will see each other in person in miami someday soon. but thank you for your book. >> thank you. >> great book. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2, every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. tv on c-span2 created by america's cable-television companies. today we're brought to you by these television companies who provide booktv to viewers as a public service. .. >> from a catastrophe in the altar prize-winning in the newly published "under a white sky: the nature of the future".

>> so offer elizabeth kolbert because of who studied literature at yale become a pulitzer prize winner. elizabeth: it's a long and winding road. i spent a number of years covering politics my first real journalistic job as entered at the new york times and i was pretty quickly dispatched to albany to cover state politics and when you're doing journalism from one thing following another and i spent any years covering basically state and local and national politics and then i went to the new yorker in 1999 and i was supposed to cover revive, at city hall. and they did do that, i wrote that column for a while but i

became increasingly interested in this question of climate change which at the time in early 2000, was still a lot of the coverage was still wrapped up around this question is a big deal or not. and i very naïvely thought i'm here at new yorker and i have a lot of space and i have the luxury of trying to answer that question. once and for all, it's going to put it to bed. and i ended up writing a three part series on climate change. and that was in 2005 in the lead management of sort of transforming myself from a political reporter too much more of a science reporter. but in all cases i guess you could say from the study of literature to the political

reporting to science, the journalism a lot of the basic rule lines are the same a lot of basic techniques as it were, you're trying to take information and climate can be complicated and germany and full of sort of information that insiders are very familiar with and you trying bring it to a broader audience in a way that it's engaging to them. so don't think there's anything particularly special about being in science reporter. peter: for the three part series in your new yorker became your second book "field notes from a catastrophe," "the sixth extinction". when did global warming become climate change. is there a distinction in those terms.ge elizabeth: there's actually a kind of a political debate about thatat, there were efforts to nt

use the term global warming and climate change by people who were sort of trying to factor downplay the issue within there were other people and scientists who embraced the term climate change because global warming does not always and everywhere pretty stormy at same time, it can produce strains whether extremes and people thought it could be called something else. i thought at this point that the two terms are used very much interchangeably. i myself use them interchangeably. peter: in writing throughout your books and in your new yorker pieces, use the word anthropopathy. and am i pronouncing it correctly. a. elizabeth: i'm sure there is a completely agreed-upon pronunciation, in the u.s. it tends to be friends when wade

and britton pronounce another way. you can choose like tomato or tomato. the word refers to his idea that humans are now rivaling the great forces of nature in terms of our a impact on the planet. so is shaped life on earth and the geology of the earth over time in the forces of volcanism, tiktok thinks and humans are now on par with a lot of the forces. it so just give you one example, humans now move around as much earthen sentiment is major members of the world pretty so that is just one of the numerous examples i can give you the show you how we are now started on equal footing with some of these great forces.

and it has really caught on in the popular literature in the scientific literature as well. there still is ultimately deep theological what we live in is determined by geologists in that case debate going on about whether we should formally rename this geological thing which is technically we live in the coliseum which is the. since the end of the last ice age about 12000 years ago. so the question is still before geologists should formally named this time. peter: under a white sky a new book you quote albert weinstein and you say that he said that we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that we used when we created them. what is that referencing. elizabeth: w i have to unpack a

little bit. i don't call him. point out that it is written on the wall of this great model that is been made of the mississippi river that had various. potential solutions to the tremendous landmark is going on in southern louisiana. the fact of the matter is it is probably incorrectly related to albert weinstein. he probably never said it but certainly the sentiments behind it i believe new thinking for new era. and newhi a thinking for thinkig differently. peter: put it comes to the mississippi river, and the delta which you visited, how does that apply. elizabeth: the story of what is happening to the mississippi delta is really fascinating.

it starts on the french settled new orleans which incredibly important spot basically where the mississippi hits the golf of mexico and all of the land in southern louisiana and delta was formed when the mississippi when overflow its banks which is to do all of the time securing a great deal of sediment from the great plains and would drop that sentiment as overflowed and all of the land is suddenly this kind of soupy soil and new soils require being replenished by the river they think. and new orleans is sinking fast one of the fastest thinking on earth because we have prevented the mississippi from flooding quite successfully and sometimes their disasters exceptions to

this but basically we have prevented the mississippi from flooding so all of southern louisiana sinking away. that's particularly a problem in the city like new orleans. but it's not just said this is actually true. if the new orleans southern louisiana loses a football field worth of land basically every 90 minutes. peter: that said, having not engineered new orleans dikes in the truck, louisiana continue to grow.ou elizabeth: parts of it would be going and parts of it would be shrinking. thus the natural duct tape, processes, the river overflows its banks and lays down this voltage land which is known as a delta load. to dig geologists and then the river has impeded its own flow. this radiant becomes too steep for the river and the river decides okay let's find it

faster route to the state. mixups course. and that's known as impulsion. and geologists carefully reconstructed the history and there have been at least half a dozen emulsions in the last several thousand years. and each time the river they downed a new set of land and then in the natural course. the overloads would be sinking away in the new laws would be created. because of the way we basically put the mississippi in a straitjacket, is all of the sediment that is in the mississippi gets shot out at the end of what is called the bird foot which is this piece of land south of new orleans. sue and so elizabeth kolbert you also visited a site upriver a little bit with actual flow of

the river is controlled is that correct. elizabeth: yes printed old river control that you're referring to. yes. sold reverse control, this is back to the mississippi would like to switch course. it's now the point once again the natural course of density would have evolved in experience and devotion party to measure the verb you would use but it would start more and more water would be flowing down what is now called the distribute terry of the mississippi. as recognized back in the early decades of the 20th century the more and more water was flowing down so the army corps of engineers stepped in and built a huge series of control works about maybe hundred miles

north of new orleans. it may not that quick quick the much to basically free the river in place. so the .30 percent of the water that went by the old river control wasol going down in othr areas 70 percent down the main branch of thein mississippi they decided to keepis this. it thefts every day that water flow was measured and adjusted accordingly to try to make that flow and a 378. two and it's quite an engineering feat incident pretty. elizabeth: yes it is. and is nearly, the old river control very nearly ran out of control in the 70s during huge event in the 70s. he had to be shored up. and more controls added that since then, i think it has kept control of the mississippi.

