consider the atmosphere a fast hub and we are filling it with co2, if you turn down the tab you are still filling the tub just more slowly so we need to not just turn down the tap but we need to shut itt off and it's at that point and only add to that point to that we will reach a new climate and equilibrium and it will be a warmer world but it won't be a perpetually warming world so unless we are doing that and heading towards really dramatic carbon reductions then yes we are just playing around the edges. >> half-an-hour with our guest

left on in depth. you are on the air. go ahead. >> thank you. there's a study on the east coast that showed the wetlands were soaking up more than the amazon rain forest. there's a big one in southern california that at one time was an ancient redwood forest and there's one in alaska the largest t in the hemisphere that was threatened by a private oil deal from the last administration. my question is what are we doing to preserve and protect the wetlands and p perhaps even maye bringing them back somehow? in the northern hemisphereph particularly in the northern >>hemisphere. >> that is a very good question. you know, we have lost i can

only say we have lost tremendous proportions of the wetlands here in the u.s. we allow them to be drained and developed and you know, otherwise empty. they are no longer wetlands.er they are you know, no longer support the wetlands education, they no longer support the wetland species. and there are a lot of efforts to try to stop the loss of the wetlands and to try to bring and restore some that have been lost for a number of reasons. theyey are a crucial habitat. they are as the call indicated they are important carbon sinks and also important pollution control, water pollution control, water, the nitrogen

runoff that pours into places like the gulf of mexico and if we had sort of buffering wetlands that problem also could be ameliorated so there's a lot of reasons why we should be i completely agree we should be devoting a lot of attention to the wetlands. but i, once again i'm afraid i'm not a wetlands expert and i cannot give you a chapter and verse on what's being done or not done on the subject. >> on your work in the sixth extinction, you seem to spend a lot of time with frogs and bats. why? >> they are both groups of organisms that have been hit really hard in the recent decades byy pathogens, so by diseases that were moved around the world by people and frogs the pathogen is known as bd.

it's a fungal pathogen that interferes with basically frogs that get it end up having suffering a heart attack in effect and many species have been driven extinct by this disease and many are just barely clinging onto existence. so, that is a really big problem. frogs are considered probably the most endangered class of organisms on the planet and that should be a warning sign to us and bats as it happens right near where i live in west massachusetts back in about 2007 a new pathogen also was identified that has since killed many millions and has spread most of the way across the u.s.,

not every state yet but most states that was probably a pathogen imported from europe is the belief. so, when you move things around unthe globe, one of the big drivers of extinction right now is globalization. honestly we are just moving a lot of things around the world. when you bring species together that involve for tens of millions of years often times nothing happens, but sometimes a very dangerous thing will happen and since we are moving so many species around the world, if even a small percentage of them result in disaster, you know, you are getting ongoing disasters and i can point to one right across the street from me. we now have as far as the northeast and to the midwest

very heavily ashes these days and within the last 20 years, introduced and insect from asia that has been devastating so when we bring species together, as i said one may not have any defense against the other. there may be diseases, you know, the pandemic is a good example of this we could talk about but anyway, you get these very unfortunate impacts, so this pathogen that was introduced near albany new york doesn't just impact one species, unfortunately it impacts a lot of species of the bat population that have reallyly plummeted. >> george is calling from cambridge massachusetts. you are on with elizabeth.

>> thank you so much for c-span and elizabeth for all the work you've done over the years. a few years ago there was a scientific task published primarily to be released at the paris climate talks. it's the idea of using existing ecological systems to repair the damage that our species has done. i'm interested in whether you knowow about the geo therapy and whether you have seen the book or looked at the conferences on all of the aspects of geo therapy that biodiversity for a livable climate has organized over the pastte few years. >> do you work in this field? >> i've been looking at this for a long time as an interested

observer. since i live halfway between harvard and mit, i've attended public lectures there and for over a decade i published a free looking at what was 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,mu unfortunately, i thought that the environmental organizations would be interested in that material but they haven't been and i stopped doing it in the september because i was tired of listening to the same people that i've heard before talk about things that i've heard before without any action items at the end. >> thank you. any response for that caller? >> i can't say i've ever heard of this word geo therapy i have to be honest. i certainly am familiar with

ideas of how we can use natural to get a little bit back to restoring c the wetlands just as one of many possibilities for enhancing the carbon take up from various ecosystems that could be a significant contributor to helping to fight climate change. (202)748-8200 in the east and central time zone, (202)748-8201 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones. we've got about 20 minutes left. we will also put up our text number. please text carefully to the right number and include your first namena and your city if yu would. maybe not geo therapy but you do talk about genetic engineering. how does that fit into some ofit

