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Thank you for joining us for hacking the climate crisis with Elizabeth Kolbert, moderated by Lizzie O'Leary.

Before we begin, we'd like to thank our environment and outdoors.

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The Arbor Group at UBS manages investments for individuals and nonprofits , including national parks in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia.

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My name is Zoya Tierstein.

I'm not Lizzie O'Leary.

I'm stepping in today due to a scheduling change.

I'm a staff writer for Grist, covering public health and the environment and the politics of climate change.

And today I'm here to speak with Elizabeth Kolbert , who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades.

She writes about a range of topics, not least of which include insects, deep sea mining, geoengineering.

Her 2014 book , The Sixth Extinction won a Pulitzer Prize, and she recently published a new book called Under a White Sky The Nature of the Future So climate change is no longer a far off threat , and it hasn't been for some time.

It's here right now, and unfortunately, it's not going anywhere any time soon.

So what can we do about it?

When people talk about climate change, they often talk about two things mitigation.

So reducing emissions, such as transitioning a coal plant to a solar array and adaptation , which is adapting to some of the effects that we know are already baked in, such as raising your house up off the the ground due to sea level rise And there's actually a third category that I'm going to call manipulation, and that's something that Elizabeth touches on in her new book And that's where we change the natural or the unnatural world to make it better and make it easier for us to survive the coming, the coming climate impacts.

So basically, what it means is we're trying to fix some of the mess that we've created, and we're going to talk about that today with Elizabeth Can we undo some of the harms that we've done?

Is it even possible And no one is better equipped to talk about that than our guest.

So Elizabeth, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

So before we get started, if you're in the audience and you have a question that you want to ask Elizabeth, feel free to drop in the chat and we'll try and get to that at the end of our conversation.

So I want to start with a question about your beat.

You've been covering climate change for a long time and things have changed.

I know some things have stayed the same , depressingly, such as a large portion of elected Republican officials not recognizing the the scientific consensus behind climate change.

But some things have changed.

There's been a more heated debate about geoengineering, about environmental justice Things have sort of entered the zeitgeist that never were talked about before.

So I'm wondering what has changed for you or what have you noticed?

Well, there have been huge changes.

I mean, on all levels when I when I started out on this, you know, be almost 20 years ago, I had to really search to find examples.

Very vivid examples of the impacts of climate change.

I spent a lot of time, in fact, in the Arctic, where the impacts of climate change are still the most dramatic.

But nowadays, you know, I could go anywhere in the world and find very compelling evidence of climate change.

So that has changed much, you know, for the for the worse.

I think political awareness is way, way higher than it was when I started out And emissions are way, way higher than when I started.

So everything has kind of, I guess you would say everything has has gone up and that's not, you know, that's not what we need, obviously.

But and also I do want to say that there has been there has been movement.

I mean, you know, there there are lots and lots of solar panels out there that weren't out there when I started lots and lots of wind turbines But because emissions have increased so much, you know, around the world, the the overall , the net impact is not nearly sufficient.

So lots of which is on all levels, right?

One of the things I've noticed that has changed is the way that people talk about the natural world.

There's been this, I think, a resurgent force of emphasis on natural solutions to climate change.

And so I let you talk about and write about a lot is what the word natural means.

I mean, human beings have left an impact on every cubic foot of air dirty water on this planet And yet there's been this this really kind of intense conversation around, you know, trees, other natural solutions to climate change So is there such a thing as a natural solution and perhaps better yet, what is an unnatural solution and can you talk about some of the examples that you that you list in your book of that Well, the subject of the book really is how profoundly intertwined we are with nature now.

And as you mentioned, there's really no where you can go, and that includes , you know, the top of the atmosphere or the bottom of the oceans.

You can go online and find pictures.

There is a Japanese submersible that went to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, which is , you know, the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, the deepest part of any ocean and found plastic down there.

So, you know, there's really literally nowhere to go where you can't find traces of human activity And the question so the question in that context of what is nature and what is, you know, human and they're sort of they've sort of merged at this point But one of the complexities is, you know, nature of the forces of nature, which include, you know, everything from biology to geology are still very powerful.

So we're messed up in them.

But we don't we don't really control them.

And we're seeing that very , very profoundly with climate change.

Although unfortunately, climate change is just one example of the ways that we have really, really messed around with the natural world.