that water still flowing past new orleans and down into the bird foot. but how long that can go on is unclear. it can be perpetuated for a while but in the grand scheme of geology, i think eventually it can't be maintained. peter: another engineering feat happened and you talk about this in your new book "under a white sky: the nature of the future" and we change the direction of the chicago river. elizabeth: so that is another great story that's really where the book begins. in chicago grew up somewhat later a century later than new orleans read on the bank of the chicago river. a small river but a key one to the city of chicago and chicago used it as a sewer really an open sewer. depository for all the cities

human waste and rate stockyard of chicago also the suppository for the animal waste. and it was said that the chicago river was so thick with phil bit a chicken could walk across without ever getting her feet wet and this was a problem not just because it was disgusting isobviously but the chicago rivr was running east into lake michigan. so you can easily do the math on that. there were constant outbreaks of waterborne disease. around the 20th century it was decided that something can toane done about this. and something turned out to be was an enormous construction project that reversed the flow of the chicago river rate is enough you go to chicago, the river is not going east into

lake michigan, is going away from like michigan and into a different part of the mississippi. peter: is that a good thing. elizabeth: is a good thing for chicago's drinking water. when this project was completed and finally opened it was basicallype a canal that was connected the chicago river that mississippi water shed was sort of this facetious headline in the new york times. i'm not going to get it exactly right but ran something like, water in the chicago river resembles liquid again. sue did get water flowing through the river again and you got the city's waste moving away from the drinking water. so it was from the public health sort of public health perspective, granted success but what it did with people were not

thinking about at the time was a connective are connecting these two great watersheds to drainage basin and the mississippi drainage basin which previously had beenen separated. so if you refinish or some aquatic organism, you could not have moved from the great lakes into the mississippi. and now you can write it. peter: so elizabeth kolbert why are there electric fences on the chicago river. it. elizabeth: the electric barriers as they are called were constructed precisely in order because what happened was during the course of the 20th century, after this project was completed, but the great lakes and the mississippi became highly negated water system so lots of invasive species some of which were introduced purposely and lots of which were introduced inadvertently in the

ballast waters. and establish themselves in the waterways. and were wreaking havoc in different ways. so about 20 years ago i guess, the congress and the army corps of engineers that we need to not let all of these invasive species just go from one basin to the other. it will rent those basins. as of the army corps of engineers was assigned the task to figure out some way to keep these organisms and their respective waterways. it looked in a whole list of possibilities.fi they thought maybe you could set the water the uv radiation. you can install giant filters in all sorts of ideas and could use some kind of toxins. also some ideas were explored and dropped in favor of this idea of a great deal pulsing

through the water and the vaqueros on official another aquatic organism comes into this part of the river that's electrified, it will get a shot and he said go back home. go back in the direction that it came from as opposed to crossing over these barriers. i myself have taken a trip across the barrier, there are huge billboard like signs that warn you to keep your pets and your kids and do not go into the water. because there's a high danger of electrocution. peter: and this is all due to a variety of trying to get into the great lakes are potentially getting into the great lakes predispute if honestly the barriers were put up initially to try to keep a fish from moving from the great lakes into the mississippi because the fish

the mary consumer but other fishes eggs. it and that fish by the time this was completed, that fish had already crossed. so as a matter of closing the barn door after the fish was already out. but then it turned out that moving in the opposite direction, were several species we refer to asian carp. there are actually several species of asian carp that were moving to the mississippi walkers. can people really don't want the carp to get into the great lakes. so that at this point as you say, aimed at keeping these asian carp out of the great lakes with thoseng interestingly enough got the original recent of the construction. peter: so elizabeth kolbert first of all that is asian carp and up in the midwest in the

u.s. and what is the danger of them getting into the great lakes. elizabeth: asian carp has a really interesting history in the u.s. they were introduced various species at various times, roughly around the same time and the sort of mixing of the early 1970s. they were introduced because it was hoped that they would perform some form of what we call bio control. when species is a very gracious her before any class and hope was that species which is known as as graph carp would eat aquatic leaves a lot of these were invasive species. and then we would not have to jump herbicides into the water and another species was introduced because it was hoped that they would eat basically take care of some of the new

learning that occurs when you have insufficient sewage treatment. so different species were introduced for different reasons. they were not really introduced. but until research stations. but they quickly got loose. very tiny fingerlings got through whatever mesh that could be keeping them in right and they were pretty quickly and these tributaries of the mississippi and they started to move all over through the water system and with a deal is as one of the army corps of engineers and staff members that i spoke to about this but, they are very good invaders printed they are very very adaptable. they do very very well and that watershed and they take over the water essentially in some parts of the mississippi water system

at this point, the asian carp makeup is about three quarters of the biomass. so they really sort of elbowed out native species of fish. and another habit they have come up one of these species which is known as silver are assertive and unnerving habit of when it startled or scared it links itself up out of the water. so your viewers go online and find these extraordinary pictures of carp jumping quite high into the air. and i have seen this any times now. the sort of a beautiful and sort a frightening site and people have been previously entered by flying carp. i met a lot of first woman who because one of the things you don't like is the outboard motor sound so if you go boating on stretches, that carp infested parts of the water chance of

getting hit in the face with carp are pretty high. that people have had very serious injuries as a result of that is another reason why people are on the great lakes really do not want them in the great lakes. peter: we talked about the mississippi delta and the chicago river. and were talking aboutri billios of dollars in economic damage or infrastructure week. elizabeth: you mean that has been invested. to try to correct these problems or prevent these problems. yes printed, will billions of dollars were spent initially to connect the equivalent probably billions of dollars worth to connect the mississippi in the great lakes watershed. and i'm more billions of dollars will be spent to try to correct the damage that was done. in the original billions were spent. sue and so is there another

solution out there. elizabeth: how we still talking about the great lakes and the mississippi. peter: you canso talk about thoe or any others. elizabeth: indicates the great lakes and the mississippi, one proposal that is been made and was again this goes back to the study done by the army corps of engineers was what man has join, man can pull asunder so you could in theory separate the two basins again. and i would also cost billions aof dollars and would be an enormous construction project. that idea has essentially been dropped because chicago has become so dependent but for flood control and its water treatment on the way things are right now and also navigation. and now navigate that through and from the river into the

great lakes. so for a lotnt of reasons, a lot of new infrastructure has built up around the old infrastructure and very hard to turn back the clock pretty. peter: you and i are both on the east coast in massachusetts and were in dc. why should we care about a fish and the mojave desert. elizabeth: the fish that you are alluding to is the foppish which is considered to be the rarest fish in the world and found only in one pool and canyon in the middle of the mojave. and it is a small lovely beautiful fish. isn't bluefish. now the numbers or maybe several hundred fish exist inn the world pretty say why would you care whether survives.

there are a lot of different ways to answer that question. one thing that's interesting about that fish is that it survives a very high temperatures. the water in this canyon in the pool at the bottom of this canyon is a constant 93 degrees fahrenheit since very difficult for most organisms to the vent and most fish would not have live in that but this foppish lofgren senate. so i guess one answer that i could give is we might have some very interesting to learn from this fish. but i think in mark profound reasons as every species is sort of you could see that is a library book, it's an answer of how to live on an earth and how

to survive on planet earth. these species has come up with some sort of it to her survival stspat strategy was recorded in its genome accreted by killing off this fish and the myriad callous other species that are on the brink of extinction right now, we are basically a library of life burning thread and i don't think that's something that do for ethical reasons or e practical reasons because much of what we ourselves depend on, our food supply and oxygen supply, these are all part of the biological systems. seventy start unraveling the web of life to me don't know exactly what you're going to get. and the dangers are high rated. peter: from your book, under a white sky, the right one way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. history of life has after all

been punctuated by extension of events in both big and very very big. elizabeth: yes but i do go on. and i talk about why peoplepe don't want to do that. one of which is part of the reason is because as i mentioned is simply ethically unacceptable to a lot of people and another reason is it's a very scary process to think of unraveling the web of life. could just say forget it, that's just what were going to do. i don't think those people think that is wise. peter: just to be fair, i didn't mean to cut off at closing to go on and you write that for whatever reason call it biophilia, call it care for god's creation call it a heart stopping fear, people are reluctant to be the asteroid so we've created another class of

