Protecting Our Environment, with Gina McCarthy

What will it take to keep Earth habitable for humanity? Neil Tyson finds out from EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. Also featuring environmental blogger Andrew Revkin, science historian Naomi Oreskes, co-host Maeve Higgins and Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the hall of the universe. I am your personal astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. And tonight, we're gonna be talking about keeping Earth habitable for humans. And in the United States, there is an agency charged with doing just that. It is the Environmental Protection Agency. And we will be featuring my interview with the head of that agency, Gina McCarthy. So, let's do this.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright.

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As you know, I never do this alone. I always need some help. And so, tonight, we have back as StarTalk comedian, Maeve Higgins. Maeve, welcome back.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  I'm out of prison and ready to start and stand. And thank you for giving me this chance.

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so to talk about the environment, Andrew Revkin. You're a journalist who cares deeply about the fate of life on Earth. That's a good thing. And so, you write a blog for the New York Times? And so, you've been writing for the Times for how long?

• 1:27Speaker 02

  This is my 20th year writing for the New York Times.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  20, 20 years. So, let me ask you, you've been following the environment and our relationship to it.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there any hope for us? Let me start with that. Is there hope?

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Well, yes.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what do you base that hope on? Because recent research among, I guess, is it anthropologists and especially geologists, want to describe a new geologic era called the...

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Anthropocene.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that just means the age of humans, right?

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Right, well, the Holocene was this, since the last ice age, we've been in an epoch called the Holocene. And scientists have proposed we have entered a geological age of our own making, which is what's the new thing.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's kinda cool, though. What's wrong with that?

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, cyanobacteria did this a couple billion years ago.

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They totally did.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  They oxygenated the atmosphere, but they didn't know it. See, that's the thing. We kind of...

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, let's back up. So, so before we had oxygen in the atmosphere, we had these cyanobacteria.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That dined upon whatever was the gases in the air.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And excreted oxygen.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Enabling subsequent creatures to thrive on that. So you can argue that they were the most disruptive creature ever to live on the face of the earth.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, did we name that geologic period after them? No. So, I answer for you. No.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  But they didn't have.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why go up and all blame humans now?

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Well, that's one of the, one of the debates about this is are, aren't we being rather anthropocentric?

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't mind an era or an epic, whatever is the unit, to be named after us.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But my feeling is that you want to call it that because we're doing bad things.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  I actually think there's a decent chance we can navigate this century and come out the other end, those who are around at the other end, saying we did the best we could. And that, you know, there'll be losses. Look at the losses that have already happened. Eighty percent of the tunas and sharks that were in the ocean fifty years ago are gone. But there's plenty, you know, you can rebuild stocks of fish. Uh, the atmosphere has profoundly changed. We're gonna have centuries of climate change, but we can modulate that and do what we can to thrive.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Engage, engage is my thing.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you want to fix the earth?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  No. No, I want to fix us.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, well, sure, we're on, we're part of earth.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Cause that's, of course, the EPA is trying to do that.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're trying to do that, like, starting in the United States. And so, in my, uh, interview with Gina McCarthy, I wanted to find out how she began in this. And how did she go from here to there? From her childhood to being the head of the agency that's charged with watching out for our own health and wellbeing on this planet. Let's check out what she said.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  I grew up in the 60s. You know, I know I look like that's not the case, but it is. I grew up, and when I was a kid, I was outside all the time. Loved the outdoors. To me, an ecosystem is what I looked at when I grabbed a log and I picked it up and you saw all the creepy critters underneath and you realized how vibrant life was.

• 4:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So your heart and mind were already there as a kid?

• 4:34Speaker 03

  They are, and I will be very honest with you. I think one of the biggest threats to the environment is that kids don't go out and play anymore.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I didn't. I didn't really, yeah.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  It's really tough to get them to understand. If you don't have strong science education in your schools, it's really tough to get people engaged and excited about environmental work. But I was outside so often that it became really a part of me.

• 4:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember, I grew up in New York City, and like the rivers were not...

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was not pleasant.

• 5:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stuff floating up in the rivers. How were the waterways of Boston?

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Oh, they're much better, but not when I was a kid.

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you were a kid, how were they?

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Well, we went to the city of Lawrence, which is the heart of the Industrial Revolution. And it used to run green one day, yellow one day, blue one day. We used to take a bet on which one it would be the day we were going by.

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What color the water would be?

• 5:23Speaker 03

  Because that's where the textile industry was, and it depended on whether they were doing yellow, a blue, a red textiles that day. And that's what the color of the river ran. You know, I didn't come from a rich family. I actually did swim in a beach off of Boston Harbor when you really weren't supposed to. And we used to go there as a day trip. It was 20 minutes away, and it was right in a little boatyard. But when you came off, your mother was picking the tar off of you and the oil. But we still loved it, and we still went there. But that's what we had available, and we used it.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe everyone needs to have that kind of experience to

• 6:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to jumpstart their immune system.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Well, I'm pretty healthy, so maybe it would. But it's not what I would suggest to this generation.

