Welcome to the Aspen Institute’s McCloskey Speaker Series program featuring Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and staff writer at The New Yorker. I’m Crystal Logan, Vice President of Aspen Community Programs here at the Aspen Institute. I want to thank Bonnie and Tom McCloskey for supporting this program, and thank you to our audience for tuning in for this important conversation.

As I introduce our guests today, you’ll find links to their bios in the chat. If you’d like to ask questions, you may type those into the Q&A feature at any time during the event.

Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Her new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, published in February, is an editor’s pick on Amazon and was recently listed as one of the best books of 2021 so far. It’s a fascinating read—I can’t get the visuals out of my mind, especially the Asian carp and the cane toads.

For her work at The New Yorker, where she’s been a staff writer since 1999, Elizabeth has won two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Our moderator today is Greg Gershuny, Executive Director of the Aspen Institute’s Energy and Environment Program. Prior to joining the Institute, Greg served in the U.S. Department of Energy, where he worked on clean energy and energy security policy. He also served in the White House for five years under President Obama as Director of Energy and Environment for the Office of Presidential Personnel.

We are thrilled and honored to feature both of you today. Thanks for joining us—and with that, I’ll turn it over to you, Greg.

Greg Gershuny:
Thank you, Crystal, and thanks to the Aspen Community Program for putting on this speaker series with Elizabeth Kolbert. I had the chance to read Under a White Sky while sitting in the mountains of North Carolina earlier this spring, and I’m really excited to talk with you today about the fundamental question at the core of this book: To what extent have humans changed our own environment, and should we continue to do so to try to fix the many problems we’ve created for ourselves—and for all the other living creatures we share the planet with?

It reminds me of the old saying: “If you find yourself in a hole, the first step is to stop digging.” At the start of your book, you use a phrase to describe the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ work—“backward-looping second-order efforts.” That really stuck with me. You use it in the context of projects in the southwest of Chicago, like reversing the river and building an underwater electric fence, and also in southern Louisiana, which is facing increasing flooding and sedimentary loss.

So, how did we get here? And what can we do to avoid more unfortunate outcomes like these in the future?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, how we got here is really the story of modern society. We embarked on this effort to change the world to suit ourselves. In some ways, we did it consciously. What you might call a “first-order” Army Corps of Engineers project includes many of the vast engineering efforts that shaped the U.S.—like the Bonneville Dam and the control of our major rivers, which are now mostly dammed for flood control and hydropower.

This was, in many ways, an extension of Manifest Destiny. We set out to re-engineer the country—just talking about the U.S. for now, though this applies globally too—to meet our needs. For about a century and a half, we undertook bold and exuberant engineering projects. The reversal of the Chicago River, which opens the book, is both pioneering and emblematic of those efforts.

Now, having done all that, we’re realizing that many of these projects have had significant environmental impacts that we now have to—or should—deal with. And then there are the inadvertent ways we’ve re-engineered the planet. Climate change, for example, wasn’t something we set out to do, but it’s a byproduct of our activities. Many of our actions have had unintended consequences that have essentially terraformed the planet in dangerous ways—ways that can’t be overstated, especially in the summer of 2021.

Greg Gershuny:
Yes, and I think we’re seeing the impacts of that now—116-degree temperatures in the Pacific Northwest, unprecedented droughts in the West, wildfires in Canada, and record-breaking heat. Even today, the remnants of a hurricane are passing through D.C., where I am.

You spent some time in southern Louisiana, at the tip of the Mississippi River, where people are losing land every year to the sea and the river. How are they thinking about this? What are they doing to prevent their homes from being destroyed the next time a major hurricane hits?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
The fight for southern Louisiana has been going on for three centuries. It began as soon as the French settled in what is, geologically speaking, a very temporary and unstable part of the world—where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf.

The Mississippi has shifted course many times since the last Ice Age. That’s how the Mississippi Delta was formed: the river would hit the Gulf, drop sediment, form a delta lobe, and then shift to a new path. New Orleans, for example, is built on a lobe that’s about 5,000 years old—and it’s sinking.

If you had geological knowledge back in 1718, you would have said, “This is a really dangerous place to build a city.” But they did it anyway. They were flooded almost immediately and began building levees to contain the Mississippi. That project has grown to epic proportions. Anyone who’s been to New Orleans knows that when you go down to the river, you’re actually looking up at it—the city is below the river, protected only by levees. 

