Should We Dim the Sun? Will We Even Have a Choice?

“We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand famously wrote in “The Whole Earth Catalogue.” Human beings act upon nature at fantastic scale, altering whole ecosystems, terraforming the world to our purposes, breeding new species into existence and driving countless more into extinction. The power we wield is awesome. But Brand was overly optimistic. We did not get good at it. We are terrible at it, and the consequences surround us. That’s the central theme of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.” And yet, there is no going back. We will not return to a prelapsarian period where humans let nature alone. Indeed, as Kolbert shows, there is no natural nature left — we live in the world (and in particular, a climate) we altered, and are altering. The awful knowledge that our interventions have gone awry again and again must be paired with the awful reality that we have no choice save to try to manage the mess we have made. Examples abound in Kolbert’s book, but in my conversation with her I wanted to focus on one that obsesses me: solar geoengineering. To even contemplate it feels like the height of hubris. Are we really going to dim the sun? And yet, any reasonable analysis of the mismatch between our glacial politics and our rapidly warming planet demands that we deny ourselves the luxury of only contemplating the solutions we would prefer. With every subsequent day that our politics fails, the choices that we will need to make in the future become worse. This is a conversation about some of the difficult trade-offs and suboptimal options that we are left with in what Kolbert describes as a “no-analog moment.” We discuss the prospect of intentionally sending sulfurous particles into the atmosphere to dim the sun, whether “carbon capture” technology could scale up to the levels needed to make a dent in emissions levels, the ethics of using gene editing technologies to make endangered species more resistant to climate change, the governance mechanisms needed to prevent these technologies from getting out of hand, what a healthier narrative about humanity’s relationship with nature would sound like, how the pandemic altered carbon emissions, and more. At the end, we discuss another fascinating question that Kolbert wrote about recently in The New Yorker: Why is a Harvard astrophysicist arguing Earth has already been visited by aliens, and should we believe him? Mentioned in this episode: Whole Earth Catalogue Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth by Avi Loeb Recommendations: "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald "The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka" "The Song of the Dodo" by David Quammen "Global Warming (The Complete Briefing)" by John Houghton "Cosmicomics" by Italo Calvino "The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster "Charlotte’s Web" by E. B. White You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.

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

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  I'm Mr. Klein, and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:20Ezra Klein?

  So it's only February, but I'm pretty sure Elizabeth Colbert's "Under a White Sky" is going to be on my best books of 2021 list. It's a wonderful work. Colbert is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of "The Sixth Extinction," which you may have read. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker, and just one of the great science journalists of this time, and particularly one of the great climate journalists of this age. But this book, this book's existence is evidence of how badly that fight is going. This is a book about what we are going to need to contemplate in the coming years that we don't want to. It's a book about taking responsibility for how irreversibly we have altered the natural world, how often we have tried to control it, and then watched those attempts at control fail, how often the best,

• 1:04Ezra Klein?

  most scientific minds of the age have come up with some brilliant solution, implemented it, and then watched calamity result. And at the same time, and this is what makes a book so worthwhile, it is a book about how there is no going back, not now, not ever. We are in the Anthropocene. The future from here is an endless layering on of new efforts to control the consequences of our past efforts. We don't get to flinch or pretend we don't have to contemplate any of this. We've gone too far. One of the hardest things to do as a writer, and I tell you this from personal experience, is to write ambivalence. It's easy to write a polemic or a sharp take. It is hard to write down the middle path, where you are simply describing things as they are, knowing that every possible, obvious

• 1:49Ezra Klein?

  answer you can come to is probably a bad one, knowing that the hubris embedded in past attempts to solve this problem means any future brilliant idea is likely to end that way, too. But that doesn't mean we can do nothing. But Colbert walks that path really beautifully here, which is why I wanted to talk to her for the show. As always, my email is ezra klein show at mytimes.com. I'm always interested to know who you'd like to see on the show, weirder the better. So send me your guest suggestions. Here's Elizabeth Colbert.

• 2:22Ezra Klein?

  So Stuart Brand had famously opened up the Whole Earth Catalog by writing, "We're as gods and might as well get good at it." And you talk a little bit about this line in the new book, but it seems to me the message of the book is that we are as gods, but we are very, very bad at it.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  I think that's a fair reading of the book, has that.

• 2:39Ezra Klein?