• 6:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me ask, how often do you get sick?

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Very infrequently.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  There's gotta be wood I can knock on.

• 6:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. You've...

• 6:17Speaker 03

  I'm pretty healthy.

• 6:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've fixed your...

• 6:19Speaker 03

  Well, there is an argument about getting kids' hands in soil outside and how that exposes them at a young age to different types of germs. At that age, they're gonna be able to get some immunity towards. There's arguments about that. I just think it's really fun to go outside and walk in the woods and play in the mud. And that's what we did as kids. No one told us to, but our mothers simply wouldn't allow us to stay in the house, that's for sure.

• 6:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, she made a comment that more people should go out and play, then they might embrace the environment. Now, I went out and played, I was in the street. So, to me, the environment was cars and trees. So, she must mean go out to nature. So, do you agree that this is what... this would solve all the problems? Or many of them?

• 6:58Speaker 02

  It's a wonderful and vital component of getting people to care about something beyond the built environment. Absolutely.

• 7:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let's find out. Gina, she thinks a lot about awareness of the environment. And let's see her continued take on that.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  We used to, you know, if you had trash and you would, you know, be eating McDonald's in your car, you'd throw it right out the window. This wasn't just, I don't think it was just my family. I'm certainly hoping it's not. It was just, it was so...

• 7:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody did, I remember.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Everything. There was just, you know, the gasoline was awful. When you went to fill up your tank, it just, the emissions coming out of the tanks, because we didn't have the sophisticated equipment now to capture all that. The smoke was everywhere. Boston Harbor, you... I went in it as a kid. I also went to college along Boston Harbor. And even at that point, you were warned, when we went sailing, not to fall in the water, or you'd have to go out and get a shot. You couldn't swim in the Charles River. But now, we have Boston Harbor, that is the engine of the city of Boston. That's the engine of all of our economy there. It's just, things change dramatically for the good, just as much as they change for the bad.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we try to think, what are the drivers that created this change of awareness? Because no one really does that without feeling guilt, even if you did. Throw things out the window with disregard. In fact, there's some interesting scenes in Mad Men, which of course takes place in the 60s. You just see them doing things, "Wow, did we do that?" People walk into an elevator, smoking a cigarette, "Did we do that?" And they finish a picnic and they toss everything on the ground, "Did we do that?" So, why did all this change? What happened in the late 60s? And we go to 1968, the most turbulent year of a turbulent decade. Assassinations, the Tet Offensive, the anti-war movement, and in that year, Earthrise.

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apollo 8. They went to the moon, orbited a dozen, 15 times, and then came back, snapped this picture. This was published in 1968, and we see Earth as nature intended us to view it. Like with oceans and lands and clouds. We go to the moon to explore the moon, and we discover Earth for the first time. And I looked at what happened after this photo was taken. In the four years that we were going to the moon, 68, 69, 70, 71, and into 72? Five years, excuse me. End of 68 into 72, that's when all of this happened. When was the Environmental Protection Agency founded?

• 9:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Seventy. 1970, okay? When was Earth Day founded? Seventy. 1970. We were going to the moon then, and we had other issues in 1970, all right? Assassinations and unrest on college campuses. And all of a sudden, people started thinking about Earth. Earth. Right. 1972, the catalytic converter is introduced. Leaded gas is banned. DDT is banned, 1973. All these early years of the decade. The Comprehensive Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, all was in that period.

• 10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm thinking, we go to space, and why are we going to space? Where do we need space for?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  There's one other really cool thing about that image. It was, you know, you know how the NASA missions are so scripted, they, you know, they plot out everything.

• 10:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  That was unanticipated, and when you listen to the dialogue that took place, it was, hey, get the camera, quick. No one had actually said, hey, we're going to come around the backside of the moon and see the Earth.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They didn't even think to think that.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  And I love the idea that that appreciation, the narrative power of that, actually was more important than the mission part of it.

• 10:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, when StarTalk returns, we're going to find out what kind of new gadgets the EPA is invoking to help us all monitor our environment better on StarTalk.

• 11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk at the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. And we're sitting beneath the Hayden Sphere. Yeah. So we are joined, of course, by Maeve Higgins, straight off the boat from Ireland. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. And Andrew Revkin, longtime journalist for The New York Times, writing .earth.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of the challenges of getting people to change their behavior is to convince them that it is in their best interest, or that they'll save money, or that they'll live longer, or that they'll be happier. Nobody wants to do something they don't want to do. And in a free country, at least we tell ourselves, we live in a free country, if they can't benefit from a behavior change, I don't, I wonder if that's even possible. Would you, you agree with that?