animal and these are creatures that we have pushed to the brink and then yanked back, the term of art for such creatures conservation reliance so there might also be called the stockholm species. elizabeth: yes exactly. we tend in part of this honestly is our legal system. as a species and is in really big trouble, it can get listed on the endangered species act, and one of the key provisions of the endangered species act is you have to have a recovery plan for that species. so i should say that this fish was one of your relationship species on the endangered species act so once again by law has to have a recovery plan. peter:r: i want to go through a recent new yorker article that you wrote. and this is from january, the pandemic was brought down carbon

emissions has also illustrated how tough it is to make significant cuts and much ofem e world under lockdown, global emissions were around at 6 percent lower in 2020 than they work in 2019. so this drop was the largest on record. it was still not enough to put the world on track to meet the 1.5 degrees celsius goal set out in his parents accord. elizabeth: so covid-19 has brought carbon emissions down pretty dramatically at the start of thehe pandemic. emissions dropped dramatically in any sort of started taking up nagain. what is trying to explain that piece was in order for us to reach t targets and enshrined fm 2015, there was a goal of making

every effort to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees celsius which is almost 3 degrees fahrenheit. the significant climate shift already. you need to basically bring carbon emissions to zero very soon within the next few decades if you want to have a reasonable chance of hitting that goal. and 6 percent year does not quite getting there. sorority expecting to see this but if and when this pandemic ends, we will see a rebound. it. peter: can you in layman terms explain the danger of the plan for me. elizabeth: the danger of the planet warming is people are saying it right now. we saw california burning this fall. that was a human disaster.

it i think all california people would agree on that. d it there are any factors that would into that terrible fire season. but the fundamental one is that california is getting warmer and isre trying out and that is increasing the odds devastating forest fires. so that is one danger in one part of the world. hurricane season was quite devastating. it is unclear whether this will be pretty clear that one of the things it is going to do is lead to these very rapid intensifying and go to bed one night and hurricane is a category one storm and you wake up as a category or storm. those are extremely dangerous storms. very hard to get people to get out of the way of those storms that intensified so fast.

so that is another tremendous danger from climate change. tzero arising climate change, that is a product of two forces, one of them is that is the oceans warm and they are warming, that is indisputable. warm water just takes up more space. so that's called the thermal expansion of water that is pretty predictable and easy to predict how much the ocean and space the oceans are going to take up as they warm. but then were also melting a good deal of ice the greenland and antarctica. so all over major cities here in dc, quite a bit of inland but boston new york miami, all are now trying to figure out how to going to deal with a verse rising sea levels and depending on how much they need to pour into the atmosphere and how much sea levels rise, that could be

manageable issue or catastrophic. it so the list of reasons we should be concerned about warming climate unfortunately goes on and oner and we can sped the next two hours talking about them. as a sampling prey to. peter: and we've only scratched the surface with our guests elizabeth kolbert but we do want to open up the phone lines and allow to participate in this conversation. 2-029-748-8200 for this view in the east and set up zones in (202)748-8201 if you live in the zones. other ways of reaching us getting a question in two elizabeth kolbert include (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 a comment on facebook twitter instagram and apple tv is our handle and for those and finally our e-mail address is book tv at cspan .org. and we will get to those as quickly as we can. elizabeth kolbert is the author of four books and the editor of one in the profit of love is her first book in 2004 and power and decedent and then came the science books "field notes from a catastrophe and in oh six and holds a prize-winning, the six extension, "the sixth extinction" and her most recent just out this year, is "under a white sky: the nature of the future". we've been talking about a little bit today. so i also want to bring in another topic before we are more or a little bit more on the climate change issue.

and here is senator james inhofe and he is a republican from oklahoma and he has been critical of efforts to control climate change and here's a little bit from him on the senate floor. >> universities here in virginia commissioned a poll to be done of all of the weather casters on tv. they came back to 53 percent of the weather casters said that any global warming that occurs as a result of natural variations and not human activity. so i i hear people and another difference on that really believe this. and i think that you sometimes you open it up and realize there is another sidee to the story. so when they say that 98 percent of the scientists agree. my good friend senator white

house had an amendment with one sentence and it says that global warming, i'm sorry climate change is real. and it is not a hoax. whether the rule against talking about your own books on the senate floor so i can't do that. with that hoax came from a totally different interpretation, hoax was the idea that this is happening, climate change but it's due to man made in man is causing this so what is unsupported is how arrogant is this for people to say that man can do something about changing climate. twenty-one and elizabeth kolbert that was from 2016. elizabeth: will be frank and say that it's really dangerous to rebroadcast that. i don't it is a good idea. i think that is basically like staring a lot of these. people can believe and learned

in recent years just about anything. and if he wants to believe that the world is warming only to natural causes, that's his right as an american but is simply not true. i will give t you a very basic reason why the climate is warming carbon dioxide which is a byproduct of any combustion about fossil fuels and also what we breathe out all of the time when we are in our own forms of combustion as it were. greenhouse gas, traps heat in the service of the planet predict this is been understood since 1950. if you know greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it's pretty easy to calculate the temperature of the planet and the planet would be present. so we are here because of the

composition of the atmosphere. and we have and we other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the more that you put up there, the warmer it's going to get. is as simple as that. peter: so as is the case of climate change is 90 percent man-made 80 percent or hundred percent. elizabeth: of 100 percent. this is somewhat complicated issue and are also things that we're doing that will bring up this, there's a cooling intact but i think that once again, the scientific consensus would be 100 percent. peter: let's show video of one more senator and this is senator children, democrat from rhode island from this you pretty. >> this long-run began in the dark days of 2012.

after speaker pelosi had passed a serious climate bill. in the senate has refused to take up anything speaker pelosi passed a bill in 2009 over in the house side. we had here in the senate filibuster proof of democratic majority that this was climate change. and we just walked away. i was told then that was because the obama white house told leader read to pull the plug. but after the obama care that white house was tired of conflict and didn't want another big battle. it was not going to take on any

fight that was not sure it could win. and then years went by. he could scarcely get a democratic administration to put the words climateou and change n the same paragraph. in which we fought idiotically about whether to call it climate change or global warming read in which the bully pulpit, the great presidential megaphone in the hands of wonderful most articulate presidents, stood mute. peter: elizabeth kolbert is talked about this quite a bit of incentive for brady. elizabeth: yes senator white house gave this speech and as he said starting in 2012. on the floor of the senate and he had a battered sign that said, time to wake up.