Mm-Hmm.

What are some other examples Well, we've completely reshuffle of the biosphere.

We've moved all sorts of creatures and pathogens.

We're discovering that right now with COVID, that's a very, very vivid example, I think.

But it's happening to many different paths that just don't happen to affect humans.

They're being moved from continent to continent.

We have a global pandemic, basically friend Vivians.

It's a fungal disease which was moved around the world by humans.

We have lots and lots of, you know, invasive species have really remade ecosystems, often to the detriment of the species that were there to begin with.

And that's that's really unprecedented.

in the history of the planet.

You know, if you if you think about it, it was very, very difficult for a terrestrial species to cross an ocean.

And in past, you know, millennia or eons.

And it was very, very difficult for a marine species to cross a continent.

Now that happens all the time.

Mm-Hmm.

Yeah, the there was just a study released that I wrote about that talked about how climate change is shaking the world like a snow globe and species are coming into contact with one another, and they have never met before.

Basically, animals can't social distance from each other anymore and they're spreading these pathogens.

And the fallout could be enormous and you know, no one's really preparing for that eventuality, which is more diseases similar to COVID.

And yes, that's definitely another knock on effect.

And it's related to climate change and actually , you know, The Sixth Extinction your your 2014 book talks a lot about biodiversity Species loss.

And this one the most recent book that you've written under a white sky is about something sort of entirely different A kind of like moves the conversation to, OK, these things are happening What do we do now?

Where do we go from here?

And so I guess I'm curious what inspired you to write that book?

What , what inspired that idea?

Well, it's very much, you know, it follows very, very, very much from from your description of it.

You know, after I wrote The Sixth Extinction , the question really was, OK, we've set in motion these these processes, most of which have , you know, pretty dire effects for the other species with whom we share this planet.

So some of the chapters were about climate change.

Some were about what sometimes called climate change equally evil twin ocean acidification.

Habitat destruction.

You know, lots and lots of ways we're changing the world on a and really on a geological scale.

And then the question is, well, OK, what what do we do now?

You know, we're we're we're not going away anytime soon.

Many other species may be going away , but how do we sort of deal with the unintended consequences of what we're doing?

And the first piece that I reported on that sort of became a book was a piece about trying to manipulate corals so they could survive in warmer water and that seemed to me when I started sort of thinking about it.

I started to see that pattern of thinking in a lot of different places.

OK, we messed things up in one way.

Maybe we can, you know, deliberately try to now intervene in a new way to counteract that Yeah, I wonder I was thinking about this earlier , which is that just sort of the sixth extinction is about humans purposefully, but also inadvertently messing up the natural world , quote unquote natural world.

And this book is about humans taking the utmost care to revive it.

And in both cases, humans are meddling.

Right?

And I'm wondering, I mean, is this second iteration of of meddling successful?

I mean, are there examples of humans being able to undo some harms that that we've done Well, that's, you know, unfortunate It sort of depends on what your measure of success is.

So, you know, certainly we have rescued many species.

We've brought a lot of species to the brink , let's say, of extinction.

And then we've swooped in And, you know, in many cases, a surprising number of cases , you know, gathered all of the individuals that we can find that we could catch that still exist and brought them into, you know, captive breeding programs and sometimes brought them back and sometimes brought them back.

Semi-Successful so that they're sort of off life support usually brought them back to the extent that they're still on life support.

Those are called conservation reliant species.

So, you know, certainly there are lots of interventions like that that have worked , whether there are interventions that have worked on sort of the whole planet scale.

I think you have to say at this point, no.

But you know, we're pushing that boundary and we seem determined to sort of find out how far we can go.

Right I mean, it's one thing to try and save the pupfish in Nevada It's another thing to, for example, the heat wave that's centered on on large swaths of the world right now.

That's going to result in order resulting in death.

Much harder to to sort of figure that one out.

I mean, there's there's levels to this right Yeah, absolutely.

And I think one of the one of the things that we're learning and we've been pretty slow to catch up to, honestly, is that we are having this, this whole Earth impact.

There's just nowhere , you know, nowhere to go and nowhere to hide.