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Oh, I do, and that's why some things are easier to get done than others, including on the environment. The, all the pollution that spawned the environmental movement was actually not that hard to get rid of. You stuck a special filter on a smokestack, or you built a sewage treatment plant. What a novelty.

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  And amazingly, the Hudson River got cleaner, and everyone could, even on a political timescale, someone could cut a ribbon and then take credit for it. And with something like global warming, slowing biodiversity loss, you're talking about things that don't have those... The reward factor isn't there and some of the times it can be really expensive. You know, getting off of carbon is not going to be cheap.

• 12:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I asked Gina McCarthy, what plan does the EPA have to get people on board? Because without incentives, without people being better off for having done so, I wonder if it's even possible, let's get her take on it.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  I think EPA started out in a pretty reactive mode, where people were doing what they were doing and we were trying to catch up and make sure it did things well. Now we have, I think, an opportunity to use data to actually get people much more engaged in thinking about how they interact with the environment and thinking about their behaviors themselves. I'll give you a really quick example. You know that little blue energy style label you see on appliances?

• 13:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh yeah, yeah.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  On washing machines and dishwashers and, I mean, it's all over the place. People love it, they recognize it because we tell them how efficient that product is and they start buying more efficient products because it saves them money.

• 13:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They base decisions on that information.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  And guess what happens? Businesses start basing their decisions on the basis of that information. Because if you want people to buy your product, you make it more efficient. Those are actually, that's an EPA program. Because EPA was trying to reduce greenhouse gases. I didn't say you had to suffer by buying a really lousy piece of equipment because I'm regulating that piece of equipment. I said, "Let's drive the market to recognize that efficiency is good, it saves people money. Businesses who drive towards efficiency will do better." And as a result, the greenhouse gases will be reduced. So it's both changing the impact that human beings have on the environment

• 14:16Speaker 03

  and recognizing that environment is changing, as well as getting tools to be able to continue to have people live the way they want to live. But can I tell you about another technology that we have? As you probably know, people have been... Worried about toxic chemicals for a long time. And EPA is working with a pretty outdated statute right now on how to do an assessment of how to get toxic chemicals in their place, if you will. What's toxic, what isn't, how do you use them? How do you protect people?

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Toxic at what level versus another level, right?

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Right, and what's the management strategy? There are always going to be chemicals out there. How do we protect people and make sure that that we can keep putting chemicals on the market we all need?

• 14:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some of my best friends are made of chemicals, so you don't want to ban all chemicals.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  And I don't want to ban all carbon either, or we'd be withering away. All right, I get all that.

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But how do you spell?

• 15:07Speaker 03

  C A H B O N.

• 15:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Carbon. You're not even embarrassed by your Boston accent.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  No, I love it. Are you kidding me?

• 15:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not trying to suppress it? You're just laying it all out. I interrupted. Please continue.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Let me tell you about this really cool technology. So basically, EPA has been given the job to take a look at how we manage chemicals. And so we have spent the past decades looking at doing a traditional way of doing risk assessments. That has, and we have managed to do something in the order of 50 when there's thousands and thousands of chemicals out there. New ones every single year. And we spent a million bucks on each one. What we're doing now is something called computational toxicology. Okay? Now, this is an ability to basically put our testing on steroids. It's basically testing now that we now finished.

• 15:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not literally on steroids, because that would be putting it on another chemical.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  Actually, I'd have to test those as well. This is actually basically using

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pumping it.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  A robot. It's a robotized program that actually looks at testing thousands of chemicals at once for different characteristics. Where we can use now computerized ways of establishing statistical links. So that we can determine whether it's likely to be toxic or not. And for 30,000 bucks a chemical, we can do, we can move forward to do thousands of them in a short period of time. This is science EPA did. That EPA is going to change the face of science everywhere. And what this does for transforming things is we don't just do the data. We actually put it on the web.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  And because businesses now know that their chemicals will be able to have this really short turnaround time where we can decide whether or not it is a toxic or not in all likelihood. They now are redesigning their chemicals to meet these standards even when they're not even regulated.

• 17:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it looks like they've thought this through in ways that they can change behavior.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Well, there are there's there's

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With tons of opportunities. Without creating a law that requires you to change your behavior. That's brilliant.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  And one other really neat thing is there's a lot of science that shows you that people who can be completely divided over what we call global warming are totally in sync on energy efficiency and on actually investing more in renewable energy. There are liberals and libertarians who agree on that. There's no red, blue states when Yale did some studies along those lines.

• 17:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're all purple with regard to this issue?