in his own form of protest. and he finally, retired his sign because it's been pretty beat up in just a few weeks ago, when joe biden president biden kind a bunch of executive orders indicating that climate change he took it very seriously. so we do open up i hope in this country, a new chapter in a way we talk about and discuss and debate hopefully deal withan climate change. but to say that a great deal of work remains to be done is the understatement of the century. elizabeth: just trying to convey the problem, is it your view that is almost impossible to get it back, the genie back in the

bottle in a sense. elizabeth: the genie of carbon emissions or a change climate pretty. peter: yes pretty. elizabeth: the latter. well now getting the climate back. the unfortunate fact and the reason why climate change and why the scientists have been raising the alarms for decades now is because co2 is not a pollutant like a lot of other pollutants for example when we decided we wanted to try to reduce smog in american cities and we mandated catalytic converters on cars. relatively quickly by contrast once we put enough into the air, really hangs around for quite a

long time for all intensive purposes forever.al he continues to have a warming influence. so is very difficult pretty is something i do discuss in the latest book "under a white sky: the nature of the future". it is difficult. and these ideas sound pretty far out of how you can actually get a climate of the past, back. but when we talk about reducing emissions and even getting emissions down to zero, it does not mean were going to get rid of this problem. it just means were to stop making the problem worse. peter: speak in with glenn from michigan. you're on with author elizabeth kolbert. >> thank you all very much. it elizabeth kolbert, one thing, i hope, the terms that you might

address this before. [inaudible]. i've been watching about a half an hour now freighted and you might've addressed it already. but anyway, global warming and climate change, why did that change if the global warming is the problem. and i agree that it is. why i call it climate change because i think that confuses lots of people. time is changing at least . peter: i think we got your point and let's hear from elizabeth kolbert. elizabeth: glenn, that gets back to we did talk about that at the top of the hour and the white house also mentioned will be festive or call it. and as i said, there was some of that debate does have a political providence were some

people thought climate change sounded more benign than global warming those were people who really didn't want us to do anything about global warming. but i think they are the term climate change also has gained currency among scientists because the effective global warming does not always warming. they canau be used temperature extremes. so sometimes climate change is a better term but i think at this point you can use either one and everyone would know what you are referring to. peter: in wisconsin, texting into you elizabeth kolbert, something we talked about a little bit for further explanation. could you expand my republican congressman are so reluctant to believe an offer a republican solution. the climate change. elizabeth: that is said to good

question. i wish i did have an answer. we answer this often, follow the money, look at where people campaign contributions come from and you will learn a lot. i think there's a lot to be said for that printed and also increasing the we have a divide in this country just between parts of the world which are being either oil or coal producing. states where they don't get any income and fossil fuel. know i live in massachusetts and there's no one in that area who is making a living off of fossil fuel. may be easier easier for politicians to take a strong stand on fighting climate change. and this is one political opinion. it is becoming increasingly unattainable at this point to say the climate is not changing

we don't have to do anything about it printed in a very interesting state to watch will be florida. as everyone knows, is a swing state and on a fossil fuel producing state but a state that is going to be hit hard by climatee change. peter: and as sheldon whitehouse indicated democrats have not moved forward with his as well. and you wrote in the new yorker in april of 2020 the environmental problems that are emerging since 1970, have simply gone unaddressed pretty congress has no past ors even really cloe to passing a single piece of legislation p aimed at addressig climate change. elizabeth: yes, the bill that he was alluding to in that clip that we saw, the bill that is called a cap and trade bill. someone in the ways of people have proposed and reduce emissions is a similar technique to what was used to reduce

sulfur emissions back when acid rain was a big environmental concern it was very effective in what you do is you give your emitters and allotment. this would you can omit. this is a lament and then if you are burning more than that you have to by the credit freighted see you create a market mechanism for using these emissions. and then you can ratchet down those limits over time that would be a way, it is hopes to bring down emissions. and that bill passed and it was called - it past the house in 2009, and then as senator whitehouse pointed out, itnt really never came for the senate. that fight was never even really thought. in part presumably because the obama administration just did

not want the find that point. and emerged on the obama care fight.t. they were bloodied by that. peter: john you're on with elizabeth kolbert. guest: thank you for taking my call. it elizabeth kolbert i'm curious if you believe that humans can control the earth tectonics, source of heat and a major contributor of glaciers in antarctica and greenland this melting. elizabeth: i do not believe that humans can control the tectonics on this one geological force that is beyond our control. the way that the tectonics contribute to the climate and the major driver of climate before we got involved in fossil

fuels is volcanism and that was the way that we got to the atmosphere before the humans he started to burn fossil fuels. but if you the output of volcanoes and carson airplanes and factories, and puts out about 1 percent of the co2 that we know what helped through our activities. so even though we don't control the tectonics, we do control the climate. but i say that but we are responsible for the climate change. peter: brian in michigan, going and brian. guest: hi and thank you. it the paris climate change and all of this is everyone equal in this. weatherby indians and so forth i think that's a big stumbling block.

i hear that a lot of times i'll be blunt with you i have no use for communist things and i've been up close and personal growth decades with them so if no use of it but china is part of everything and obviously part of this, is everything dollar amount equal across the board for major polluters on this earth with no exceptions. that's where it's going. peter: elizabeth kolbert. elizabeth: well the paris accord is a complicated document and everyone brought to the table in paris what they said they were going to do. no one was forced to do anything and everyone, described as a potluck supper and you came the contribution that you felt your country could make. so it's important to understand about the background to paris

and the back onto climate change in this gets back to the fact that co2 emissions hang around for a long time. so what we are interested in when we have a responsibility of climate changes who put co2 up there in aggregate. as need major contributor to the additional co2 this in the atmosphere right now. and we areer about 45 percent of the worlds population and we put up about 30 percent of the co2. so that is really you and makes us in my view, a lot of responsibility for trying to solve for these problems. now the chinese now are the world's biggest emitters on an annual basis pretty but they

still have not caught up to us in aggregate basis. they have a lot of people so on a per capita basis, the u.s. has a tremendous responsibility i don't think there is any way to get around that. so our argument for why we should not have to do anything is everything doing the same thing. there are any any countries, any countries in europe for the average person is responsible for a tiny tiny fraction. less than 1 percent of the co2 that the average american is responsible for fighting toys don't think it's appropriate to be allison certainly not geopolitically suitablen' for everyone has to make the same contribution to solving this problem. because they didn't make the same contribution to the carbon problems printed. nd peter: elizabeth kolbert are electric cars or the best answers.

elizabeth: there are a few and major sectors, that are responsible for the big part of our missions globally and t transportation in the u.s. is that transportation is number one. so even bigger than electricity generation. electric cars are complicated because there only as good as your electrical grid. so electric cars are more efficient in gasoline internal combustion engines continue to get an immediate sort of benefit the weight. in order for them to really make a big difference, you need a granite an electrical grid is not producing a lot of co2 sing plenty to do both. and make alo transition to electrical cars and clean up our

grid dramatically freighted. peter: another text for you please include your first name and your state printed you cite countries ahead of the u.s. in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. elizabeth: yes northern european countries. denmark sweden germany and these are countries that have invested a lot. i just read recently in norway, half of the cars are being sold for example are electric vehicles. so denmark is a lot of power. a lot of wind power. in germany and when power and solar. those get that highest mark in terms of having both made a significant effort to emissions and having succeeded to a

certain extent in that effort printed. peter: george is from pennsylvania. guest: hello and thank you. and i'm looking at a new thing this is local production is expected to reach a new record of 780 million tons in 2021 according to - in the forecast issued in march 4th by an egg food in agricultural organization and in addition they said that is expecting a new and higher estimate for world serial production that's expired and out turns and rice in india and wheat harvest in the european union and russian federation. in the second point i would like to make is einstein and his idea and a reporter went to einstein and said that i know 100 scientists who don't agree with your series and einstein said, why hundred pretty you just need

one. in other words, just have one is verifiable scientific evidence and there isfi not one scientist who has any verifiable scientific evidence that fossil fuel co2 has caused any measurable warming and sea rise, i smiled, droughts floods. peter: george, why did you cite the food production to begin your question. guest: this has to do with all of these warming claims affects essential threats, things are becoming worse and worse freighted to what thank you sir and let's hear from elizabeth kolbert. elizabeth: one of those claims is quite possibly true. forecast for food production but we are very good in agriculture. it and it's quite possible and

not at all contradictory to say that the production is increasing in the say that the climb into it in the ways that it could threaten productions. it does not seem to be an issue. for the second point, and no one has s any evidence. this gets back to i've say kind of a ridiculous argument at this point. people have tons and tons of evidence, entire libraries of evidence. people don't want to believe it, i can't make them believe it. peter: what did you come up with the title fordi your newest book "under a white sky: the nature of the future". elizabeth: while the title refers to this idea we are talking about before how it is very difficult to do anything about climate change quickly because of the long life is such issue in the atmosphere.