  Tell me a little bit about that. There's a trajectory here from, you wrote in '06, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, which is one of the early great books on climate change. Then The Six Extinction in 2014, which is about this human-led mass extinction. And now this book, which is about how we can extricate ourselves from what we have done to nature. Can you tell me a bit about how your thinking has changed over the course of this long project?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Well, the sort of genesis of this project, one project has flowed into the next, the way it is true, I'm sure, for many journalists and writers. And after The Six Extinction came out, I went sort of looking for, okay, you know, what's the next step here? What are we going to, quote unquote, do about this? And I came upon a project. I went to Hawaii to report on a project that had already been nicknamed the Super Coral Project. And the idea behind the Super Coral Project, which was run by a very charismatic woman named Ruth Gates, who very sadly passed away about two years ago. So when I was sort of midway through this book,

• 3:46Speaker 01

  the idea was we've changed the oceans very radically. We're warming the oceans. That's a function of climate change, of pouring a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere. And we've also changed the chemistry of the oceans. Ditto a function of pouring a lot of CO2 into the air. And one group of organisms that really doesn't like the changes that have already been produced is reef-building corals, the little tiny animals that build coral reefs. So Ruth's idea was we've already changed the oceans. We're not getting the oceans of the past back in any foreseeable future. If we want to have reefs in the future, we're going to have to basically manipulate reefs.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  We're going to have to try to create more resilient corals. And this kind of... Intervention, so one intervention in the natural world to counteract the effects of another intervention struck me as a sort of opening up a new chapter in our relationship, our long and very vexed relationship with the natural world. And when I started to think about it, I started to see that sort of pattern everywhere. And that became the genesis of the book.

• 5:02Ezra Klein?

  And so you write, "If there's to be an answer to the problem of control, it's going to be more control. Only now it's got to be managed. It's not a nature that exists or is imagined to exist apart from the human. Instead, the new effort begins with a planet remade and spirals back on itself, not so much the control of nature as a control of the control of nature." And so as I understand the book, part of what you're saying is that we have caused all these problems, or changes at the very least, with our attempts to control nature, but we are now in so deep that there is no going backwards. There is only more control. So there's only unknown in front of us, right? Is that fair?

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Yes, I think that's fair. I mean, there are many, many choices to be made, but you know, we are in so deep that one of our options is no longer to just say, oh, let's go back to the way things were. I'll give you an example that's not in the book, but that could have been in the book. In addition to changing the carbon cycle very dramatically, so you know, by burning fossil fuels and releasing a lot of the carbon that was buried underground into the atmosphere, we've also really, really dramatically changed the nitrogen cycle on Earth. And the way we've done that is by producing synthetic fertilizers. And

• 6:21Speaker 01

  these fertilizers, you know, there are many, many side effects for sort of drenching the world in nitrogen. You know, one of them is that we create these huge dead zones, anoxic zones in the oceans, which are, which are growing. Now, you could say, well, Let's try to fix that. Let's try to, and certainly we should, and we should certainly be using nitrogen fertilizer a lot more carefully than than we are. And there are, you know, all sorts of things we could do to try to ameliorate this problem. But the basic fact is that, you know, billions of people are alive today because of synthetic fertilizers. And it's simply not a viable solution to say, you know, we shouldn't be using nitrogen fertilizers.

• 7:03Ezra Klein?

  So one of the scary parts about your book, from the perspective of anybody thinking about how to fix anything, is it, it is a continuous record of well-intentioned interventions going terribly awry. And that's even true for seemingly natural solutions. I think there's this idea that if an intervention is natural, like unleashing a foreign predator as opposed to a pesticide into an ecosystem, that'll be better. But that's not really proven true either. And so you open the book with silver carp. Can you tell a bit of that story and its moral?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Sure. So that story begins, it's sort of a two-part story. And the first part of the story begins as the city of Chicago is growing up on the banks of the Chicago River. And the Chicago River is flowing east out of the city and carrying all of the city's waste. As Chicago grows up, it carries all of its human waste. And as tremendous stockyards in Chicago grow up, it also carries the city's stockyard waste. And it was said that the Chicago River was so thick with filth that a chicken could walk across it without getting her feet wet. And this was not only, you know, disgusting, but by flowing east, the river flows, was flowing into Lake Michigan, which was Chicago's source of drinking

• 8:22Speaker 01

  water and still is Chicago's source of drinking water. So you had all sorts of outbreaks of waterborne disease. So around the turn of the 20th century, Chicago decided to reverse the flow of the Chicago River. It was a tremendous construction project, one of the biggest of its day. And that was accomplished by digging a canal. It's called the Sanitary Ship Canal. Which connected the Chicago River up to the Mississippi Drainage Basin. And in the process, connected these two huge drainage basins, the Mississippi Drainage Basin and the Great Lakes Basin. So fast forward about 60 years and we get Silent Spring,