the environmental issues we have been discussing? >> genetic engineering has really taken a dramatic step forward in the last decade or so going to crisper which is a sort of sweep of techniques that allows scientists or even amateurs to do genetic editing much more cheaply and quickly than previously. one of the questions that i think is increasingly going to be in front of us is whether we want to find it acceptable to use gene editing to try to repair or reverse, i don't know exactly what verbs you want to use some of the damage we have

done. so, for example, in the book i go to australia to talk to scientists who are working on a gene editing version of the cane toad and it's one of the species that was moved around the world and is native to south america and central america with a hope that it would help eat the insects that eat sugar cane which is a big cash crop including australia and it's unlikely it ever did the sugar crop any good but they have ecological havoc in a lotri of places andco especially in australia because they aresp highly toxic so any animal that eats them basically drops dead, lot of wildlife has no native involvement since they didn't evolve with them so they chomp on them and they die as a

number have plummeted for that reason and the scientists were working on producing a less toxic and they had successfully as a really interesting question whether and i think that it will become increasingly a salient question as to whether we want to let organisms like that out onto the landscape at the time that i visited they could not, they didn't have the permits for these less toxic to leave the laboratory. they were in a very highly bio secure facility. >> whether it is visiting a native down in the delta of mississippi or flying to australia talking to people or hawaii you seem to have a knack for getting it in with people. do you approach them, do you approach the government when you want to talk to the government

people? how do you get these contacts? >> i think i operate like all journalists tend to. you find something you want to talk to and nowadays, you know, it used to be harder. nowadays you looked online and find in many cases even if they are halfway around the world did you find their e-mail or phone number and get in touch with them and sometimes people you have to go through various channels to try to get to them. but often times, you know, scientists and researchers mainly, not exclusively and they are usually schedulers and if they feel like talking to you they will talk to you. so it's not a very sophisticated methodology here. >> when you go on a trip do you come back with notebooks full of notes or do you do your writing

while you are out there? >> i come back with notebooks. over to my left ear unfortunately is off-camera but they are sort of teetering stacks of notebooks. >> do you do the writing where you are sitting right now? >> yes right now i am speaking where i wroteter all of the books we have discussed. >> michael is in deerfield beach florida. go ahead. >> thank you so much for your books. especially when you spoke about the quarrelsls and how the sink running. i think what we are experiencing right now and everything from trump to climate change to the eugenic genocide going on with covid and listening just now it occurred to me and a lot of my research as far as inefficiency

why would a species come to the brink of extinction ever, it's a huge inefficiency but also a blindness. we are blind to these things because we are within it and a lot of what darwin said we take in competition leading to an optimization and that is a falsehood. i don't want to get into politics but if we base our politics on both sides when you go to the think tanks please set up a think tank you mentioned your ability to talk to different parties. we need to think tanks on both sides to understand stopped using false scientist evolution as optimizing. it minimizes. that's howt you end up with blid cave fish and we are with a genocide of the 21st century that o deals with people and things like that and it's unparalleled and i hate to be so frank, butle could you speak to

that perhaps as far as the fact evolution doesn't optimize and the fact there is a connection i'm afraid we are making explicit to what sociology is, it is a competition between group interest and self-interest. >> let's hear from our guest. >> i'm not sure i feel capable of saying anything in response to that. i think many people have looked at this question of to what extent and participants in any food lab in competition and to what extent are they actually relationships of mutualism and i think those are really interesting questions, but i don't think i have any expertise that allows me to speak intelligently on behalf of one side or another. >> before we run out of time i

want to ask about something i found in the sixth extinction and that is the snakes in guam what is the situation? >> it's sort of a case of an invasive species that had no natural predator. these are brown tree snakes i believe that totally took over an ecosystem basically it reached an incredible abundance of manynd dozens of snakes. i don't remember the exact figures and the native wildlife of guam that evolved in the absence of such a predator was really defenseless, so a variety of birds especially were really

hard hit by this invasion and are still being hard hit by it and once again it was also another case where people have tried to reduce the numbers and i believe they discovered aspirin for some reason i don't know the chemistry of this but feeding them aspirin would do them in, but they've tried all sorts of ways to attract and reduce the numbers. i don't know where that effort stands at this point but i do know that several what is the value of a carbon tax?