in one proposal, one of the few proposals value my to do that is to produce a form of global cooling to counter act global warming. this is known as solar engineering or solar radiation management. and the idea is that you would spray some kind of compound either sulfur dioxide or carbonate or an semen proposed diamond dust in the stratosphere freighted and this would create a kind of reflective haze that would bounce the sunlight back to space and cool the planet freighted the reason we know this is a viable possibility is because this is what the volcano still the major volcanic eruptions a lot of sulfur dioxide at their printed forms droplets that reflect the sunlight get beautiful sunsets and you also get temporarily a

different global temperatures. in one of the possible side effects of the engineering is it would change the appearance of the sky. the sky would appear quieter. so that's where the title comes from. peter: innocent 2015 and "under a white sky: the nature of the elizabeth kolbert won the pulitzer prize for this book, "the sixth extinction" in a naturall history. without getting too technical, what are big five what you mean by this. elizabeth: with a big five refers to the five major half a billion years so basically since a multi- failure life appeared. in the fossil records. the first of these occurred quite a long time ago during. call the organization.

and the last one number five, people are familiar with is the event that the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. once again, fairly broad scientific consensus that that was caused by an asteroid impact. peter: in the sixth would be pretty. elizabeth: the extension event that we ourselves are responsible for. we right now in 2021, extension rates are extremely i and hundreds of thousands of tens of thousands of times higher than what are referred to as background distinction freights. summa normal course of geological history, new species evolve and species go is synced slow process. ybut now all of us, as human beings and human lifetimes and

basically you should not be ablt to watch for species go extinct but we all know only read all the time about species that are making out so that suggests the basic fact suggested something very unusual is going on. and that was very unusual exasperated we are, the major driver of extinction right now. peter: so does winning a pulitzer, is life-changing. elizabeth: [laughter] is very nice and flattering and honored and i would not say in my own personal case it was life-changing. peter: let's move on, viewers from new jersey. guest: actually global warming can turn on a dime. if you take the famous explosion of 1850, in which there was a

frost and each of the months of the year. the global temperature dropped is astounding to degrees. when yellowstone blows, were liable to have nuclear winter for four or five years winter in which we would starve to death. so that isn't even include meteorite asteroid. were all overdue for one and we had some close calls that were in terms of astronomy were razor thin. we just had one last friday i believe. peter: john to follow this issue, you seem to follow it closely why is that printed. guest: is the fact that we do not views this problem in the totality. in fact the asteroids in the comments in the other things, the ones that come from the sum, we can t even track. peter: that is john new jersey, elizabeth kolbert. elizabeth: there's a long

description of the impact of that in my latest book in "under a white sky: the nature of the future" because that's precisely why we narrowed it these major eruptions have a very serious affect. is correct printed don't think that we want to bet the future of humanity are the forms of life on the next major volcanic eruption and the other problem here which we cannot predict, the other issue here is there's a temporary impact, significant impact master a couple of years as a haze and were talking about sort of falls out of the stratosphere and once that happens the temperatures go right back to where they work. peter: lynn from connecticut

texan ty's population control not a topic of discussion. or people equals more of every issue contributing to carbon emissions. so i have zeroio population groh despaired from this conversation. elizabeth: that's another complicated question has a lot of political and politics behind population control. and a lot of coercive publishing troll the people find very in the past i guess. i don't know it is still going on. i don't think so but people found it disturbing. is it somewhat politically an issue but the fact of the matter is from the perspective of these issues that we are talking about that a lot of parts of the world where people or tend to be high

consuming do have pretty low birth rates at this point and in fact, in any european countries and japan and places like that, below the level of birthrate so high standards of living pretty there still countries that still have pretty high birthrates. this can be very low consuming countries. so we are sort of collecting and pet on planet earth, it's a function of both of how any people are h down any each of us is consuming and i think that we need to think about both of the size of the equation very seriously. peter: in the 60s the population explosion book came out and we were all worried about hunger etc. a. elizabeth: yes. and we've had the green revolution since then which successfully fed any hundreds of

millions of people so some of us most dire predictions of the population gone do not contribute we have almost tripled our b population since that book was written. so the population is a pretty significant issue. c1 anthony is: in new york. you are on with elizabeth kolbert. guest: thank you for feeling all of her questions. and for being patient with us. i'm on board with trying to protect the planet it is save the environment. i'm not a naysayer. but if you like nuclear power in the south see that it is good for us that it can be contained especially at this point, where you all of the accidents. not aside from what is going on in japan and chernobyl and gone on with the military as far as a submarine failure.

when we have done with nuclear power and reach containments. i think it kind of overtakes most like putting cartons on the titanic. i mean, the relicensing all of the reactors now to 100 years was supposed to be shut down. they've refueled them by putting all of the waste in the containing polls and then we have to reload it the reactors and i have double the waste. and now it's being dumped six of their thereby there's no place to store 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. peter: all right anthony i think you get the point. this is something that elizabeth kolbert discusses in her most recent book, "under a white sky: the nature of the future". elizabeth: nuclear power is a tough one. we in the u.s. get roughly

20 percent of our electricity from nuclear power right now. it is declining. as anthony says, a lot of plans have been relicensed by lot have much. summer shutting down so then the question becomes nuclear is right now very significant source of carbon low carbon in the u.s. and the question of whether we should be shutting down our nuclear plants and what are we going to replace them with, that is a pretty live on right now. in a way and there's also an argument on whether if our concern is getting rid of carbon emissions should we be building

more nuclear plants. i'm not going to stand on that right now. ati do share a lot of the conces about nuclear waste. we do not h have anywhere to put nuclear waste, is offsetting in containment parts of the original facilities. so even after 60 years, we have not come up with a solution to the problem long-term waste and need to be stored for all intensive purposes once again forever. it i believe there are a lot of risks to power. and the fact of the matter is once again somewhat practical matter in this country in the u.s. at least would not building nuclear plants because there's simply too expensive. it the risk factors into that but there too expensive to build nuclear facilities. peter: from california what is

your position on natural gas. elizabeth: on natural gas is now really major source of fuel. what is powering our electrical grid. i'm not sure i don't know the exact but is quite high. so that's our major fuel for electricity these days rated and burns cleaner than coal and less co2 per unit of energy than coal and it has been referred to as a bridge fuel between our coal power past and hopefully our carbon free future but there arr a lot of people who argue i think pretty compellingly that it should not be considered a bridge fuel. depending upon how much of it though we need to reduce these natural gas as quickly as possible. i thank you so clearly true.