• 9:04Speaker 01

  which tells us that we're drenching the world in chemicals, which, you know, we were, we are still. And we should try to find better solutions to our problems. And one solution that Rachel Carson recommends is, as you suggested, using one species against another. So some of the species that are brought in are various species of carp, silver carp and grass carp and big head carp, all native to Asia. They're brought in to do different things, all forms of biocontrol, though. In one case, to eat aquatic weeds or to help with the nutrient loading that comes from sewage treatment plants or lack of sewage treatment plants.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  And they get loose and they wreak havoc in the Mississippi Drainage System. And then, fast forward to the present day, there's a tremendous amount of concern that having connected these two drainage systems, the carp are going to get into the Great Lakes and wreak havoc there. And so what has happened is, and this is a case of an intervention sitting on top of an intervention, that parts of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal have now been electrified to try to dissuade the carp from making that move. And as part, as the opening of the book, I take a trip to the electric barriers, which was actually a great adventure.

• 10:26Ezra Klein?

  So to situate this, I think, in the, in the broader conversation it's part of, you wrote recently in a, in a piece in The New Yorker, that with much of the world under lockdown, global emissions were around 6% lower in 2020 than they were in 2019. Though this drop was the largest on record, it was still not enough to put the world on track to meet the 1.5 degree Celsius goal set out in the Paris Accord.

• 10:49Ezra Klein?

  And so I would not say this book is an argument for geoengineering, but I would say, and you can tell me if this is wrong, this book is an argument that we are past the point, given how rapidly we are able to move the global economy, when it seems likely that we have the luxury of not thinking about things like geoengineering, when we have the luxury of saying, some things are just off limits because we can't change the world that much. We've already changed it so much that the unthinkable now has to be thought. Is that how you approached it?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's a reasonable interpretation. I mean, I think that you could look at, you know, the chapter on geoengineering, which is probably, although I also talk about genetic engineering, so, you know, I guess you could take your pick, you know, the most fraught and controversial. So the book sort of begins with things that are already happening. I mean, the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal, you know, it's already electrified. You could already, you know, jump in and get yourself electrocuted to things that are more slightly futuristic, but eminently, you know, possible. And I think the chapter on geoengineering, you could read it as you've just described, you could say, we are past the point of having that luxury. I think that's a very valid

• 12:06Speaker 01

  reading. And you could also read it as a species that has managed to muck up the atmosphere one way, thinking about mucking up the atmosphere another way, you know, what could possibly go wrong? I think those are both very valid readings.

• 12:21Ezra Klein?

  You have a wonderful quote in the geoengineering chapter, which to me really, really gets at the core of this discussion from Andy Parker, who's a project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, which, which wants the geoengineering conversation. And he says, "We live in a world where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it." That feels like An indictment of the human race and where we've gotten ourselves to with all our with all our knowledge and all our power.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Yes, I think that that does sort of sum things up and it gets to your point that

• 12:56Speaker 01

  we are in this very deep and it's sort of the meme, you know, only wrong answers, only hard choices at this point, nothing easy from here on in.

• 13:07Ezra Klein?

  What do you think of geoengineering?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Well, I hope a sense of respectful horror comes through, has that some very, very smart people are thinking about it and are, you know, very worried that it may be our best option at a certain point, you know, they may unfortunately be right, but you know, wow, dimming the fucking sun, you know?

• 13:31Ezra Klein?

  It seems to me that we need to be spending many billions of dollars studying it and other things, not because we want to do it, but because either we may have no choice, or we may learn something that is a reason we absolutely can never, under any circumstances, do it. And I've looked into this a little bit and the amount of money, you know, there's some, some rich guys supporting it. There's like a study now with David Keith, but there's really been for as much discussion as it gets, very little money spent trying to figure this out. And I'm not sure we have that luxury now.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Well, I think that that's a viewpoint shared by more and more people and you are seeing these, you know, tiny little appropriations, they're not enough, you know, if you were, if you were thinking this is humanity's last best hope, wow, you know, as you say, you'd be pouring billions into it. It is still at this point. And it was a point made to me by the scientists who run the Harvard solar geoengineering research program, which is sort of the best financed of the groups and the farthest along. It's very, very politically toxic at this point. And, you know, and maybe that's good. I don't know the answer to that question. So for example, they are thinking of doing and simply putting up a balloon

• 14:44Speaker 01

  to see, you know, whether that's viable, just to do this study that would require a balloon in the stratosphere, not even, you know, just, this is not even an experiment. This is just like an experiment to do an experiment and that will be tremendously controversial and I'm not sure it will get off the ground.

• 15:00Ezra Klein?