And that gets a little bit back to the point you made about, you know, pushing all these species into new places practically every species in the world is on the move right now, trying to track the climate , often unsuccessfully because, you know, there's a city in the way But you know, when you set something like that in motion, you know, we're not One of the things that we're also discovering is we're not we're not necessarily terribly observant We're not really keeping track of most species we are.

We see suddenly pop up in a new place and we we seem surprised But when you set a process like this in motion, you're going to get a lot, a lot of surprises.

Right I think that one of the exciting things about reading your book is that there's examples of people meddling and having success , limited success or just outright success.

And there's some examples of things going kind of explosively wrong.

Can you talk about those at all Well, the book you know, in Under a White Sky, I really try to look , you know, it's something of a dark comedy of our attempt to, you know, intervene in various different ways in our interventions.

And have you know, the book starts with the reversal of the Chicago River, which was done back in the early part of the 20th century because Chicago , the Chicago River used to run through Chicago, still runs through Chicago and it carries carried all of Chicago's sewage and all of the, you know, guts from the stockyards, and it dumped them into Lake Michigan, where Chicago also gets its drinking water Chicago reverse the Chicago River and in the process of doing that, they created this channel that now links the Great Lakes water system to the Mississippi Water system, and that has had all sorts of unforeseen consequences , which can seem comic but are also quite devastating.

to the creatures involved.

And one of those impacts has been that Asian carp, which are this invasive species.

Actually, several invasive species are now working their way towards the Great Lakes, and once again, this has this is karmic elements to it and also really serious elements.

Mm-Hmm.

And what are the can you just briefly talk about, you know, the downsides of of carp moving like that?

Well, Asian carp are very voracious feeders.

They're these four different species , actually, and they have different feeding habits, and all of them are their very successful and invaders are very successful at being invasive.

I mean, they've really just taken over the Mississippi water system and in some parts of the Mississippi system, they make up something like 75 percent of the fish biomass.

Now So they've really pushed aside a lot of the native species and another sort of slightly unsung problem that they've caused is one species is its mollusks, their Molesky bores.

And there are a lot of endangered mollusks in the southeastern U.S. And now you add the world's most successful mollusk eating fish on top of these populations of endangered mollusks.

And you can kind of see where that's going to end up.

Right?

I think that a lot of us , when we think about climate change, we think of these large scale impacts It's top down heat drought What I think that you do beautifully is you take these what seem like small examples and show how they can have knock on effects through an entire food chain.

affect things at a level that you wouldn't think possible, like what does it matter that carbon are changing or moving through different areas?

But of course, there's these consequences that can stretch on for generations.

And that's that, to me, is really fascinating.

I mean, as someone who writes about the environment, it can be kind of a slog to write the same kinds of stories over and over again and the ones that really fascinate me are these bizarre, unexpected stories of little things that are changing the world.

And we don't even know it a lot of time So I want to remind the audience that we're going to take questions at the end of this.

So if you have a question, write it in the chat box and we'll get to it soon.

I wanted to ask you about if you have a favorite example of humans changing the natural world from your book is that the super corals shooting diamonds into the sky?

Is there one that really stood out to you that you still think about?

Well, I still think about all of them, really.

Let's just say they all made a big impression on me, but I guess if I were to single out one , I would single out the super coral, which is as I mentioned before, the story that really got me going on all this.

And there the idea is that corals really don't like it when water temperatures get too high.

They have this symbiotic relationship with the kind of algae , and that relationship breaks down in warm water and they expel their algae and they basically starve to death.

That's the phenomenon known as coral bleaching, and it's really been devastating to reefs around the world, been very devastating to its largest reefs, the Great Barrier Reef.

So the idea behind the Super Coral Project is, well, maybe we can sort of breed up these corals that will be able to withstand higher water temperatures And I think that what is so sort of powerful about that story is, you know, on the one hand, there's a sense where we have to do something for reefs.

We can't just watch them, you know, die there Incredibly important ecosystems And on the other, so so on some level, we could say, well, that sort of a hopeful story And on the other hand, you know, the scale of the problem is so huge.

You know, the Great Barrier Reef is the size of Italy So if you were going to intervene, if you're going to, you know, receive the reefs you're talking about, you're doing something on the scale of Italy, which which honestly seems quixotic, almost impossible.

Although people in Australia are talking about doing very large scale intervention, So it's sort of where , you know, hopefulness meets fantasy and it's hard to know where that line is.