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, sort of. We're all yes.

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Red plus blue, I think.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  We're all yes instead of yes, no, yes, no, yes, no.

• 17:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it turns out the EPA has other stuff up their sleeves. Let's find out what's next with the EPA.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  One of the cool things we're doing right now is our scientists actually designed a park bench that we're dropping off in a bunch of cities. And this park bench has an air monitor on it that is solar powered so that you can pick up particulate matter and ozone standards just hanging around, right, in every location where you drop it. And people love this because you can localize it. You can make it personal. You can figure out not just what the ambient air quality is that EPA puts out that takes care of large counties and you can personalize it and figure out what the air quality is in your park, in your community, so that they can take what we do and then work with their own community to keep it safer.

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the park bench is a secret laboratory?

• 18:33Speaker 03

  It's not so secret, but it is a laboratory. Actually, people think it's really cool. So it's not secret, but

• 18:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I worry from a quantum mechanical point of view. I worry that here's this laboratory you've set up disguised as a park bench.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now people sit on a park bench and eat their hamburgers and spill things on it. Doesn't that contaminate the data?

• 18:54Speaker 03

  Actually, the ICA monitor is a little bit higher up. A little bit higher up.

• 18:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't want to tell you how to do your job. I'm just saying, gaseous effluences could influence the data.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  What she's talking about is information. Smart meters are a really good thing. They can connect, they allow utilities to get a better sense on an hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute basis of how their power is being used.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Smart power meters at your home.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, smart meter in your home. And California's had a hard time getting them into people's homes. Very liberal people and very conservative people hate them. Liberals think they're going to give them cancer because it's wireless. And the conservatives think that it's an intrusion into their rights to have the power company know how they're using their power.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who I have sex with is not an intrusion of my personal...

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. Well, there you go. So, you know, there's lots of...

• 19:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  There is lots of potential to build a smarter grid if we go with the flow in a way.

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we'd all be participant in that because the meters would be in our homes.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Actually, new people didn't want to cook their food in a microwave because they thought they would make it radioactive.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, they didn't know that if you just put aluminum foil on your head, it's totally fine.

• 20:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It fixes it. It protects you. Thank you, Maeve, for this insight.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  You're welcome. I'm actually not a trained scientist. I just know this stuff innately.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 20:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, when we come back, you knew it was coming. We could not have this conversation without going there. And yes, we're going to go there. Climate change on StarTalk when we return. StarTalk is back. The American Museum of Natural History. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Maeve, always good to have you back. Andrew, first time we've met this evening. Great to have you on the show.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Great to be here.

• 20:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been writing about the environment your whole life.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Most of it.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Most of your whole life.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 21:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. And in there, you got to talk about climate and what an impact humans are having on climate. Now, if my records are correct here, 2014 was the warmest year on record since 1880.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we've got these other data. 97% of climate scientists agree.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Only on that global warming is reality in humans or most of it.

• 21:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an important fact.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Now, however, there's a famous quote from Galileo who says, and I quote... In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 21:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I've never been happy with people saying 97% of scientists agree, because that's like, so, so, maybe they're wrong. What I, what they should be saying, in my, I am HO, in my humble opinion, is that the overwhelming consensus of experiments give these results. It's the experiments, the results of experiments, that matter here.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  This is a tough one, though, because we're not experimenting, well, we're running only one experiment.

• 22:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Observations, observations and experiments. That's what people report on. That's what we should be looking at. In fact, we have data on the CO2 levels over time, and you see larger scale variations in it, and then you see what's been happening recently. So this seems kind of convincing to me.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  And we know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, meaning that it's one of these gases that's opaque to infrared radiation.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  So you know the planet will get warmer with more of that gas in the atmosphere.

• 22:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, so people just, is it, I don't want to know this, I don't want to believe it's true, I have interests that are not satisfied by believing that we should do something about this. We have data, we have evidence, and they're just, they don't want to agree. And that's a mystery to me. So to get to the bottom of this, we've got Naomi Oreskes on video call from Harvard to give us some insight into what the hell is going on out here. Naomi, are you, are you live with us?

• 23:14Speaker 04

  I am, yes.

• 23:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, there you go. Thanks for, thanks for being on video call with us.

• 23:19Speaker 04

  Well, thank you.

• 23:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, so what's up with the deniers? What's going on? We just looked at a graph of CO2 levels that have been going up. Where is the disconnect? You've studied this?

• 23:34Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, that's the question that I asked myself about ten, eleven, twelve years ago, and it was exactly what you just said. We have all this evidence, we have all this data, and many of the most prominent deniers were actually scientists themselves. So it wasn't plausible to think that they didn't understand the science. There had to be something else going on. And that was the mystery that we set out to answer and that we wrote about in our book, Merchants of Doubt. And the short answer is that these folks weren't interested in the scientific evidence. What they were interested in was a kind of political argument about preventing government interference in the marketplace, preventing the EPA and other organizations like the EPA from taking action to control the hazards and the damage of fossil fuels.