  How you feel about geoengineering and some of these other ideas we're going to discuss? I think this depends on how you feel about the traditional political pathways. So let me put that question pretty directly to you. Do you think there is a significant chance that traditional politics, the legislatures we have right now around the world, including in America, are going to do enough to keep us under two degrees?

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Well, I think that we face multiple problems along the way. So two degrees is, to be honest, political rather than geophysical reasons been decided upon as the sort of goal, keep average global temperatures for rising more than two degrees. And many, many scientists and many nations, whole nations that could disappear between here and two degrees, low-lying island nations would say, well, that's really too high. And then so there's this sort of stretch goal, if you want, in the Paris Accord of 1.5 degrees. Now, 1.5 degrees, if you're going to be honest about it, I think you have to say, well,

• 16:09Speaker 01

  we're basically at 1.5 degrees now. So that is not just a hard goal to reach. It's getting to be almost geophysically impossible. Now, two degrees, I think probably, and I'm no expert on this, there are many, many, many studies that have been done on it, but presumably it is still physically possible to do it. Then that gets to the point you're making. Is the world set up to do this? And the problem is not just that our legislative, in the US, that we are legislatively gridlocked, that we are incapable, so far at least, and we can talk some more about what might the

• 16:52Speaker 01

  next two years or four years look like, but so far at least have been really incapable of taking significant action. And we are the major, I do want to add, the US is still the biggest single source of greenhouse gases that are up there in the atmosphere right now. And then you have to look all around the world at all of the major players in this drama. China, which is now the single biggest emitter on an annual basis, the EU, which is a very big emitter, India, which is increasingly a large emitter. So you have to ask, are we all going to get our act together?

• 17:28Ezra Klein?

  One of the questions I struggle with most in my own work right now is, what do you do? What should it make you do if you believe that it is no longer politically plausible that normal politics will get to a reasonable outcome here? Would you say normal politics will even hold temperatures below 2 degrees? What should that put on the table? And sometimes I think about technological solutions, huge amounts of money being spent on not just renewables, but potentially studying things like geoengineering. Sometimes I wonder about things that are somewhere between political activism and extra-political, right? Really aggressive forms of direct activism, like shutting down cities.

• 18:09Ezra Klein?

  If you read Kim Stanley Robinson's new book, The Ministry for the Future, he's clearly contemplating what it would mean when violence begins to be away. People try to move opinions on this, eco-violence. Where are you on this? If you begin to give up on politics, where does that leave you?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Well, I guess I plead journalism here. You know, I'm a straight-up journalist. I report on what's happening. And, you know, this latest book and the previous books are all very much on the ground, reporting what is happening. Now, when we get into the, you know, what should we do or what could happen now owing to our failures? And that's certainly where geoengineering, you know, comes in. A lot of very smart people saying, "Look at the political system. It's just not capable of moving fast enough." And, you know, the last 30 years are a pretty depressing proof of that.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  So you're led either to a techno-fix or you're led to a carbon dictatorship. I don't know what you're led to if you say, "Well, we just are incapable of moving fast enough under politics as they are." And I think that the point I think that's really important is, on some level, unfortunately or fortunately, maybe, it's unknowable. I mean, how people will react all around the world, this is going to affect... You know, everyone is going to affect some people much more brutally than others. Obviously, people living at the margins of society already, you know, just eking by presumably, you know, already are getting hit the hardest by climate change. And that will continue.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  But really, all of us, everywhere, you know, New York City, San Francisco, Mumbai, every major coastal city in the world is going to be grappling with this. And every farmer in the world is going to be grappling with this. And how people will respond and whether they will respond the same way all around the world, impossible to know.

• 20:11Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I just, I struggle with this because I am a political reporter and I try to say what's happening. And the thing that I think is happening is that the political system will not respond. And I just don't know where that leaves you. There are very, because global warming is such a distinctive issue in the way that it becomes irreversible, might be a little too strong a way to put it, given things-

• 20:34Speaker 01

  No, I don't think that's too strong.

• 20:36Ezra Klein?

  Fair enough. But it's unlike other things. And if we don't, you know, if we don't fix the healthcare system in the way I would like to see America do it in the next 10 years, we could do it in year 12. We really could. I mean, people will die in the meantime, but it's not an irrever, like, the healthcare system itself is not irreversibly gone. And this is just such a distinctive issue in that it does have this quality of points of no return. And I think there is a desire, understandably so, to keep people engaged in activism and voting and other things, to always say, well, maybe there is a strategy that could unlock it. And I really want to be clear, I'm not getting into a Jonathan Franzen, like, we're all screwed and this is over. The question is simply that if a political system will not respond, historically, people

• 21:20Ezra Klein?