Mm-Hmm.

Yeah, I think that there's this this issue, right where we have a tendency to try and save these really important things The Great Barrier Reef is a good example in Australia.

There , the prime minister there is trying to save the Great Barrier Reef, but it hasn't done much to mitigate the emissions that are affecting it in the first place.

So it's one of those things where it's like what are we trying to achieve here?

And I guess one might feel a bit hopeless looking at the scale of a situation across the board.

I mean, not just, I mean, we talked briefly about a species living around the world getting shaking like a snow globe , the coral bleaching.

All of these impacts of climate change seem so huge.

After writing your book, did you feel more or less hopeful about our outlook?

Well, I my level of hopefulness is not terribly high And I think it was I don't think it moved the needle tremendous sleeve, but I did.

In the process of writing the book, I met a lot of people who are really on the cutting edge of of using some relief , fantastic tools, you know, including gene editing in the middle of the book is really about gene editing, which we are getting astonishingly good at.

And when I say we in the book, I do even do an experiment where I gene edited something you know in my kitchen And every day I read another story about an organism that's been successfully gene edited for one reason or another.

And so I think that, you know, our ingenuity, human ingenuity is incredibly powerful That's why, you know, sort of why we're in the mess we're in right now.

So I never would rule out the possibility that human ingenuity, you know, which got us into this mess will get us out of this mess.

It's not, you know, if you're going to Vegas , it's not necessarily what I would bet a planet on, but it's not impossible.

Yeah.

I think that going forward, I mean, as as governments and people get more desperate to tackle the climate crisis, we're going to increasingly turn to these interventions , some of which you talk about in your book.

What advice would you have or what do you hope that perhaps we can focus on on politicians like what do you hope politicians will will weigh as they think about implementing some of these interventions?

Well, you know, definitely one of the messages in the book and I covered politics before I covered, you know, climate change in the environment.

I covered politics for a long time.

And I don't have a lot of faith in our political systems.

And one of the ironies is that, you know, the more our political system fails , in a sense, the more we are betting on these technologies.

And then we're asking the political system to, you know, regulate or think about these technologies.

It's sort of a weird, vicious cycle But certainly if I could speak to politicians if if, if they cared, you know, I would say be very, very careful.

You know, we we live in a world of unintended consequences.

Right now we are we are dealing with them.

Our kids will be dealing with them , humanity for the foreseeable future.

And I'm talking , you know, millennia we'll be dealing with them.

So be very careful when you set things in motion or I think that something that I've struggled with recently.

You're not the only writer who's been writing about this concept of nature and human intervention.

Other writers been doing it to Nathaniel Rich wrote a book called Second Nature.

Emma Marris is writing about wild animals and whether any animals are even still wild And something I've been thinking about is like, you know, we're in this situation where the world is changing rapidly.

We're behind it.

And there's this nostalgia for going back to how things used to be.

Let's just go back.

But that's not really possible, right?

There's there's no way to sort of unwind the clock, and I would like to talk about that a bit about how, you know, perhaps the natural world as we remember it or imagine it to be doesn't really exist.

And as you write more intervention is, is or is the only option.

Can you talk about that?

A bit?

Well, I do want to, you know, offer an offer another option.

It's not the option You know that I the going back is not possible I think we have to accept that climate change is not stopping once again for the foreseeable future.

Ocean acidification is certainly not stopping even when we reach, you know, net zero emissions, the oceans are going to continue to take up CO2.

We're going to have increasing ocean acidification.

So investors species, you know, you can't really take them back.

You can try to eradicate them.

And I do talk about some pretty exotic and potentially powerful and potentially very scary ways to do that.

But all these things, you know, it's very easy to break an egg is very difficult to put the egg back together again.

And that's sort of the message of the book, I think, but I do want to say, you know, one of Ed Wilson's E.O.

Wilson's last books before he died last year was a book called Half Earth, and in that the sort of idea is , you know, let's try to put aside as much space as possible for species that are going to be on the Moon.

We know they're going to be on the Moon because of climate change to regroup, evolve, you know, hopefully make it through.

His point was sort of hopefully this century , the 21st century will be the century of maximum human impacts on the planet.

And can we get as many species as possible through this century by sort of leaving them alone to the best of our ability?

That is not going to save a lot of species that are on the brink that cannot survive without human intervention.

at this point.