Anyone who’s been to New Orleans knows how monumental the levee and flood control projects have been. After every disaster—especially after Hurricane Katrina—billions of dollars have been spent on massive new infrastructure. If you go down there now, you can see these enormous structures. They’re almost pharaonic in scale, built to correct the problems that contributed to the Katrina disaster.

But with each new round of engineering, there’s a growing sense that we’re reaching the end of the line. I don’t know if the average person in New Orleans feels that way, because it’s such a beloved city—people love living there. But if you talk to the engineers, even the post-Katrina projects, which were just completed a few years ago, are already sinking. They’re no longer even up to the standard of protecting the city from a Category 5 hurricane.

I think people are starting to recognize that we can’t keep doing this. It’s just not physically sustainable. So now we’re looking at new forms of manipulation. One of the ideas I write about in the book is trying to divert sediment—sediment that would naturally flow over the landscape and rebuild land if we hadn’t walled off the Mississippi—and redirect it into shallow bays to help rebuild the land around New Orleans.

But of course, you can’t just let the Mississippi flood New Orleans. That’s obviously not an option. So we’re in a serious bind. It will be a very sad and disastrous day if people ever say, “We’re giving up on New Orleans.” But between now and then, the city will likely become more and more of a citadel—surrounded by massive earthworks. And we’ll see if that actually holds.

Greg Gershuny:
And you have to think about the people walking around New Orleans and the surrounding areas, seeing all of this and sensing what’s happening. Meanwhile, in Chicago, probably very few people know that a river was reversed—that the flow of a river was literally changed. That reversal created another problem: invasive species. So now there’s an electric fence in the river to keep fish from going the wrong way.

How do you view something like that? If New Orleans is the continuation of an original project that keeps causing problems, Chicago is a place where we’ve added on layers—like the electric fence—to try to fix the consequences. How do we deal with things like that?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, one way to deal with them is to understand why they matter. I think the story of the Chicago River is really emblematic, even if it’s not the most significant story in the book.

For those who aren’t from Chicago: the Chicago River is a relatively small river with two branches—north and south—that come together and used to flow east into Lake Michigan. Chicago grew up around this river and dumped all its sewage into it. As the city’s stockyards expanded, all the animal waste went into the river too. It was said that a chicken could walk across the river without getting her feet wet—it was that clogged with waste.

This was a huge problem because Chicago gets its drinking water from Lake Michigan. So the waste was flowing into the lake, and then people were drinking that water. There was a lot of waterborne disease. At the turn of the 20th century, the city decided something had to be done.

That “something” was an enormous construction project that literally reversed the flow of the river. Now, instead of flowing into Lake Michigan, the river flows west—into the Des Plaines River, which flows into the Illinois River, and eventually into the Mississippi. That solved the drinking water problem and allowed Chicago to continue drawing water from the lake.

But it also connected two massive freshwater systems: the Great Lakes Basin and the Mississippi River Basin. Over the 20th century, both became highly invaded ecosystems. The Great Lakes, especially after the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, became one of the most invaded water systems in the world—an ecological disaster.

When Asian carp arrived in the Mississippi, people around the Great Lakes were alarmed. These carp are notorious invasive species, and there was a strong push to sever the connection between the two basins. Studies were done to see if it was possible to undo what had been done—to “unconnect” them. But so much infrastructure had grown up around that connection, and there was so much political resistance to change, that it was deemed impossible.

So instead, a new control had to be imposed on the old system. That’s where the electric barriers come in. These barriers pulse electricity through the canal that connects the two basins. If you jump in, you’ll get electrocuted. The idea is that when a fish approaches, it gets a shock and turns around.

Whether that’s effective or not—no one really knows. Now, there’s another barrier being planned further south. It will include underwater noise, jets of bubbles—it’s been described to me as a “disco barrier.” The project is estimated to cost about a billion dollars and is moving forward, pending congressional appropriation.

Greg Gershuny:
Fascinating. Well, let’s turn from the water to the air. We often hear about companies that offset their emissions—whether it’s through investing in a solar project or purchasing credits for maintaining forests. But you actually got to see where the emissions that people pay to offset end up. Can you tell us about the facility in Iceland—what it is and what you saw there?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yeah, sure. This project in Iceland is actually a step beyond traditional offsets. Offsets themselves are a pretty troubled category—we can talk more about that if people are interested. The basic idea behind offsets is: “I’m putting carbon into the air, so I’ll invest in a project that prevents carbon from going into the air.” That might be a solar farm or preserving a forest.