  begin to think of other things. Sometimes technologies change systems, as you're saying, and we're talking about here. Sometimes you have very, very large direct action, as you have in different kinds of equality movements. Sometimes you have violence, right, as you do in wars. And I just, you know, this is not a question I'm going to make you answer, because I hear, I take your point on it. It's more to just reflect that I feel like saying the political system is failing is simply saying what is. But because we have, there's almost like, it's like verboten to say that in America, you're supposed to always imbue everything with hope, that people really don't like it when you just state that fact.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Well, I think that one thing that is really important to realize, and- You know, gets very much to what you're saying is we are in an unprecedented moment. That is also, I should say, you know, one of the things that I hope comes through in the book. You know, even though I'm, I actually am trying to have fun in the book. I know that sounds weird. I hope that, I hope that some sense of fun comes through in the book. But we are at an unprecedented moment. You know, no species has ever had the kind of impact that we are having on the earth. You know, with the possible exception of the original, you know, bacteria that invented photosynthesis and oxygenated the atmosphere. That was a very long process, but certainly changed the earth.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  But you know, with that possible exception, just no species has managed to exert the kind of influence on planet earth that we have. And there are a lot of effects of that that potentially have tremendous effects for, you know, human thriving and certainly also for every other species with whom we share the planet. So it's an ungodly, as it were, responsibility. And, you know, typically, as you say, we're dealing with things that we have some precedent for, the healthcare system, an economic crisis, you know, you name it. And as you say, if you get it wrong, many, many people suffer. And for some people, the damages are reversible, but not for the whole planet.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  And here we do have that situation. And the fact that we're unprepared to deal with it, you know, if you wanted to be kind to humanity, you could say, well, of course, we've never faced it before. And that's the situation that we're facing in some sense over and over again. And I talk in the book about this phrase, you know, no analog. We are in a no analog moment. We're creating a no analog climate, no analog ecosystems. They just don't have any precedent in earth history.

• 23:53Ezra Klein?

  I think there are two deep stories that are always implicit and sometimes explicit in this conversation. So one is maybe, let's call it the Christian story of dominion, that man has control of nature, that nature was entrusted to us, but at any rate, that it is something that we act upon. We are trying to beat back the oceans, put out the fires, extract the lumber, pull up the oil, right? That nature is somehow here for our extraction. And the question is, how much can we master and control it? And to what end? There's another story that I think has always been there, but has developed popularity particularly in recent years again, which is that this is hubris, that no matter what we do, we are subject to nature. You can live in your fancy house in California,

• 24:36Ezra Klein?

  and the fires still come for you too. You can live in your fancy high-rise in Miami, but the waves are going to come for you too. And so that we are subject to nature. And this has all been a kind of misunderstanding of our relationship that's going to end with tragic consequences. And obviously, those are two extremes, and people are between them. But I'm curious if you think there's a story that we should tell basically our children, we should tell ourselves about what our relationship should be, given the amount of control, but also given the amount of vulnerability we have. What is it? What is the way to characterize it?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's a very, I mean, that's a very good point that you made. And those two narratives, I am somewhat trying to question both of those narratives. And the new narrative to spring from that, a narrative that would potentially guide us into the future. I mean, it's a complicated narrative, how's that? And it, I suppose, would say, be very, very careful. Realize that with great power comes tremendous responsibility. Now, one of the other messages of the book is, even when we think we're acting responsibly, often we're intervening in systems that are so complicated that we think we're doing

• 25:51Speaker 01

  the right thing, as you suggested before, and things get horribly out of control. And that has happened again and again. Now, on the other hand, as we also discussed, it's not like we have a lot of great options at this point. So I do think that stressing humility would probably be a good first step, but it doesn't prescribe a course of action.

• 26:16Ezra Klein?

  What do you think of the degrowth movement on climate?

• 26:18Speaker 01

  As a sort of first pass estimate, we have to say that resource use and economic growth are still very closely tied. And we live on a finite planet. So there's a famous saying, the only people who think you can have infinite growth on a finite planet are madmen and economists. And I think that contemplating degrowth and putting that on the table is really, really important. Now, in our political system, one has to imagine that would be toxic. So we have a problem here. But I also want to add, I don't want to add answers, but I'll add more questions. Has that, if you take solar geoengineering, there are initiatives, we'll call them, to

• 27:03Speaker 01

  look at how, in God's name, would you even reach a global? Because this would affect everyone on Earth. It could be done, one of the, choose your adjectives, one of the exciting, one of the horrifying things about geoengineering is it could, in theory at least, be done by a small group of nations, just a small group of assertive countries, wouldn't have to have buy-in from everybody, but it would affect everybody. And I think in general, if you were looking at good governance, you would say, well, every country would have to have a seat at the table. When we look at what's happened with climate change, every country theoretically, once again, has a seat at the table.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, everyone, and the US is the classic, perfect example, example A, is doing pretty much exactly what the hell they want. It doesn't give you a warm feeling about how this kind of global governance could work.