>> you would make activities that generate more expensive and technologies that don't generate carbon so let's say solar panels were an obvious example comparatively, less expensive and we would end -- in that way shift our economy and our energy sources from carbon to carbon free or lower and that's the same principle behind putting a tax on cigarettes and the theory is if you have an economy wide tax on carbon it would certainly shift thece calculation which ae utility companies who are producing and buying huge amounts of power so i think

economists would argue it's the most efficient way to reduce emissions because it would use these market forces to try to drive down emissions as opposed to imposing a bunch of regulations which is another way to goot absolutely, but which means you might not take the lowest-cost route to reducing emissions. >> and a l recent piece you wrie about iceland and the fact that there is no coronavirus there. >> that was a trip that i took in may and they managed to successfully contain the coronavirus and had quite a bad outbreak and they managed to get

basically down to zero. i was interested in how. then they actually opened up the country again to travelers from europe and they've had subsequent outbreaks. so they were a success story. i don't know where things are now. i think it's been kind of up and down since then. >> as somebody that studies and follows this issue, is the fact that a bat was in a market in china going to be a unique experience in our lifetimes or are we going to see this again? >> once again i'm not an epidemiologist and this isn't something i've studied extensively about but there are a lot of very good books on the subject that absolutely predicted covid almost down to itsst exact details of how it ws going to play out because of the way that we live. we live in, it is a disease

presumably we are still not sure whether it originated or what species, but let's assume it came from a bat either it came directly because humans went and caught a bat somewhere and the virus jumped, or probably i shouldn't say that, or possibly it got into some domesticated animaly and jumped from a domesticated animal, something that we eat or live in close proximity to and made the jump from there to humans. and because of the way we live in close proximity to domesticated animals and we are encroaching increasingly on animals in the wild and the way that we live in higher densities and travel around the world very

easily, any time that jump is made it's called a spillover event, there is a risk that if it iss contagious it will not just become an epidemic, but a uspandemic. that it would go global and that is what has happened, and i think that the expert consensus once again to use the word i'm afraid is that yes we will see this again. it certainly isn't the last pandemic going to these factors which are very conducive to pandemics. john is in pennsylvania, go ahead. thank you to elizabeth for being with us today. i would like to speak about another issue that could have catastrophic consequences, title affects basically what i think most people discussed is the potential for climate energy

pouring more and more into the gulfstream and other macro title affects where europe could freeze and where you are already seeing massive snowfalls, record temperatures all throughout, even into new england, atlanta, canada and northern europe. i will be brief since time is a factor but can you touch on those affects not only affecting north america but as the systems absorb more heat what's going to happen to the coastal areas not just flooding, but the impact on the total meteorological system. i think what you are referring to is this idea or this possibility that a lot of global circulation of energy is driven

by the current set of warm water which the gulfstream goes up the northeastern coast of the u.s. and its responsible t for keepig the uk climate and then the water is sort of driven to a conveyor belt system that is driven by the fact that cold salty water often is constantly sinking and so that is sort of driving this system of circulation and a concern "the new york times" recently ran an animation of the process one concern is as more and more freshwater melts off of greenland perhaps we are interfering with it because it requires this very dense cold

water to keep this sort of churning and some would argue that we are already seeing because of this influx of freshwater off of greenland that ween are seeing a slowing down f this and we don't have enough clear evidence of that yet, but there is a fear that were this system to slow enough or even shut down that you would wildly disrupt the climate patterns that have pertained throughout since the beginning of human civilization and places like northern europe would become a lot colder that would still be a product of global warming and i guess a little bit back to the question whether we should call it global warming or climate change those places would become colder even though the world as

a whole is continuing to warm. >> last call joe from new york and elizabeth's hometown. we have about 30 seconds. >> i will be quick. i love your discussion about the effect of the sun on the planet earth. the cycles go up and down and the temperatures on the earth do as well. ice ages, and go long before there were any people or engines on the earth. how do you account for those? >> there are a lot of good books thatf i would commend to your attention. there is a pretty strong consensusg once again caused by changes in the earth's orbit governed by a bunch of different forces basically during some parts ofin this cycle you starto

get a buildup of snow that doesn't melt in the north and that then reflects back to space and you get a big feedback loop that causes an ice age but then that is not to the output of the sun but where sunlight is heading the earth in different seasons and changes in the distribution of sunlight so yes obviously these orbital cycles have had huge impacts in the past and that is the thing we should be very aware of and quite a sobering thought because these are very tiny changes that have huge ramifications in what we're doing right now by pouring a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. it is a big change and we could get big changes out of that.

>> elizabeth won the pulitzer prize for this book the sixth extinction and unnatural history that was in 2015. and this year the most recent book came out under a white sky the nature of the future. she has been our guest for this past two hours and we appreciate your time. >> thanks for having me.

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