• 24:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what, all you're saying is that there's a subset of scientists who were, whose critical thinking elements of their brain were overrun by their political leanings?

• 24:28Speaker 04

  Well, in a sense, although I wouldn't put it quite that way. It's more like they took on the view that the ends justified the means, that they thought the threat of government intervention in the marketplace was so great. Um, these were old Cold Warriors. In a sense, they're still fighting the Cold War even after the Cold War is over.

• 24:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's we against the communists, basically.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's we against the communists, which helps to explain why you get these strange things, like when you say there's climate change, you get accused of being a communist. Or, you know, Rush Limbaugh accuses climate scientists of being communists. So, part of the mystery was trying to make sense of that. So the idea is that it's us against them, it's democracy against totalitarianism, it's capitalism against communism, and any threat to democracy, any threat to freedom, any threat to the free market system, um, is so profound that it has to be resisted. And even if that means misrepresenting the science, discounting the science, ignoring the science, uh, these people were prepared to do that.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I would have thought that conserving the environment would be a conservative issue. Well, does, does that, uh, where, where did I get that wrong?

• 25:36Speaker 04

  Well, you didn't, and that was true until the late seventies, early nineteen eighties. There was a time in American history where conservatives were passionate about conserving the environment. But after the Nixon administration, the Republican Party took this very strong shift to the right under Ronald Reagan and started to really turn against the whole notion of regulation and turn against the notion of environmental regulation as one aspect of being hostile to regulation in general. And Ronald Reagan began to spread the message that government was the problem, not the solution, that we needed to get government off our backs, and especially that we needed to get government out of the private sector to let the market do its magic.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even if the government has your long-term interest as its highest priority?

• 26:18Speaker 04

  Well, Ronald Reagan didn't believe that. He thought that the government, you know, that that was, the government, government might say that, but in the end, that wouldn't be what was, would happen. And so, the entire Republican Party really shifted in a very, very dramatic way from where it had been only ten or twelve years before. And that put them on a collision course with science. I don't think Ronald Reagan set out to disrespect science, but the net result was that the political positions they took were incompatible with accepting what the scientific evidence was telling us about issues like acid rain, the ozone hole, and global warming.

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. All right, well, Naomi, thanks for joining us on StarTalk.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  Thank you very much. Pleasure.

• 27:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, climate change is that real, presumably the EPA is ready to do something about it. I went straight to Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the EPA, to find out what are they doing about climate change? Let's check it out.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  I'm moving forward to develop a standard that will lower carbon pollution that's fueling climate change from our power sector, the companies that generate electricity. It's extremely important for us to tackle it because they are the largest source of carbon pollution in this country. We're doing it by developing a rule. We put out a proposal, it's called our Clean Power Plan. And basically, it's an effort for the federal government to look at the science, for EPA to look at the science, and to say what kind of standards we can achieve over the long term, to send a signal to the energy world that we need to be shifting towards a low-carbon future. But every state's going to translate that into their very own plan, based on where they are today.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  And that plan is going to be done in a way that meets their energy needs, doesn't threaten reliability, doesn't change the affordability of energy for all of us. No lights are going to be shut out, but we're going to actually head towards a low-carbon future and jobs of the future as well.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Andrew, is that plausible? Or is that hot air? I know, it's totally plausible, and it's happening. And the Supreme Court gave the EPA the authority to do this. A lot of the challenge with climate is that the costs come in the future, and we have this bad habit of discounting future costs. They call it a discount rate that you apply to the future. And again, as a scientist, you'd go, "Wait, wait."

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Is that like people who smoke, they're like, and you're like, "That's going to take five years off your life, but I don't care, love it."

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Well, in a way, that's right. The real-time benefit, whatever that might be. Outweighs the future. Outweighs their sense of that future doom that someone is doing this about. So you wrote a book that talked about the North Pole? I did. You've been to the North Pole? I was. Did you see Santa? Vatican North Pole, pretty cool. Did you see Santa Pole? I did. Good, I just want to verify that. But he spoke Russian.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  If you go on YouTube, you can see proof of this, actually. I would have thought Santa would have been eaten long ago by polar bears. They had shotguns.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  He would be so delicious.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  The elves had shotguns. Seriously.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  The elves had shotguns.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Well, the camp workers had shotguns.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  So he was Russian, but the elves were American.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  No, at the Russian camp, the elves were Russian.

• 29:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, at the North Pole, what's so, in your work, what was so particular about the North Pole?