But it might maximize, you know, the number , the sheer number of species that get through.

So I do think that that's an important point to make.

It doesn't mean that the world isn't going to change.

It means the world is going to continue to change.

But the notion that we are going to think our way through this and species by species get them through that does not seem very practical.

Hmm.

I think that I mean, part of what you just touched on is adaptation, right?

There's this concept that at least that I've been thinking about, which is there's these two groups, right?

Mitigation, mitigate the emissions that cause climate change adaptation, adapt to the climate that's baked in.

But there are limited resources.

I mean, there's not a lot of money out there for for these things that there's there could be more, but there just isn't a lot and it's going to require a lot of resources to to, to fix, to undo, to adapt And I'm wondering, this is kind of hypothetical, and I don't think that we're here yet.

But but I wonder whether at some point we're going to have to decide which of these two things.

We want to spend our limited resources on.

I mean, is what you're saying when it comes to species , for example, should we be trying to just save as many as we can at this point?

Is that what we should be directing our our limited resources towards resources towards?

Or how do we think about how to how to weigh these things?

Well, I think it's important when you think about adaptation and mitigation, they're not There's there's a sort of saying in the climate world, you know, manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable.

So the idea that we could, you know, adapt our way out of a constantly changing climate.

I don't think that's very practical either.

Now that's sort of what we are have set in motion.

We're just saying, well, you know, we're just going to keep emitting That means the climate is going to keep changing.

And that means that anything that we adapt to now is going to be out of date, you know, pretty soon because you're going to have a new climate, a new sea level.

So once again, we we've backed ourselves into a true corner here.

And I think that the point that you're making is extremely important because we're going to be dealing with a lot of bad stuff coming at us and the resources that we have right now, which is, you know, potentially the moment of maximum prosperity in human history.

You know, we're going to have to be going to have to deal with them, potentially in a time of more and more limited resources.

So it's a pretty frightening prospect.

But once again, you know, when you don't have a choice, you maybe rise to the occasion.

So I don't think , you know, I don't think that that adaptation and mitigation are are separable.

On some level, they have to go together Otherwise, as I say, you're just consigning yourself to this sort of treadmill of adaptation that simply cannot be achieved.

I guess that's a mixed metaphor I think it works.

I want to ask you a question about your writing process.

So something that me and my colleagues at Grist struggle with occasionally is figuring out how to take a large things, such as climate change that feels so abstract that's not inherently narrative and make it interesting and make it relatable and make it something that people might want to read and that's something that you do very well, in my opinion, and I think a lot people would agree with me that your story is our narrative that you are managed to drill down.

And we talked about this earlier on like a small , seemingly irrelevant to climate change sometimes thing.

And then why didn't that scope and show us how it ties into all of these different things?

So how do you decide what you want to write about at The New Yorker and how do you go about reporting those, those stories?

Well, the New Yorker is very narrative driven.

You know, it's not like necessarily the entire personal, you know, decision.

It's it's sort of the genre of the magazine.

And, you know, it's it's a little bit like , you know, there's the odd Supreme Court decision on obscenity.

You know, you sort of know it when you see it.

And I like all journalists.

I, you know, I read a lot.

I read a lot of other people's stuff.

And when I come across the thread of something, I might be in a piece about seeing totally different.

And I think now there's a thread there, and I sort of, you know, get on the phone like all journalists do and call someone up.

And and if it seems like there's an interesting enough way to get the story going, I will, you know, just try to get out there wherever there is and and take it from there.

And you know, you know, sometimes there are problems you have , you know, you haven't foreseen all the problems we're seeing where this will take you.

But, you know, usually if you do your homework, you can have a pretty good idea of whether things are going to work or not.

And looking ahead , do you have any plans to write any further books or any big projects on the horizon for you?

Well, I do have a project to bring project on the horizon , which I am afraid I'm not going to talk about right now.

but it's not a book.

Has that OK?

Let's do a little I want to turn to the audience questions because you all have submitted some really amazing questions here.

There's a question for Elizabeth from a person named Alan Temple, and they say, what personal philosophy do you subscribe to that helps you deal with what you've learned?

Example Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens, uses a Buddhist Method to Cope.

What do you use I use generalized anxiety, and I don't recommend it is.