But offsets are problematic because it’s hard to verify their impact. For example, would that forest have been cut down if I hadn’t invested in it? And offsets don’t directly remove your emissions—they just try to balance them out.

If you really want to negate your emissions, you have to take them out of the air. That’s what the project in Iceland is doing. It’s called carbon dioxide removal. They’re literally sucking CO₂ out of the atmosphere using machines that look like giant air conditioners. Inside these machines are chemicals that bind with CO₂. Then, using Iceland’s geothermal energy, they heat the chemicals to release the CO₂, recycle the chemicals, and inject the CO₂ deep into the earth.

There, it reacts with Iceland’s volcanic rock and forms calcium carbonate—essentially turning into stone. It’s a very elegant process. The project has gotten a lot of attention and has expanded since I visited about a year ago.

The reason it’s so popular is because of the concept of “net zero.” If you want to reach net zero emissions, that means everything you emit has to be countered—not just by preventing emissions, but by actually removing CO₂ from the air. Carbon dioxide removal is a huge topic right now. A lot of companies and venture capital are investing in it, trying to become the next big thing. There’s a growing sense that we’ve already put so much CO₂ into the atmosphere that we have to start taking it out.

Greg Gershuny:
I love the analogy you use in the book about the Earth being like a bathtub. Can you talk about that—how the Earth is a bathtub and we keep adding more water without letting any out?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Sure. One of the most important things to understand about climate change is that it’s a cumulative problem. People understand that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas—the more you put into the atmosphere, the warmer the planet gets. But unlike other environmental problems, climate change doesn’t go away quickly once you stop the source.

Take smog, for example. When we decided to tackle smog, we put catalytic converters on cars, and the air cleared up relatively quickly. Climate change isn’t like that. When you put CO₂ into the atmosphere, it stays there—for all practical purposes—forever, unless you actively remove it.

That’s where the bathtub analogy comes in. Even if you dramatically reduce emissions—say, cut them in half—the atmosphere will still continue to fill with CO₂. It’ll just fill more slowly. You’re not solving the problem; you’re just slowing down how fast it gets worse.

If you want to stop the bathtub from overflowing—and in this case, “overflowing” means catastrophic climate change—you have to turn the tap off completely. That’s the idea behind net zero: everything going into the tub has to be balanced by something coming out.

Greg Gershuny:
So, the idea of getting to zero—or net zero—emissions: from everything you’ve seen, do you think we as a species are heading in that direction? Do we have the political or societal will to reduce emissions to the extent that’s needed?

If the solution to the Chicago River problem is an electric fence because it’s not politically feasible to re-reverse the river, do we have the will to make the much larger changes required?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
That’s the 64-quadrillion-dollar question.

If you look at the data, the answer doesn’t seem very encouraging. The first major climate negotiations were held in 1992, in Rio. That led to the creation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which every country in the world—including the U.S., under President George H. W. Bush—signed. The goal was to avoid “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate system.

But in the 30 years since that agreement, we’ve emitted about half of all the CO₂ that’s been released since the start of the industrial revolution. So, emissions have skyrocketed during the very period when we all agreed we shouldn’t be doing this.

It’s hard to look at that and feel optimistic. That said, politics can surprise you. Once momentum builds, things can change quickly. And as the damage from climate change becomes more visible, maybe we’ll finally get our act together.

One hopeful sign is the dramatic drop in the cost of carbon-free energy—especially solar and wind—over the past decade. What seemed economically impossible 10 or 20 years ago now seems feasible.

But the practicalities of the energy transition are still daunting. Everyone who studies this issue agrees the transition has to happen, but the logistics are incredibly complex.

Greg Gershuny:
What would be a signal to you that we’re on the right path? The costs are coming down, electric vehicles are becoming more affordable—at least in the U.S.—but are there other indicators you’d look for to say, “Maybe we can actually do this by 2050”?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
I look every year at the global carbon budget. A lot of different groups track it. You can’t go to a single source and say, “Here’s exactly how much carbon we emitted,” because emissions come from so many sources—cars, air conditioners, factories.

But you can aggregate the data. You can look at how much oil was refined, how much coal was mined, and get a pretty accurate picture of global emissions.

When I see that number consistently decline year after year in a significant way, I’ll say the world is on the right track. Until then, all of these developments—while potentially positive—are just signs, not actual steps.