• 28:21Ezra Klein?

  You write in the book about CRISPR, and I just, I always want to talk more about CRISPR. So first, could you just explain what CRISPR is for people who haven't heard of it or haven't looked into it?

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Sure. So CRISPR is sort of a structure in bacteria. Bacteria possess sort of what's called a CRISPR locus, and they use it. They incorporate little snippets of their, of their enemies, which are viruses, into their own genome, and then they can use these to identify an incoming threat. And they then send out these enzymes, basically, that chop up the enemy. How's that? And scientists about, you know, it's about a decade ago, two just won a Nobel Prize for this, figured out you could harness this for human purposes. You could harness CRISPR to cut a stretch of DNA very precisely and pretty cheaply.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  You could accurately and cheaply do this. And that has really revolutionized gene editing. And there are a couple of things you can do with this. You can disable a gene, so just a knockout gene. That's the easiest thing to do. And then you can also replace a gene. If you give the gene instructions, you chop it and you sort of give it instructions for what to do, how to repair that sequence. But it's not the original sequence. It's a new sequence. You could insert into, you know, anything, a gene from anything into anything else. How's that? Or a completely synthetic gene that you made up. And that has just tremendous power and all sorts of crazy creatures that I just, some of which I describe in the book, have already been created.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  You know, creatures with superhero-like muscles, you know, ants that can't smell, coffee that has no caffeine. The list goes on and on. It's like having a palette and being an artist and almost whatever you can think of, if it just involves, you know, a simple genetic tweak or even a stack of genetic tweaks, could at least in theory be achieved.

• 30:21Ezra Klein?

  So this is one of those technologies where every time I read about it, think about it, hear about it, I wonder if when the long history of our era is written, things like Trump and all these things that I deal with every day are going to be sideshows. And we're living in the period when humankind developed the technology to take control not only its, but lots of other species genetic evolution, like in a very specific way, you have this, you have the lovely analogy of the palette. And maybe not, right? Maybe the technology ends up having limits on it that we don't know yet, but that is a lot of power that we are suddenly stepping into that we don't have anywhere near an idea of how to, of how to use it.

• 31:04Ezra Klein?

  I guess I'm just curious, as we start this CRISPR conversation, just how you think about that as a responsibility? Is this as transformative as it feels? And if so, like what societal reaction does that need to trigger?

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Well, I certainly think, and once again, you know, I'm not a biotechnologist, but I think anyone in that world will say it's pretty transformative. And one of the things that I did in the process of, of writing the book was I just ordered a CRISPR gene editing kit from a company called The Odin, which, you know, finds itself often in complicated legal situations, has that. They sent me this kit that I could use to genetically engineer a strain of bacteria resistant E. coli, for example, and I did that in my kitchen, basically.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  So this is potentially a game changer on a lot of levels, and that includes, I fear, you know, some very, very dangerous levels. Now, in terms of people using it not for, you know, bioterrorism, but for sort of legitimate reasons, I think it's, has huge implications. And, you know, some people will applaud these. It has huge implications, you know, for agriculture. If we're going to feed a growing population without doing even more monumental damage to planet Earth, we're going to need to find new crop varieties. So, you know, maybe CRISPR is one way that we're going to do that. But as you say, it also allows us to genetically manipulate virtually anything.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  And another point that I should make, in addition to allowing us to Add or subtract genes from a creature. CRISPR also, in theory at least, and this has already been done in mosquitoes and in fruit flies, though not yet in sort of higher orders of organisms, allows you to program a creature to perform on itself the task of reprogramming its genes. And this allows you to push out a genetic change that will perpetuate itself across the generations. And we have not been able to do that before, and that is huge.

• 33:23Ezra Klein?

  So you bring up a particular example there that I think is worth reflecting on. So researchers in Britain have engineered a gene drive, a suppression drive, for the kind of mosquito that carries malaria. Just to put the stakes in context here for everybody, more than 400,000 people died of malaria in 2019 alone, so more than 400,000 in 2019. If we could be sufficiently confident the gene drive would work, should we release these mosquitoes? Or at least, what set of considerations do you think should govern whether or not we did that?