No, I don't.

I never hold myself out as a person to emulate.

And in in any way, I'm afraid I don't have a good answer to that.

And I wish I did.

And I often feel like I need one of much better one I wonder that, too.

It's it's hard to figure that one out and something that I read.

I think on Twitter, there was a guy who was a philosopher and he was talking about how, you know, human beings have gotten ourselves into a really terrible place.

But we are a part of the natural world, right?

We are animals.

And to some extent, perhaps what we're doing is relatively natural.

What do you make of that?

I mean, that to me gave me for some reason some some solace, but I don't know if it's really, I mean, helpful Taking the planet because we're humans is not like the most helpful frame of mind, but what do you think?

Yeah, I mean, you do hear that like, OK, well, we humans are just, you know, biological agents, which is absolutely true and the product of evolution and therefore whatever we do must be natural.

But you know, I find it hard to say that, you know, that that skyscraper there or that, you know, electric vehicle or whatever is natural Now, if you want to say that, if you want to sort of extend that definition so that everything that we do and everything that we make is also natural, then then the border does just disappear.

And there's no it's very hard to even have a conversation about it.

Mm-Hmm.

Yeah, we have a question from Judith Ron Graham , who asked a question about Ukraine, how badly do you think the war going on in Ukraine will affect climate change?

Tough question because it's it's still up in the air, right?

But but perhaps I have an answer for.

Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, there are two possibilities as their sort of war with COVID.

And, you know, doubtless we will choose the wrong one.

Sadly, as we did with COVID.

But you know, one one possible would be to use the war in Ukraine to really reevaluate our relationship to fossil fuels.

Obviously, you know, Europe is finding itself cut off from a certain amount of Russian oil and gas and is having to scramble for that to make up for that.

And it had they put in place , you know, more renewable energy sources.

This problem would be a lot less severe.

So that would be one way to say, OK, look, this is just another reminder as case.

We need more than we need to get our fossil fuels.

But the other possible idea, and the one that's unfortunately equally likely, is that people will sort of use this as an opportunity to say, well, you know, we don't want to depend on Russian oil and gas.

Perhaps we'll just draw from orbit in the U.S., you know, and we'll build these liquefied natural gas terminals and Europe, which is also on the table now.

And because and then we'll ship American Gas to Europe.

And so, you know, I think it could be used to justify a lot of new fossil fuel infrastructure or it could be used to say to justify a much faster and more energetic transition of fossil fuels.

And you know, as I say, we tended to always make the wrong call or often make the wrong call , in my view.

But there's still a possibility that it will that that we will make the right call.

But I agree with you that it's sort of too soon to tell right now.

Yeah.

And if anything, I think that signs point to the latter situation unfolding.

I mean, President Biden just recently opened up drilling on public lands, something that he said he would never do on the campaign trail.

A lot of natural gas companies are breaking ground on new projects, which to some extent is necessary right to like, kind of combat the, you know, rising gas prices that perhaps there's some very real present day issues facing.

I guess , in Joe Biden's mind, voters.

But but yeah, I mean, it's tough and it's still ongoing.

There's another question from someone named Randy Howard I think is really great.

He says under a white sky is a great book How will we know when we done sufficient work on preventing or mitigating climate change?

I've never I've actually never.

My questions never occurred.

to me before, so I'm curious what you think?

Well, I think that the you know, my intro, which you know at this point, is kind of so overused as to almost be meaningless, but it does have a meaning.

We will have done sufficient work on climate change.

When we have reached well, it won't be sufficient, but we will have done good work on climate change when we have when we reach net zero emissions.

And I mean that in the strictest possible sense, we are not emitting any more than there's teacup by either the oceans , which has its own bad effects.

So I don't want to let us off the hook or the biosphere.

And that is that means that emissions have to be extremely low.

A small, very small fraction of what they are right now.

That is the only endpoint that stabilizes the climate.

Until then, we have this constantly changing climate that I spoke of earlier And I guess to some extent, people alive today might might never know if we've done enough.

I mean, the point is that we're we're putting it towards the future, putting it forward.

I talked to a climate scientist named Andrew Dessler at Texas A&M, and I asked him for a different for a story a long time ago.

What at what point will emissions come down?

And he said, I was hoping he would say 100 years, 200 years.