Greg Gershuny:
Yeah, and I think things like carbon removal become even more necessary each year that doesn’t happen. As we fail to reduce emissions globally, we need more and more tools to get there.

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Exactly.

Greg Gershuny:
One of the other, um, topics that you talked about is kind of that break glass in case of emergency, um, thing, which is solar geoengineering. Um, talk—talk about that and like what—what does that mean if—if that's something that we think at some point in the future we're going to have to—have to do to lower the temperature, um, here on the planet?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, solar geoengineering, as you say, it really is this like, um, you know, Hail Mary pass kind of idea. Um, and it's a pretty simple idea. Um, and interestingly enough, when I was researching the book, one of the things I—I discovered was that it was an idea that was proposed right away. As soon as people realized we were heating up the Earth by pouring in a lot of CO₂, they immediately proposed, well, maybe we can cool it down, uh, by doing this.

And this is to, um, basically create fake volcanoes to spew a lot of, um, something—and volcanoes use sulfur dioxide—they spew a lot of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. So it shoots all the way up above the lower level of the atmosphere and just the middle of the atmosphere. And that drifts around, it forms these droplets that are called aerosols, these little tiny droplets. They're very reflective, and that's why you get, uh, those—these great sunsets after a big volcanic eruption. And you get a temporary global cooling.

And—and we know that. We have actually measured that. Like after Mount Pinatubo in 1991, scientists very carefully measured the effect on global temperatures, and they were depressed for about a year afterwards. And, um, that's because you're—you're literally bouncing more sunlight back to space—not hitting the Earth. So you're—less direct sunlight is hitting the Earth.

And, um, the idea behind solar geoengineering is we—we—instead of waiting for a volcano to do that, uh, let's take matters into our own hands. We would—I think that the theory goes—we would sort of create a fleet of very sophisticated aircraft. They would be—be able to fly into the stratosphere, uh, and they would carry a very heavy payload. So they'd have to be engineered, but I don't think anyone thinks that's really a barrier. And they would pour something—sulfur dioxide is one possibility, but other materials people have suggested include just calcium carbonate. Another suggestion has been made—tiny diamond—diamond dust, uh, manufactured diamonds or some kind of designer particle that has yet to be, you know, created but would be man-made.

We would put it up there, and we would have to, um, keep replenishing that because they would—these particles would fall out of the stratosphere after a year or so, the way it does after a volcano. But we could do that. Theoretically—in theory—we could do that. And we would create this cooling effect, which could either counteract climate change or can counteract part of climate change.

Um, and here the idea is you'd still have to cut emissions. If you continue to just, you know, fill the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, you have to put more and more stuff of this stuff into the atmosphere. So the idea is, well, let's use it as this sort of transition moment. As we're bringing emissions down, and we will get to a point of maximum risk—maximum climate risk—and that risk may be very high, uh, can we sort of cut the top off that risk curve with geoengineering?

Now, the timing on that, you know, is still very long. I mean, we're still talking about decades to centuries that you would have to do it because of the way that carbon lingers in the atmosphere. So these are huge technical, political, uh, you know, challenges—uh, societal challenges—that, uh, you know, would have to be either answered or just—just plowed ahead. Uh, but there's a lot of pretty serious talk about it right now.

Greg Gershuny:
Having, you know, kind of putting the—the whatever into the air, you know, and kind of reducing the temperature, but you have to keep replenishing it, sounds a lot like southern Louisiana, where you keep moving the dirt and moving the dirt and moving the dirt, and if you ever stop, everything just kind of falls apart without real—real solutions.

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yes, exactly. And it's really raised—you know, there are many people, um—I mean, there are many people who consider this, you know, the worst possible idea, and that even to discuss it is the worst possible idea because it might have—could have the effect of licensing, you know, increasing emissions or—or—or sustaining emissions even at the level that we're at. You know, you don't even have to increase—you just keep them wherever they are, and it's, you know, awful enough, I can assure you.

And, um, and so as if this would sort of take the social pressure off really, really radically cutting emissions. On the other side are people who will say, well, you know, be that as it may, we are not radically cutting emissions. And you may decide when you get some, you know, humanitarian or ecological catastrophe, uh, that you need this. And if you need it, you—you should know if it could even work or not. You might want to know that.