from a climate perspective. natural gas produces less issue than coal for energy but still produces a lot of issues and another problem that has emerged with natural gas is that natural gas is essentially methane and methane itself is very powerful greenhouse gas. so leakage from natural gas depending onn how much natural gas is leaking in the production process, natural gas can to be much of a burden for the climate as coal. so that's a very serious consideration in my mind. a lot of it should also be trying to say that natural gas. 200 elizabeth kolbert inou your view is there a hold up. elizabeth: in my view.

i'm not an evolutionary biologist but i think just about everyone would say that charles holds that pretty well prediction and say everyone but every biologist would say that yes it was one who really got things pretty well nailed it yes. peter: you writing under a white sky that he was compounded by coral what is that mean it. that was in "under a white sky: the nature of the future". it. elizabeth: in the time he was writing and as we saw during the voyage of the beagle, when he was a younger man, and on any good explanation for how h he could get a coral reef. because the coral reefs are found in these extraordinarily deep waters. there built by these tiny little animals. nobody can understand how they could create a very deep water,

how have they built these extraordinary structures. in darwin actually was the person in addition to his phenomenal theory of and was also the first person to understand how coral reefs worked. peter: there are a couple or several laugh out loud moments in your writings. i don't know how that equates to science and whether it's important or not. this was one of them made me laugh out loud which was both coral is a rare and amazing site. how did you witness that. elizabeth: they actually have a variety of ways of reproducing but one of them is major is that they release their aphrodite, these tiny little creatures, sort of look a little bit like

anemones very squishy. basically just a bunch of mouth and tentacles. they produce once a year these corals once a year they produce these little bundles like little glass bead is the contains both eggs and sperm in the release that into the water and synchronized way. these bead is cloaked the surface of the water the break apart and that is how the egg and the sperm find each other in this sort of split the forms in the water. but as these beads are rising through the water, millions and millions of them, it looks like an upside down snowstorm. and it's a really fantastic site. peter: for your research, how did you describe the condition there. elizabeth: the great barrier

reef is the largest reef in the world. it's essentially outside of italy and stretches for 1500 miles down the east coast of australia. it's hard to study in its entirety because it is so big that people have different ways of studying it including aerial surveys. is been estimated that just over the last 30 years, something like half of the coral on the great barrier reef has been lost. peter: you talk about bleaching. elizabeth: yes so coral breaching, what happens with that is that coral is a said these tiny little transparent creatures and inside their cells, they're called store and entered stony corals they build inside their cells, their bodies they have even tinier little

plants. one cell plants the make it food so there just like plants on land. these plants help corals basically in sort of for the protection of the coral, the basically donate a lot of the food they're producing to the coral. that is a big source of energy for these corals. and it's what what it allows them to produce reef watches energy intensive activity. and what happens when our temperatures rise, couple of degrees get very warm summer which increasingly getting more and moregl of, into the climate change. plants start to produce radicals which are dangerous for the

corals. in the corals basically kick them out so therefore the basically depriving themselves of their own food source. one of their major food sources of if this event, if this warm spell does not last too long, then they will sort of move on and survived the last too long, it will essentially starve to death. says you're getting these events that are becoming faster and faster and are more extended in time, it can be multiyear events now. you are getting these coral in the bleaching, the term bleaching refers to the fact that if you. [inaudible]. normally there are transparent and you're saying white and basically that skeleton, that calcium carbonate. that is the reef. and when they expel those

plants, they turned white and they look like a turning white. and that's why it's called coral bleaching. peter: and before we leave, but acknowledge this color, one of the people in your book and that is ruth. who is she. elizabeth: so ruth gates was the head of a marine science lab in hawaii on oahu. a very dynamic woman originally from the uk. i went to visit her back in 2016 and she was embarking and had been nicknamed the super project in the idea behind this project was i think i think about this extensively in the book, it is that we have these rising water temperatures and were going to get more and more coral bleachi. luckily deal.

not getting that heat out of the ocean pretty and if you the coral reefs to survive, her idea was that we would have to basically tweak the corals make them more heat tolerant. and that involved trying to lead out part of your corals but also involved trying to bring out part of your - so all of that effort is actually going on. so some experience going on in australia with her last year but very tragically, ruth passed away basically in the middle of this project. that was in 2018. peter: the next call for elizabeth kolbert comes from paul in idahoco falls, idaho. please go ahead. guest: hello and thank you. elizabeth kolbert i would like to go back to nuclear work of bill gates in a small modular

reactors and our endeavors out here at the i and l2 and she shaking her yes pretty which of you. elizabeth: my view. it. peter: i would like to hear from paul. guest: i would very much in favor as you point out that we cannot get rid of 20 percent of our power based in the united states in hopes of windmills and solar supporting that 20 percent. of the baseline power. peter: thank you sir. elizabeth kolbert speech of thank you is back to what we're talking about again, that is very and has a lot of risks associated with this and we beed for a long time there were going to get these much safer

modular reactors read i guess all i can say is i hope that is true. peter: john in corpus christi, texas. guest: hi and would like to ask what is being done about the corpus christi area becoming the ground zero for this fight against men paid climate change. the series becoming environmental disaster. i'm a member of three environmental service in this area we retain a mass that shows how the powers that be are planning on bringing in 16 new refineries and industrial plants to this area. it isre going to economically ad environmentally destroy an economically destroyed because it does not benefit the local population. on does benefit all straight is going to turn this area into a total environmentalot disaster. near deepening and widening the ports to bring in these massive massive supertankers indoor part 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's begin to focus on this area. peter: doing before we go to our guests, what groups you belong to andgu what are you doing to oppose this. guest: one group is a coastal alliance to protecting the environment another group is the surfrider foundation and another group is for the greater good for unit and i'm trying to speak out constantly and white people afraid of studied climate ever since i was a boy. the hobby of mine. and see the effects of man-made global warming every day. about a degree in agriculture came into landscaping so i know a lot about tropical plants and were able to grow stuff with the exception of his recent victories we f had. which those events or even much less frequent than whatd they used to be. much less frequent so were normally able to grow tropical stuff here andic you cannot even think of drawing and taxes just 150 years ago. that's t how much the climate hs

changed 150 miles south of here, brownsville, you can grow stuff here that you cannot even think of going there just 30 years ago.at that's how much the climate is changed in just 30 years time. peter: thank you sir. elizabeth kolbert. elizabeth: . i'm sorry i cannot speak to the specifics of corpus christi. i just don't know enough about it read i would say that one of the things that has happened over the last just a few decades as the u.s. has once again become a major oil producer, not out of sort of unconventional oil but unconventional oil. like out of places like north dakota which do not used to be major oil-producing state .that is a big economic force.