And he said, Oh, maybe in a thousand years, two thousand years, 10000 years.

So whatever we do now, it's a future project.

We're just basically putting a down payment on on a more livable planet, right We have another question from someone named and Klausner who wants to know what individuals living in different places in the U.S. who are not billionaires can do about this awful situation.

I expect she means climate change Well, I think that there are two things and there is sort of, you know, somewhat camps in the environmental movement.

And I guess I would say I belong to both camps or neither camp, depending on how you want to look at it.

You know, there's the change your life idea, and there's the , you know, that doesn't matter idea.

All that matters is political action.

And I think both matter.

I think, you know, setting an example, doing the kinds of things that, if everyone did them, would make a big difference The lifestyle changes that they're, you know, unattractive.

We called I do think that's important, and I also think that political organizing and, you know, political action are very are super important.

There's obviously no way we're going to get there without that.

But I I don't I also don't feel that we can just all go on doing exactly what we want by, you know, building bigger houses and buying bigger cars And, you know, flying at the drop of a pin and have political change.

At the same time, I don't I don't think they go.

They go together.

They suggest that we're not serious about this.

So I really think we need both at the same time.

Mm hmm.

I think I want to ask a question about technology that stems from a question someone named Eric Williams just asked.

He basically wants to know, Is there anything that technology can't fix that that we should get used to not having?

And I think that Elon Musk's of the world would have you think that there's nothing to acknowledge you can't fix.

And if we can't fix that, we can just go to Mars But I think it's a valid question.

I mean, is there in the course of reporting your book, did you come across things where you were like , we're going to have to get used to to this just not being around or to a different world?

Well, I think that yeah, I mean, I think that there are a lot of things that technology probably can't can't fix, for example.

You know, there's a lot of people making fake meat.

A lot of people would say fake meat isn't meat.

It's very difficult to get , you know, a hamburger, a genuine hamburger made from a cow that doesn't produce a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.

So I think a lot of the ways that we eat are probably, you know, I it's hard for me to predict the future.

Predictions are difficult to make as the old saying goes, especially about the future.

But I do think if we're, you know, ever going to get our really drive emissions way, way down, we're going to have to eat very differently.

For example, I don't think, you know, we're going to invent a cow that doesn't belch methane.

I think that's going to be extremely difficult to do.

So those that's something that I think technology, you know, we may have to learn to eat very differently if it's something synthetic You know, we are very good at figuring out new ways to do things, new ways to extract , you know, minerals from the world.

We're quite good at that.

So I wouldn't want to say that technology can't, you know, come up with substitutes for most material objects , but it's hard for technology to come up with substitutes for biology.

Well, I don't know if you saw this, but they some climate tech company invented a like a gas mask for cows where they can capture the parts.

And so maybe I'll even be proved wrong on this.

Maybe we will now have gas masks for cows.

Yeah, and then maybe, but it feels a little, you know, making that number of gas masks available for for the world.

I mean, we can barely even get enough masks out there for people with COVID.

So I don't know.

I don't know how feasible that really is.

Yeah, I think we have time for one more question.

I'm just trying to pick the one that I think that you might enjoy Well, here's a tricky one.

Andrew Luck wants to know where you stand on the overpopulation versus over consumption debate.

Well, that's a really good question.

And I want to say I don't I really don't think there should be any , you know, debate here, because once again, it's sort of like not the answer isn't either, or the answer is both You know, our impacts on the planet are a product of how many people there are and how much they're consuming And parts of the world where population is still growing pretty rapidly tend to be very low, consuming parts of the world and parts of the world where population is leveling off because of, you know, people having fewer kids tend to be very high consuming places.

So both of those in continued population growth in places where they still have high population growth levels, that is something that we really need to work on as a world and the overconsumption of high consuming, low birth rate parts of the world is something we really, really need to work on.

So you know, it's not an either or it's definitely a both.

Mm hmm.

Well, I think that's a good note to leave things on.

We've just about run out of time here, Elizabeth.

Thank you so much for being with us for chatting about all of these different and complicated topics.

We really appreciate your time.

Oh, thanks for having me.

And everyone else on either side of the screen.

Thank you so much for being here with us.

There are a number of other amazing sessions happening at the Crosscut Festival that you should definitely tune into.

Thanks again, so much for tuning in to hacking the climate crisis