So, um, so these are two camps who really, um, don't like each other, uh, and are very vociferous in their, um, in their debate. And there was going to be the very first sort of rigorous test of—not geoengineering—it was going to be a tiny little test to just test some of the equipment, basically. It was like an equipment test with a balloon—a scientific balloon—that was going to go take up some equipment that some guys at Harvard have designed.

And it was going to take place in northern Sweden this summer, but there was so much opposition in Sweden that it has been postponed, perhaps forever—I don't know.

Greg Gershuny:
Not a good omen for future testing or research on—on the topic.

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, interestingly, uh, more or less the same moment that, um, that this test was being suspended, the National Academy of Sciences came out with a report recommending—I think it was a hundred-million-dollar research effort. Um, so I think it is a research effort that's actually going to get more and more funding—potentially U.S. government funding.

Um, but then you're gonna have—you're gonna continue to have the sort of on-the-ground—and a lot of that will be done at compute—you know, in front of someone's computer—but then when you get to the actual, “Well, let's put something up into the atmosphere or stratosphere,” uh, can you overcome that political opposition? And I don't know the answer to that.

Greg Gershuny:
So, um, coming back down from the air to—

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Invasive species.

Greg Gershuny:
—to the land. Um, you talked about, uh, invasive species and toads in Australia, um, and some of the research that's going on with that. Can you—can you tell that story and—and kind of how that came about?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, the invasive toad story is a, um, kind of incredible story. It's really famous if you're, um, an Australian, and many Americans have heard about it too. And the story is basically the, um, the cane toad, as it's known, is this huge—huge toad, very, you know, just almost ungodly huge. And, um, native to South and Central America.

And it was exported around the world, uh, in this kind of crazy idea that it was going to eat the grubs that were annoying on sugar cane. And—and it probably never did any of the sugar cane, but it became highly invasive in a lot of different parts of the world, but especially in Australia, where it encountered, you know, basically no—no native resistance.

And it is still spreading. It was first brought to Oz in the 1930s. It is still continuing to increase its territory. Um, and the problem with—the reason why Australians hate the toads is that they're very toxic. They have these two glands behind their shoulders, um, and when they feel threatened, they sort of mix up this, uh, white milky substance, uh, that is, um, could kill you. I mean, if humans eat cane toads—which they occasionally make the mistake of doing—they die. And if your dog bites a cane toad, it probably dies. And—and all sorts of native wildlife in Australia that makes the mistake of trying to prey on cane toads die.

And so there have been many, many, many efforts to try to get rid of them, which include everything from bashing them with golf clubs—I mean, people, uh, will do anything—run them over, lawn mowers—they have no mercy toward cane toads.

And the latest, uh, effort involves genetic engineering, um, because we now have these phenomenal tools that can potentially either interfere with the toads’ toxicity—and those toads have already been engineered. There's already been a batch that were engineered. They're sitting in a laboratory. They've not been let out. Um, but that's a sort of proven thing. You could—you could make them less toxic by gene editing.

And you could, in theory—once again, this hasn't been done yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is soon—you could genetically engineer them so they have trouble reproducing. And then the question becomes—and so you could cut down on their numbers—and then the question becomes, you know, are we going to let these creatures out onto the landscape?

And that is, I think, a question, uh, not just vis-à-vis the cane toad, but a lot of organisms—genetically modified organisms—that we're going to be facing more and more, uh, in the U.S. and around the world, because it has become so much easier with CRISPR to do that sort of thing.

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Uh, they have applied for permission to, you know, send them out into the world. Uh, that is winding its way through the federal bureaucracy, I believe, even as we speak.

Greg Gershuny:
Now what is your response to that? And, you know, your gut response that might be, you know, that's—that's terrible. I—I don't think those trees should be—should be let out there. Um, but you have to weigh that against no chestnut trees. You know, it's—it's a very, uh, it's a very tough choice.

Elizabeth Kolbert:
And I personally, at this point, uh, you know, it really changed the characteristic—character of our northeastern forests here when—when chestnut trees were obliterated. I am just slightly too young to have seen them, but, um—but so I can't tell you what it looked like. But I can tell you, uh, that I—as ash trees—now we're losing all our ash trees—emerald ash borer. So the northeastern forests are really under siege.

And are we just going to let them, you know, fall victim to one problem after another? Or are we going to use, you know, our genetic engineering tools to try to save them? And these are really, really hard questions. I don't—I don't have the answer.