• 29:46Speaker 02

  So many things are cool, wonderful at the North Pole.

• 29:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but as an indicator.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, oh.

• 29:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were just gonna be like, "The food."

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Well, scientists, no, I was...

• 29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Restaurants.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  The food was horrible.

• 29:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The nightlife.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  It was, yeah.

• 30:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The six months of nightlife.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  What was wonderful was scientists that I was there to report on, um, this is 2003. From 2001 until now, every year, they go fly to, under the sea ice. At the North Pole, remember, the North Pole is not like...

• 30:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no land there.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  It's not like Antarctica. You're in the middle of the ocean and you're camped on sea ice that's about from here to the floor. So it's about eight feet thick. And it's moving and shifting and cracking. And they're camped there for a number of days, drop instruments down to the ocean to try to get a consistent... This is measurement, measurement, measurement. You gotta go to the same place, the same time, the same year, the same equipment each year by year, and you can start to get a sense of change. It's really hard to measure sea ice change, uh, the thickness of it, without being there and kind of putting instruments under the ice and stuff. So I was reporting on the process of learning about change. They haven't actually concluded, you know, we know about sea ice reducing and all that stuff, but the details are still hard and scientists have to go...

• 31:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To set up that experiment properly, to make the observations.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  And divers had to go under the ice to get the instruments back, and I mean, it's just amazing. I love, I love science.

• 31:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, coming up, we're actually gonna take questions from the public on the environments of the world when StarTalk returns.

• 31:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk. So you know what time it is? It's time for the Cosmic Queries part of StarTalk. Maeve, do you have questions for me from our fanbase, from Twitter, from Facebook?

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. This one is from Ben Ariala in Sacramento, also California. Considering Earth's current climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels, what would you say it would take for the planet to reach a runaway greenhouse scenario like the one that left Venus the way it is now?

• 32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it turns out, we, as far as we can tell, will never be in a runaway tipping point greenhouse scenario.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because all the carbon that is now underground was once above the Earth's surface. So if we burned every bit of carbon fossil fuel that's down there, we will recreate the atmosphere somewhere around when the dinosaurs were hanging out. And in a period of when we had the dinosaurs, there were no polar ice caps, water levels were really high, and the world was very different. Coastlines were different. Of course, continental drift had rearranged the shapes of the continents as well and the positions of them on Earth. So, no, it will not be a runaway greenhouse effect, but the world would be really different. In fact, you know the Statue of Liberty?

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we melted the land-based ice, principally on Antarctica and Greenland, the sea levels will rise up to the elbow of her hand that's holding the Declaration of Independence. That would be the water levels in New York. So nothing would be above water. This is serious. This is a different Earth. So the problem is, we built our civilization in a relatively stable period of Earth's climate. Whatever that was, that's how we built Earth. We put our cities there, on coastlines, on rivers. Water and land, that intersection is a fundamental part of what it was to build civilizations

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  for commerce, transportation, for irrigation, for your crops. So you want to change that? You're gonna have to move the greatest cities our civilization has ever created, you're gonna have to move them inland 100 miles. This is not a productive way to run your civilization.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  And he's already in Sacramento.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Come on, Ben.

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, no, we're safe from becoming Venus, thankfully.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 34:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, good, good. So, what's interesting is, right now, we were just thinking about the solar system and other planets, but what is the transition, I wonder, especially directed to you as a journalist? The transition between thinking locally, "I want to clean up my river," "I want to clean my air," and thinking globally? I had to check in with Gina McCarthy to find out what's their take on how we're doing in the transition from thinking locally to thinking globally. Let's check it out. As Carl Sagan famously said, pollutants don't carry passports.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Air will go everywhere, water goes everywhere. So, do you have any sense of when people first started thinking globally?

• 34:54Speaker 03

  I'm not sure a lot of people have.

• 34:58Speaker 03

  You know, I think you may be a little bit, in this regard, a little bit positive. They think about it, I think we're getting there. I think air quality is where that became much more apparent, because everybody thinks of water locally. We still are challenged to figure out how to get our arms around that. Air quality changed everything, I think. But it's still very challenging, and on a problem like climate, if you don't think of it globally, you know, if you don't act locally and think globally, you're going to be in trouble. So, we've been using that motto since the 60s.

• 35:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great motto.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  But I'm not sure it comes to roost until people understand that they individually have impacts that collectively we need to resolve.

• 35:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Andrew, who's doing best in the world thinking globally? What country?

• 35:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can say, "I don't know."

• 35:47Speaker 01

  I guess Scandinavia.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Rich?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Scandinavia, like, maybe Norway?