and really the idea of forming a lot of money into any form of fossil fuel infrastructure is nunfortunately in my view kind f crazy. so maybe there is hope with the new administration that some of these projects will be looked at again. i cannot speak to the specifics of sorry. it. peter: elizabeth kolbert this is the text from - i read the "the sixth extinction" and used it to teach world geography in high school and my question for you and involves nitrous oxide's role alongside co2. with regard to global warming. modern egg industries affect clearing the force landed waste runoff etc. elizabeth: nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas and so any increase in the production is

having a climate affect and 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 of egg him a is a big contributor to climate change. it's not as big as electricity production that for a number of reasons, one reason is that we clear a lot of land for ag so any time that we cut down forests and plant corn or soy or whatever, that carbon is been taken up by the streets is once again being released into the atmosphere. deep four station for ag is a big climate problem. in another reason that people advocate that we for climatological reasons is because of one unfortunate fact when cows digest, the verb a lot

off methane and they get back to the natural gas question. methane is a very very powerful greenhouse gas. the cows are and dairy are 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 your hamburgers. reduce your beef consumption because unfortunately, california is also a big greenhouse gas source. there a lot of people working to try to reduce the impacts of that ag through different varieties of agricultural production.

peter: 's assistance playing around the edges. [inaudible]. peter: everything that we are doing of these different things printed in your view do something major have to occur. elizabeth: i don't think it's just my view. think that anyone who looks at this problem would say seriously as we have discussed, if you want to stop making the carbon worse, unfortunately, there's such a long lifetime in the atmosphere with co2, is not good enough to e reduce your emissio. because that means that the analogy is to about them, you consider the atmosphere of a bathtub. and you are filling it with co2, if you turn down the tap, the

flow of the t tap, you still filling the tub. just doing it morefi slowly. we need to not just turned on the tap, being shut off the tab and at that point, and only at that point, that we will reach a new climate in a new equilibrium. and it will be a warmer world but it will be a perpetually warm mean world. ... ... the east coast showed the wetlands were soaking up more co2 from the atmosphere than the amazon rain forest.

at one time was an agent redwood forest and one in alaska, giving a private wheel deal from the last administration. how do we protect our wetlands, bring them back somehow. in the northern hemisphere, particularly in the northern hemisphere. >> that is a really good question. we have lost tremendous proportion of our wetlands in the us, and otherwise they are

no longer wetlands, no longer support wetlands, i know there are a lot of efforts to try to stop the loss of wetlands and to bring, restore some wetlands that had been lost for a number of reasons, wetlands are crucial habitat, they are important carbon sinks and pollution control, nitrogen runoff that pours into places like the gulf of mexico, buffering wetlands, that problem could be ameliorated. there are a lot of reasons we should be devoting a lot of attention to our wetlands.

i'm not a wetland expert and cannot give you chapter and verse on what is being done or not done on the subject to. >> host: in your work on "the sixth extinction: an unnatural history," elizabeth kolbert, you spend a lot of time on the problems of the past. why? >> frogs and bats are organisms that have been hit really hard by pathogens, diseases that were moved around the world by people, in frogs the pathogen is a fungal pathogen that interferes basically frogs end up suffering in effect a heart attack.

many species of frogs have been driven extinct by this disease and merrily -- many are just barely clinging to assistance so that is a really deep problem. frogs are considered the most endangered class of organisms on the planet and that should be a warning sign to us. where i live in western massachusetts, thousand 7 a new pathogen identified that has since killed many millions of bats, spread most of the way for the us, and as you move around the globe, one of the drivers of extension is

mobilization, moving a lot of things around the world, when you bring species together that evil separately for many tens of millions of years. sometimes very dangerous things happen and because we are moving so many species around the world a small percentage of them resulted in disaster. you are getting ongoing disasters, i can point across the street from me in the northeast and the midwest, very heavily white ash these days, green ash, and in the last 20 years, introduced insects, has been devastating in the us.

when we bring species together one species may not have defenses against the other. there may be diseases. the pandemic is a good example of this. you can get some really unfortunate impacts. that pathogen which was introduced near albany, new york, doesn't just impact one species of that, it impact a lot of species of bat. they have really plummeted. >> host: you are on with author elizabeth kolbert. >> caller: thank you so much for c-span and thank you elizabeth kolbert for all you have done over the years. a few years ago a peer-reviewed scientific text called geo therapy was published and 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 at the conferences on all of the aspects of geo therapy that biodiversity for livable climate has been in the last few years. >> host: do you work in the school? >> caller: i have been looking at this for a long time as an interested observer. since i live halfway between harvard and mit, attended public lectures and for over a decade, what was happening at the colleges and universities in the boston area is not a big college town.

and in the community around energy and environment. unfortunately, i thought the organizations would be interested in mining all that material but they haven't been. i stopped doing it in september because i was tired of listening to the same people that i have heard before talk about, without any action items at the end. >> host: any response for that collar? >> guest: i've never heard the word geo therapy. i'm familiar with lots of ideas how to use wetlands to be restored as one of many possibilities for enhancing for example carbon take up from

various ecosystems that could be a significant contributor to fight climate change. >> host: 200 to the area, 748-8200 and eastern central time zones, 748-8201 for those in the mountain and pacific time zones. 20 left. we put up our text number. if you send a text text carefully to the right number and include your first name and your city if you would. maybe not geo therapy but you do talk about genetic engineering in "under a white sky: the nature of the future". how does that fit into what we have been discussing? >> guest: genetic engineering has really taken a dramatic step forward owing to crispare, which is a suite of techniques

that allow scientists or even amateurs to do gene editing much more cheaply and quickly than previously. one of the questions that will be in front of us is whether we find it acceptable to use gene editing to try to repair or reverse whatever verb you want to use, 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 toad that was moved around the world, native to south america

to central america, moved around the world in the vain hope that it would help the the insects that each sugarcane which is a cash crop in a lot of cases including australia. and it is very unlikely, the sugar crop did any good but they have wrecked ecological havoc in a lot of places and especially in australia. any animal that eats them dropped dead, a lot of native wildlife has no native revolved wariness of these toads so they chomp on them, a lot of them have plummeted for that reason, scientists working on producing a less toxic toad and they successfully produce less toxic toads and it is an interesting question as to whether it is a salient question, whether we

want to let that into the landscape. at the time i visited, they did not have the permits for these less toxic toads to leave the laboratory. they were in a bio secure facility. >> host: elizabeth kolbert, whether it is visiting a native down in the delta of mississippi or flying to australia or hawaii, you seem to have a knack for getting in with people. do you approach them? to you approach the government when you talk to the government people? how do you get these contacts? >> i think i operate like all journalists tend to operate, you find something you want to talk to and nowadays, it used to be a lot harder, you look online and in many cases even

if they are halfway around the world you find their email or phone number and you get in touch with them and sometimes people, you go through various channels to try to get to them but often times i am dealing with scientists, mainly, not exclusively, and if they talk to you, they will talk to you so it is not a very secretive or sophisticated methodology. >> host: when you go on a trip to you come back with notebooks full of notes? do you do your writing when you are out there? >> guest: i come back with notebooks full of notes until last year which had teetering stacks of notes. >> host: do you do your writing where you are sitting right now? >> guest: yes. i am right now speaking into

the computer where i spent many an hour and wrote all those books that we discussed. >> host: michael in deerfield beach, florida. please go ahead. >> caller: you spoke about the corals and the synchrony. what we are experiencing, everything from trump to climate change to the eugenics genocide going on with covid that we are blind to and i only just now occurred to me, why would a species come to the brink of extinction ever? that is a huge inefficiency and the blindness. we are blind to these things because we are within it. a lot of what darwin said, we taken his tooth and claw competition leading to an

optimization and that is a falsehood. don't want to get into politics but we base our politics on both sides. you go to the think tanks, set up the think tank, your ability to talk to different parties, think tanks on both sides understand, stop using it as optimizing. evolution minimizes and that is how you end up with blind cases. you have the first genocide of the 21st century that deals with old people and things like that and it is unparalleled. i hate to be so frank but could you speak to that perhaps as far as the fact that evolution doesn't optimize and the fact that there is a connection where making explicit that it is a competition between crude interest and self-interest? >> host: let's hear from our guest.