But another problem that you run into—just a sheer practical problem—is, uh, you know, you say, could we genetically modify organisms? Could we genetically modify ourselves to, you know, survive on warmer temperatures?

Um, the world is moving really fast. Temperatures are rising really fast. Uh, you know, humans have a long gestation time. And they—uh, these experiments are very—even just the experiments, uh, when you're not involving, you know, mice—mice experiments—even mice experiments take, you know, months and months. But they—it’s not—it’s not as easy as snapping your fingers and saying—when you are dealing with any living creature, which does have to go through developmental—before you even know, you know, what—what you've accomplished.

Um, so these are very, very time-consuming and I don't—and expensive—and I don't—I see the world changing so fast that I'm not sure we're going to have an opportunity, uh, to do a lot of those, um, experiments.

Greg Gershuny:
And so I guess the—the, uh, the moral here is that we—we have to be much more diligent in the decisions we make the first time around, instead of having to kind of cover band-aids over band-aid over band-aid, um, on the—on the mistakes that we've—we've made.

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Yes, exactly. The—the—the problem that we've gotten ourselves into is that we, um, you know, have done so many different things—from introducing, you know, species all around the world totally inadvertently to changing the atmosphere inadvertently. You know, it's very hard to put that genie back in—those genies back in the bottle.

And it's very hard to say, well, you know, next time around, let's just be more thoughtful. That is, you know, absolutely the message that we should get from this. But meanwhile, we are faced with dealing with problems of—on a massive scale, uh, where it's too late to say, well, you know, you really should have thought about before—you know, before we started burning fossil fuels. We're really way too deep into this by now.

Greg Gershuny:
So I want to invite, um, Crystal back to ask—

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Audience questions.

Greg Gershuny:
—questions from the audience. Um, Crystal?

Crystal Logan:
Okay, great. Thank you. We do have, um, our first question. It is:

Elizabeth, you write, "It's going to be more controlled—not so much the control of nature, but the control of the control of nature." In thinking about this control, how do you incorporate justice and ensure that geoengineering conversations include those that will be most impacted by climate change but are often most left out of these conversations?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, I—I think that's a really, you know, profound question. And it's, you know, another one that I, you know, personally don't have the answer for. I think that, um, all of these conversations obviously should be—should have equity at their center. Or—or as we, you know, grope our way to the next round of interventions—or whatever you want to call them—we should be cons—focusing on how these will impact, you know, everyone, including those who did the least to cause the problems in the first place.

Um, you know, unfortunately, that tends not to be how politics works, either at a national level or at an international level. Um, you know, certainly there are many people, uh, pushing for that. There are whole groups, for example, in the solar geoengineering world who are working to sort of bring the Global South into this, you know, quote-unquote “conversation.” It's a very—you know, so far it's a pretty limited conversation.

Um, but, you know, I—I don't have like, okay, this is the way we're going to, you know, make a better world. Um, but I certainly agree with the implicit idea of the question—that—that those concerns should be central. Absolutely.

Crystal Logan:
Great, thank you. The next question is:

Your piece in The New Yorker last month talked about the astounding biodiversity of the deep ocean floor in the context of potential for advancing deep seabed mining to get minerals to produce climate-fighting tech like vehicle batteries and solar panels. How do we set up a system to compare this risk to marine biodiversity alongside the potential detriments of acquiring these minerals from other land-based sources?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
That's another great question, uh, and I wish I had a great answer for it. Um, I mean that piece—just for, um, you know, people who didn't see it—it was about, um, there's a lot of minerals on the—on the bed of the oceans. They—they take the form generally of these black lumps that look like potatoes. Um, they took—they're called polymetallic nodules. They probably took millions of years to form. Um, and they—they contain a lot of, um, these rare earth minerals that we need for—for batteries and for sort of this next generation of clean tech.

Uh, the risks of—uh, risks to the ocean, to the creatures on the ocean floor, to the oceans in general of mining them is—are severe. And many, many marine scientists are arguing—argue that we should not, you know, go down that road. Our record is so bad on land, we should not be going to mine the deep seas.

And the question of the trade-off and how you would, um, really, um, rigorously, uh, you know, assess the trade-offs—yes, we need, you know, certain, um, minerals, let's say. Let's say—let's say you decide there's no way to make, you know, thin-film solar panels, uh, without some of these minerals that are—are pretty abundant on the ocean floor and not very abundant on land. Um, and then you decide, but the risk to marine life are X and Y. And then you have to have some system for comparing them.