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Well, yes, but Norway exports an awful lot of oil. So, they have a very clean economy, but they export the oil and part of their wealth. They just, they said they're going to, I love this, Norway has what's called a sovereign wealth fund that was built on oil money, and they're going to, they want to divest from coal. They're taking that money out of coal investments, but the money came from oil, so...

• 36:21Speaker 01

  So who's winning?

• 36:23Speaker 02

  Right now, coal is still actually, well, coal and oil are kind of in a race, unfortunately. They're kind of winning still, and that's what makes this a real tough challenge. And by the way, that's what circles me back to science, because, you know, we are going to keep using fossil fuels until something comes around that is as seamlessly plug-in-able to our systems, and that's not there yet.

• 36:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, when we come back, we're going to talk about countries that are not thinking globally about their economies and their environment, and wonder, what is anybody doing about it, when StarTalk continues?

• 37:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk, from the Coleman Hall of the Universe, here at New York City. Maeve? Yes. Love having you. Thank you. Andrew? We're all there. Andrew, there are countries leading the world in polluting the air and water. Who's at the top of that list?

• 37:33Speaker 02

  China leaped past us a few years ago to become, for carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, they're the dominant source now.

• 37:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're not number one in that anymore?

• 37:42Speaker 02

  No, no we're not.

• 37:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you can get back there.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  By the way, they're also tops.

• 37:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got to try harder.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're trying, they know that their coal use is unsustainable, and domestically, they realize it's unsustainable. They actually couldn't import it and mine it fast enough to keep up with the rate at which they were electrifying.

• 38:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so they're the worst pollutants, but they're self-aware.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  But they're also aware of markets. They're building solar panels faster, more, cheaper than anyone else.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they could be leading the world, and then to corner the market in the stuff that'll... Keep the world clean while they're making the world dirty.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  In fact, the availability of those cheap panels is partially what's facilitated booming industry here in installing those panels. So it's become affordable here.

• 38:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But also killing whatever industry that was nascent here.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Well, you know, that's, this is, there's a trade.

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the world economy.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  You balance trade issues with getting the right technology out there, you know, it becomes interesting in a hurry.

• 38:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, in my interview with the head of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, I had to ask her, you know, environment is not just the United States. Are they thinking about the rest of the world? I had to go there and find out what she says. Check it out.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  China has some difficult air quality problems in their cities. One of the things that brought that to the fore was in Beijing, we put an air monitor in the US embassy and we started tweeting out what those levels said to our own staff because they were concerned about their own kids being out in an area where the air quality was so bad. That started getting picked up by the people who live in Beijing. And the people who live in Beijing looked at what the federal government was telling them, the central government, and realized that our data didn't look like that. As a result, now you have China recognizing that problem. We're there, US technology is there, monitoring in a good system, and things change.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Oh, I'd say China was delighted with that.

• 39:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give it up for the power of the tweet.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so are there any examples of, of pollutions crossing?

• 39:47Speaker 02

  There was an estimate that a third of the smog in California was Chinese pollution.

• 39:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A third?

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I'm quite sure of that number. I could, I'd have to, you know, look it up on it.

• 39:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But convert it to Fahrenheit and what do you?

• 40:01Speaker 01

  This might be stupid, but like, in China, they're making stuff that's being used in America though, right? Like they're manufacturing products that we use here all the time.

• 40:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  So isn't it like, sort of like, fair enough in a weird way that like? We get their pollutants also, like not just their like phones.

• 40:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I see. Interesting.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  But she's right, that you know, there actually have been studies that have measured the the embedded energy or carbon in an exported good, you know, whose carbon is that? Is it China's or is it the country that's that sold China the coal? Or is it the person that's buying the toaster from China? There you can do those analyses and turns out like Europe got kind of cleaner the last decade or so, but that was because a lot of European manufacturing moved to China. And so is that and the goods still go to Europe or to wherever. So that you actually you're on it, you're on a point that people are trying to figure out.

• 40:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's a fascinating, so you so nature is forcing the United States to share in the pollutants of the products made by China that we are consuming.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's karma for you, right there, right? So Andrew, you haven't really left us with much hope in anything that's come out of your mouth. I don't even know if you know how to write about hope. So I asked Gina McCarthy.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 41:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there no hope for any of this? Let's find out what she says.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  I think our challenge is to make sure that people recognize that if you face the science, if you have a problem, running towards it is where you want to go. Being afraid of it because you're worried about the actions you need to fix it just holds you in place and the world never changes. You never innovate, you never develop that next technology. What we have seen is the growth of technologies that never would have happened because we've identified a problem and begun to tackle it.

• 41:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you imagine in 50 years, you are so effective that you put yourself out of business?

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Wouldn't that be lovely? But right now it's beyond my imagination.

• 41:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's too, that's too much of a fantasy.