• 33:53Speaker 01

  That is a huge question. And once again, I'm going to punt somewhat. I mean, people are going to have to bioethicists on the one hand, and also people on the ground. So, you know, the thought is to release these mosquitoes, which are now, as you say, they were developed by British scientists, but there's a facility in Italy where they're sort of spending their lives buzzing around a biosecure facility in Italy right now, to release them in Africa, you know, where there are parts of Africa that suffer from a lot of malaria deaths. And, once again, the good part of being a journalist is, you know, I don't get to make that decision.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  And I think another question is, who does get to make that decision? I don't know the answer to that, really. I'm not sure anyone does. But that's going to have to be a complicated conversation, especially with the people on the ground who are going to be affected by it.

• 34:51Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I mean, I am profoundly, on one level, uncomfortable with the idea that we're going to start driving species out of existence. But I was thinking about that line in context of your previous book, which is to say, humankind drives species out of existence all the time without much consideration. And now that we can save more than 400,000 human lives each year... We're suddenly going to be shy about it. It gets to this, this constant, I think, theme in, in your book, which is that we are somehow very comfortable with the ways we warp and control nature and act upon the physical world thoughtlessly, like the ways in which the machine is just doing it by running. But then when you actually raise your hand and say, well, we should do it in a directed way, we should get rid of this one mosquito instead of all species get into our path,

• 35:35Ezra Klein?

  or we should geoengineer to cool the world as opposed to heat it, because we are basically geoengineering the world all the time right now. Then there's this feeling of, well, is that really something we should do? Who decides? How do we do it? And you're doing it all the time right now and nobody's deciding. And it's for no particular purpose. It's maybe to get people rich. It's weird.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Yes. No, I think that's a very good point. And I do want to say, I raised that with a lot, that exact point with a lot of the scientists I spoke to, like, one of the guys I spoke to, an Australian scientist named Mark Tizard, I spoke to him at a, this really high security bio secure facility in, in Geelong, Australia. You know, he was of the opinion, everyone's looking at genetic engineering all wrong. If you do genetic engineering, you could do some very, very impactful genetic engineering that would change, you know, one gene in a species, let's say. So for example, there's a chestnut tree that's been developed in Syracuse, New York, that

• 36:35Speaker 01

  has one extra gene imported from wheat that is resistant to chestnut blight. And that's considered a transgenic tree. And so right now you can't take that tree out into the world. So that's a one gene shift that we are very, very concerned about. Now, his point would be, look, we take entire organisms with, you know, 20,000 genes and we just plop them somewhere new. Once again, as you say, completely unconsciously, just when we ship stuff around the world, this is happening constantly and we don't worry about that. So, you know, why, why do we get, as you say, all bent out of shape? Now, I think. An argument can also be made, and other scientists made this point to me,

• 37:16Speaker 01

  David Keith, a scientist at Harvard, who is really the lead scientist, I suppose, on the solar geoengineering research program. When I said to him, well, you know, we're already, what you said, we're already geoengineering the planet, you know, by burning a lot of fossil fuels. His point was, well, there is a difference, you know, between something being collateral damage, climate change is just really collateral damage of our economic system or our economy right now that depends on fossil fuels. There is an important distinction between something that's an unwitting effect and something that you're doing consciously, and the bar is higher for that. So I think both of those points, they're in conflict, but they both, to a certain extent, make sense.

• 38:01Ezra Klein?

  There's a way, reading the book, I kept thinking about the scene of Lucy and the Chocolate Factory, where we just keep stacking these clutches and changes and controls on top of each other. We've talked about solar geoengineering, and I've probably been a bad host in not defining it a little bit better, but basically what we're talking about there is blasting particles, maybe sulfate particles, into the stratosphere in order to cool the world in the way that has happened after volcanic eruptions. But one point people make on that is that once you start doing it, unless you find some way to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, you can never stop. And you write about this in the book, that as soon as you stopped, you would snap back to all of the global warming you've now built up, because like the sun would be actually that hot.

• 38:45Ezra Klein?