And once again, I can unfortunately assure you that that is not the way these decisions are going to be made. Um, there is a body called the International Seabed Authority. It's based in Jamaica. It's a very kind of weird, secretive body, but it was formed by the U.N. under this Law of the Sea treaty—which—convention—which the U.S. is not part of, I should also add. We have not ratified it—one of the few countries that hasn't.

And they are going to come up with the sort of rules for seabed mining under a lot of pressure from companies and countries that want to share in the proceeds from this mining. So we could, in—potentially, in theory—design a better, much better system. But this is the system we have. Uh, and I think that people should be quite worried that those decisions are not going to be made, uh, in a way that carefully weighs all of the potential ecological good and harm.

Crystal Logan:
Thank you. The next question:

There are a lot of projects dealing with sequestration of CO₂ into the Earth. One of the most favorable of these is the use of mantle peri—uh, period—um, peridotite, with, um, with which CO₂ bonds. Uh, that has the advantage that the reaction goes faster with higher temperature, which increases with depth. But this requires a lot of digging to expose the rocks, which are on the surface of several places, including Oman and Canada. Would it not be a good idea to encourage large-scale funding of such projects?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, I think we get into these really complicated questions once again. And I don't—you know, fortunately, I guess you could say—I'm not going to be the one to make these decisions. But, um, a lot of these projects for carbon dioxide removal—uh, unfortunately, all of them—well, not a lot of them—all of them require energy. Um, they require a lot of energy.

So if we decide, for example, we're going to dig up rocks that have not yet equilibrated with the atmosphere, we're going to, you know, spread them out, and then we're going to grind them up, and we're going to spread them out, uh, and they're going to suck up CO₂—which is, you know, definitely theoretically possible—um, we have to ask once again the trade-offs here, the, uh, environmental trade-offs.

And right now, uh, you know, if you were to send a lot of, you know, diesel equipment in to do that, you would be releasing a lot of CO₂ in the process. And even if you were sucking up more than you are expending, you do have to ask: is that really a worthwhile thing to do at this point?

A lot of these projects sort of presuppose some moment when all of our energy is already carbon-free. We're gonna have so much carbon-free energy, we're gonna use the excess, you know, to do all these things. And I hope—I hope we get there.

Um, but the idea of, you know, digging up a lot of Oman right now, for example—which is, you know, one of the possibilities on the table—and spreading it over, you know, large parts of the world, uh, that does raise the question of, you know, the law of unintended consequences. Are you sort of doing more harm than good?

And I—I don't know the answer to that. Once again, it would be very good to have, you know, um, to think—to imagine that these decisions were going to be made in a very careful way that, you know, weighed apples against apples, as it were. But unfortunately, I—I don't think we have a mechanism to do that yet. And I would—I would hesitate at this point to say, okay, well, let's just go out there and dig up Oman. I—I'm not sure we know enough to know that that is, um, worthwhile.

Crystal Logan:
Thank you. Uh, the next question is:

What constitutes a humanitarian or ecological crisis to you? At this point, it feels like the Colorado River Basin—that we are already moving into an ecological crisis, but slowly enough that even current climate deniers can and are actually still denying it.

Uh, this slow-motion but increasingly faster-unfolding ecological story isn't even happening at a—at a fast enough clip to constitute a crisis or even an acknowledgement from the deniers. How will, um, we be motivated going forward?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, the story—I mean, for you in Aspen, uh, you know, the story of the Colorado River and what's happening to the Colorado River—what's going to happen with the Colorado—is, you know, definitely, uh...

There's this phrase, which I use in the book. It's used about, um, the Mississippi Delta. It's called a “coupled human and natural system.” Mississippi Delta is a coupled human-natural system. It's no longer Mississippi flowing free and flooding when it wants to. It's a necessity in a straitjacket and humans trying to manipulate it, you know, to prevent all the land from, uh, disappearing.

This—Colorado River—is the most heavily controlled, litigated, regulated, you know, uh, dammed-up, uh, river in the world, perhaps. Um, so you know, very little of the Colorado flows free at this point. And most of the water is, you know, as everyone knows, doesn't reach the sea anymore. Uh, it gets used before that.