• 41:57Speaker 03

  It really is, but.

• 41:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you can just fix all the problems.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  The life changes, right? Everything changes and you know as well as I that the more you learn, the more you see. You know, you realize the challenges and that next come up. You know, we've been able to reduce air pollution 70% since EPA came around. And at the same time, our GDP has tripled. Don't tell me that this is not somehow going to be irrelevant to the future.

• 42:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Andrew.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there a, uh, is anyone still talking about the Gaia hypothesis of Earth? Where Earth will heal itself? That Earth is almost like a, an organism that has self-interest in mind? Are people still talking about that? That was all the rage back when.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  That was all the rage.

• 42:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  But James Lovelock, Lovelock, who wrote, who penned the Gaia hypothesis with others, he then.

• 42:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Lynn Margulis, I think, was also a proponent.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. He later wrote a book called Gaia's Revenge, which was about us getting pounded by this force because we're messing with it.

• 42:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Earth will kill us?

• 43:00Speaker 02

  That was his thesis. Although he's now, he's in his 90s and he's writing another book. He's just written another book that's more, uh, actually hopeful.

• 43:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Earth will kill us, but not other life forms?

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Well.

• 43:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is an evil Mother Nature, right?

• 43:15Speaker 02

  In, in that, well, he was seeing us as the, uh, sort of the disease that needs to be, you know, managed.

• 43:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, when we come back, we will find out where in the universe we will catch up with Bill Nye the Science Guy, my friend and colleague, when we return on StarTalk. We're back. StarTalk. We've been talking about climate, we've been talking about the environment, and right now it's time to check in on my good friend, Bill Nye the Science Guy, former resident of California. He's, lives in New York City now.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  We got him.

• 44:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and we got him. And I, you know, I never know where he is, and I don't even see these until like right now. But he's gonna share with us his reflections and his understanding of what environment means. Let's check him out.

• 44:19Bill Nye?

  The birds, the bees, the butterflies, and the trees, they're all from the earth, and so are we. We are all earth stuff. And today is beautiful. Today is a walk in the park. It is a park. And it's right here in the city. Half the people in the world now live in cities. And so many of us think of cities as being separate from nature. But how can it be? Nature built us, and we built all of this. It's our home. But it's also our house. Here's what I mean. If you have a house, you can't just call the landlord and complain if something goes wrong with the lighting or the plumbing. You have got to get it fixed.

• 45:03Bill Nye?

  Now, everyone you'll ever meet is from the earth. The earth is our home. But it's also our house.

• 45:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Andrew, what do you think about that? We're owners, not tenants. That's a pretty sensible perspective. Would you agree?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, way back in college, I remember a professor of comparative literature told me that in Italian, you don't own property, you hold property. I mean, I'm not from Italy, and I don't... He said historically, it was holding. And I think that's actually a valuable way to think about it as well.

• 45:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I actually have a bias in terms of what kind of pollution I care most about. And I brought that up with Gina McCarthy. Let's check it out.

• 45:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've had initiatives about trying to get people outside to explore nature. And to me, part of exploring nature is looking up. Without light pollution, we have a relationship with the night sky. And with it, you don't even know it's there.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  I did do an initiative in Connecticut called No Child Left Inside. It was just an effort to connect kids with the outside world and families. So we did a lot of running around in parks. But one other thing we did was bring them out to the night sky.

• 46:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You did have telescopes.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  We did have telescopes.

• 46:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OK, so you're in the club.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  But the other thing we did, and this is what impacted me, is we just made them go in a quiet place that didn't have everybody around and look up. It gives you a sense of the breadth of the universe, how small you are. I want every teenager to do that who thinks their world is this small and who worries about the next email that they might see that talks about them. Go in the big world and see how vast it is. And get a sense of yourself in it and what an amazing thing it is. It changes your perspective forever. And you're absolutely right. That's one of the reasons why we have to be worried about light pollution. Because the way in which we disconnect ourselves from the natural world means that my job gets harder and harder.

• 46:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So she's really describing the early stages of a cosmic perspective. Again, I'm an astrophysicist and so we live big. All our numbers are big and the sizes of things are big and time scales are big. And when I look at Earth rise over the moon, I remember, I'm that old, I remembered when that photo was published. We all had to stop and take pause at the meaning and significance of that image. Here's Earth rising over somebody else's horizon, afloat there in the dark vacuum of space.

• 47:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think it's possible to affect you emotionally, even subliminally. You're down here and you're thinking, I gotta protect the whole thing, not just my stream, my pond. I want to protect the whole Earth. And this is not a new thought. I dug up a few lines from T. S. Eliot, with which we will end this show. "We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time." You've been watching StarTalk. And as always, I, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist,

• 48:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  bid you to keep looking up.