>> guest: i am not sure i am capable of saying anything intelligent in response to that. many people looked at this question to what extent our agro systems and participants in the competition, to what extent relationships of mutualism. those are interesting questions but i don't think i have any expertise that allows me to speak intelligently on behalf of one side or another. >> host: i want to ask you about something i found in "the sixth extinction: an unnatural history" and that is snakes and guam. >> >> guest: snakes in guam are a case of an invasive species

with no natural predators, brown tree snakes that totally took over and ecosystem, dripping from every tree, an incredible abundance of many dozens perhaps are. i don't remember the exact figures and the native wildlife of guam which evolved in the absence of such a predator which was really defense was. birds were really hard hit by this invasion and are still being hardheaded and once again another case where people have really tried to reduce the number of these snakes. they discovered aspirin, for some reason, don't know the

chemistry of this, would do them in. to attract the snakes and reduce the numbers, don't know where the effort stand at this point but i do know several bird species that were on quam are extinct, found in these outlying islands off of guam. >> host: ship in massachusetts texts what is the value of a carbon tax? >> guest: a carbon tax? the idea behind a carbon tax is you would make activities that generate carbon more expensive and technologies that don't generate carbon, let's say solar panels for a very obvious example comparative, less expensive, in that way shift

our economy and shift our energy sources from carbon emitting and energy sources to carbon free or lower in many sources and that is the same principle behind putting a tax on cigarettes. the theory is if you had an economy wide tax on carbon and it would shift the calculation from the big e meters which are utility companies for producing, buying huge amounts of power. economists would argue a carbon tax is the most efficient way to reduce emissions, and market forces as opposed to imposing,

but which means we might not take the lowest-cost route to reducing emissions. >> host: iceland, and the lack, that there is no coronavirus. >> guest: that was a trip i took in may and they managed to successfully contain the coronavirus. they managed to get it down to 0, they actually opened up the country again to travelers from

europe and they had subsequent outbreaks. they were a success story. don't know where things stand now. it has been up and down since then. >> host: is someone who studies this, is the fact that a bat in wuhan, china is a unique experience in our lifetime? will we see this again? >> once again i am not an epidemiologist, this is not something i've written about but there were a lot of good books on the subject that absolutely predicted covid almost down to the exact details of how it was going to play out because of the way that we live. we live in -- covid is a disease, presumably, once again, we are not sure where it originated or in what species, but let's assume it came from a bat became directly because humans went and caught a bat

somewhere and the virus jumped but probably -- they don't really know, it got into some domesticated animal and jumped from some domesticated animal, or lived in close proximity and jumped from there to humans and because of the way we live in close proximity to domesticated animals and the way we are encroaching increasingly on animals in the wild and because of the way we live in high urban densities and travel around the world very easily, any time the jump is made causes a spillover even and, there is a risk that if it is contagious, it will not just become an epidemic but a pandemic, that it will go

global and that is what has happened and the expert consensus to use that word again i am afraid, we will see this again. this is not the last pandemic owing to these factors which is conducive to pandemics. >> host: john in pittsburgh, pennsylvania. >> caller: thanks to elizabeth kolbert for being with us today. i would like to speak about another issue with catastrophic consequences, tidal effects. basically what most people have discussed is the potential for global climate energization, pouring more and more energy into the gulfstream and other macro tidal effects where europe could freeze, you are already seeing massive snowfalls, record temperatures

all throughout and even into new england, atlanta, canada, and europe. i will be brief since time is a factor but can you touch on those effects, not only affecting europe and north america but as the systems absorb more heat, what is going to happen to coastal areas not just flooding but the impact on the total meteorological system. >> host: thank you, john. >> guest: i think what you are referring to is this idea or this possibility so a lot of global circulation of energy is driven by currents that warm water, which the gulfstream, goes up the northeastern coast of the us, responsible for keeping the uk at a temperate

climate and then the water, this whole system is driven through the conveyor belt system which is driven by the fact the cold salty water off of the greenland is constantly sinking and that is driving this system of circulation and a concern, the new york times ran a beautiful animation of the process. one concern is that as more and more freshwater melts off of the greenland, perhaps we are interfering because it requires this very dense, cold, salty water to keep it churning and some scientists would argue we are already seeing because of the freshwater of the greenland ice sheet we are already seeing a slowing of this current and some scientists say we don't have clear enough evidence of that yet but there is a fear,

rather circulation system to slow enough or even shutdown, you would wildly disrupt the climate patterns that have pertained since the beginning of human civilization, place like northern europe become a lot colder, that is a product of global warming and that gets back to the question of 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. >> host: george, we have 30 seconds. the fifteenth i rarely if ever hear a discussion about the effect of the sun on the planet earth, temperatures go up, cycles go up and down and

temperatures on the earth do as well. ice ages come and go long before there were any people or engines of the earth. how do you account for those? >> guest: there are a lot of good books on the ice ages which i convinced your attention. the ice ages, pretty strong consensus that 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 buildup of snow that doesn't melt in the north and that then reflect more sunlight back to space and you get a big feedback loop that causes an ace age but that is related not to the output of the sun but where sunlight is

hitting the earth in different seasons. changes in that distribution of sunlight. obviously these orbital cycles have had huge impacts in the past. that is the thing we should be very aware of and that is a sobering thought because these are very tiny changes that have huge ramifications and what we are doing now by poured a lot of carbon into the atmosphere is not a small change, it is a big change, big and surprising changes where we are. >> host: elizabeth kolbert won a pulitzer prize for this book, "the sixth extinction: an unnatural history" in 2015 at her most recent book, "under a white sky: the nature of the future," she has been our guest for the past two hours on booktv. appreciate your time. >> guest: thanks for having me.

>> shopper elizabeth kolbert's books in the all new c-span shop. all of her books including her most recent, "under a white sky: the nature of the future," available for purchase in every purchase supports booktv, television for serious readers. visit c-spanshop.com today to get a copy of elizabeth kolbert's books. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2 every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. booktv on c-span2 created by america's cable television companies, brought to you by these television companies who provide booktv to viewers as a public service. >> here are some programs to look out for this weekend on booktv.

>> peter wood, 1620:a critical response to the 1619 project. you should go to amazon or another provider immediately. the book came out in november. it has been on amazon for some months now. this is both a proper history of america frankly and everything missed hot by the