Um, so part of this, you know, catastrophe that's unfolding slowly and—but—but more and more quickly, uh, is—is human-made. Most of it is human. You know, yes, the flow of the Colorado—I believe the figure is that the flow of Colorado has probably shrunk by about 20 percent owing to climate change, and it's going to continue to shrink. I think, you know, you can bank on that.

Um, but the way that we have manipulated the Colorado and the way that we overuse the Colorado is—is on us.

Um, so when does it become a humanitarian disaster? I mean, the good news here, if you want some good news, is a lot of the Colorado River water is going to, you know, raise alfalfa to, you know, feed horses or cows or whatever. Uh, and we could stop doing that. So I think we will start doing that before we let no water come out of the tap. I hope that's true.

Um, but there is going to be a huge fight, and it's going to, you know, occupy the rest of the lives of everyone here today over what to do about the Colorado, because it is going to be, um, politically incredibly difficult to sort out this mess.

Crystal Logan:
Thank you. The next question is:

I'm a sophomore in high school, and I love everything about being in nature, and I want to make this a career path. What fields will be most important for climate change in the next 10 years?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Wow, that's a good question. I—I hesitate to give, you know, career advice, except to say, um, that I think that, you know, we're in sort of an all-hands-on-deck, uh, situation. And if you love being out in nature and want to, um, make a career in that, there is a—there is—there are definitely very, very useful things that you could do as a—as a field scientist, as somebody who is out there looking at the impacts of climate change and thinking about how we could minimize those impacts.

Um, I don't have, like, you know, the three steps that you should take to get from here to there, but I can assure you that we need you.

Crystal Logan:
Great, thank you.

Audience Member:
Uh, let's see. There's been an enduring tension in environmentalism between a “technology will save us” philosophy and a “return to nature” school of thought. Where do you fall on this spectrum? Do you think the technology camp has won?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, that's—that's really the question, um, at the heart of my latest book. And I think that the answer—I—you know, emotionally, uh, I am on the, you know, return to—uh, return to nature school. But I think that, um, we have to be frank and say that we're kind of beyond that.

We're—we're in a really difficult situation where we have eight billion people on the planet, uh, and presumably we agree that everyone has, you know, a right to eat and to shelter and to certain, you know, basics of life. Now, many of us in the world live way beyond that. Um, but trying to feed—just simply trying to feed eight billion people is a task that, uh, you know, depends now, for example, on, uh, synthetic fertilizers. You know, we're not going back from synthetic fertilizers. We can't. We simply cannot feed the population.

So I think we're between a rock and a hard place. And a lot of the easy answers—all of these answers—on the one hand, the “let's just go back and, you know, live on small farms and, uh, you know…” answer, uh, that's not gonna work. And the techno-optimist, “Oh, well, let's just, you know, if—if things go wrong, we're just gonna fill, you know, the—the atmos—the stratosphere with, uh, sulfur dioxide,” uh, it's not clear that's gonna work.

Uh, so I don't think there are easy answers. And part of the motivation for writing the book was to sort of, uh, lay that out.

Now, that being said, I do want to say for the book—and I know it always sounds weird when I present this unbelievably gloomy, uh, portrait—is, uh, I like to think that the book is kind of funny. It's really a dark comedy. It's basically: how did a species, uh, get itself into such a big mess?

Crystal Logan:
Thank you. I think this is our last question: What do you think about Biden's efforts to address climate change so far? What should the U.S. be doing while we have a president who's willing to take actionable steps on climate change?

Elizabeth Kolbert:
Well, that's a great question. And, um, we could talk about that for hours. But I was very heartened by some of the things that Biden did right off the bat. He signed a slew of executive orders that were really good. He hired a lot of really good people.

I am less heartened when I look at what is going to come out of this infrastructure package. And I am actually quite worried that we're going to get all the worst parts of the infrastructure package—which is obviously roads, you know, which are, you know, okay, we need to repair our roads, I buy that—but, um, and not any of the climate—not any of the important measures that we're supposed to, uh, at the same time, make sure that we were building smarter infrastructure and infrastructure for the future.

So I think that, you know, while we have an administration that's willing to do something—and I—I do think that the administration's really interesting—we have a Senate where you can't get anything through, and it's a—and we have a Supreme Court that's a disaster. So they are in a very difficult situation. And I wish them absolutely the best of luck.

Crystal Logan:
Thank you. Uh, well, that brings us to the end of our hour. Thank you both so much. Thank you, Elizabeth Kolbert, for your time that you've spent with us today. Thanks for writing this book.

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