  And so there is a scary way. One of the things that your book did for me was it forced me to confront in a more serious way than I sometimes do, that there is no out anymore. There's no like stable equilibrium we will get to. We're just gonna be doing more and more and more of these, and the more of them we do, the more of them we have to keep doing. And then we have to fix what we've already been doing. And like, this is just the condition of humanity and the world, frankly, much of it, you know, much of the natural world being subject to our whims from here on out. It's, I don't know what to say about it, but it's a hell of a, it's a hell of a way to run a species.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, hell of a way to run a planet. Definitely not what the doctor ordered, how's that? And as, as you're suggesting, all these things are going on simultaneously. And I think that the idea, and this is a point that, that Ruth Gates, who is, you know, I mentioned before, who is the scientist behind the SuperCurl project, mentioned to me, and that made a big impact on me. She said, look, a lot of people, they just, you know, they want to go back to something. But that just isn't happening, right? So if we, for example, you know, stopped right now and just said, okay, we're, we're just gonna, you know, stop pouring carbon into the atmosphere, for example. Now that requires, you know, rebuilding the world economy.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  And I think it is, it's something that we hopefully eventually will do, absolutely. But at that point, the problem is just no longer getting worse. It's not that the problem is solved. That's also a really important point to make about climate change and why climate change is different, not just quantitatively, but qualitatively different from a lot of other environmental problems, which, once you stop doing whatever you're doing, they dissipate over time. So something like, you know, air pollution, soot, let's say, particulate matter, that will fall to earth if you just stopped putting it up there. After, you know, a certain amount of time, your problem would be solved. You stop putting CO2 up there, there's so much inertia in the system.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  And CO2 also hangs around, you know, for all intents and purposes, forever, that you don't get the world back in any foreseeable timeframe. And that is exactly why people are starting to look at very, you know, very radical solutions. It's why carbon dioxide removal, trying to figure out ways to get carbon out of the atmosphere. I think that is going to be a very big business at some point.

• 41:19Ezra Klein?

  You, you talked about that direct to air capture projects. One of the things you mentioned that I always think is worth people people considering here is that the IPCC, which does, you know, the big scientific consortium that does all this modeling on different warming pathways, when you look at almost any other simulations where we keep warming down to manageable levels, it includes a fair amount of direct air capture. Can you just talk a little bit about that technology and how viable you think it is or isn't?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, one thing I want to say is it doesn't necessarily, I mean, this is a bit of a technical point, but I'll make it. It doesn't necessarily include direct air capture. It includes some form of negative emissions. So that means taking carbon out of the air and then putting it somewhere has that. So what the models really love and what sort of got us, one of the things that in a way we're living in the world the modelers created was a technology that's become known as BECS for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. So if I plant a lot of trees, I then burn them in a power plant, I make electricity, I capture the carbon from the smokestack and then I bury it somehow.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Then I have both energy and I have negative emissions because I've grown the tree, the tree has taken up the carbon while it's growing. And then when I burn it, I sequester that carbon. So I've taken it out of circulation. And the models love that because you get energy and you get negative emissions. And so in a weird way, the models were off to the races with this. And then when politicians ask the models to come up with these scenarios where we can keep warming to quote unquote, safe levels, well, they just put in more and more of this. How's that? And I think that BECS, there are some pilot projects.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  It doesn't really exist. It's extremely problematic. Let's put it that way. But there's also all sorts of other ideas out there for how we could pull carbon out of the air and sequester it from the atmosphere. And one of those that you mentioned is direct air capture. We would use machines. And I have, you know, visited such machines. They exist. They are definitely doable. The

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Issue here, as with so many responses to climate change, is scale, scaling up to the scale of the problem.

• 43:44Ezra Klein?

  Do you think it is possible? I mean, sometimes I read things on this and I'll see, oh, it's a point or two of GDP a year. And I'll say, I mean, that's a ton of money. I mean, trillions of dollars globally, but we spend that much money on much dumber things and then get carbon out of the air. In your research, did you feel that long term it is possible to do scale and simply hard? Or that these, these technologies will not ultimately scale?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Well, I think that on their own, if you wanted to just say, oh, you know, keep burning carbon and then, you know, just suck it all out of the atmosphere, you would be setting yourself up for, you know, an immensely tall order. You know, once again, 40 billion tons of CO2 going up there every year. But if you said, we're going to work as hard as possible to reduce our emissions. And then we're going to, you know, a lot of companies already have claimed, you know, by 2050 or whatever the date is, pick a date, it's usually unfortunate, several decades from now, we're going to be carbon neutral. And what they mean by that, I think, I mean, often they leave it probably purposely fuzzy.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  But if they're being honest or strict in their accounting, they would mean, well, if our operations are still emitting carbon in 2050, we're also going to have to be removing that same amount of carbon. Then we will be carbon neutral. You know, I do want to say, to inject, you know, a happier note, a lot of progress has been made, technological progress in clean energy technologies. The price of solar has come down, you know, astonishingly, way faster than anybody expected. We are moving towards electric vehicles, you know, especially where you are in California. I think these transitions will happen.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  And then maybe carbon dioxide removal has a role to play, you know, to make up for the rest. The question here. Is will they happen fast enough to avert disaster? And will they happen universally enough? How's that? And that gets back to the global question. So, you know, I'll just throw another geopolitical issue out here. You know, the Russians who have tremendous fossil fuel reserves, you know, they they may decide we don't really care about climate change. They seem to feel that way right now. You know, so you need unfortunately buy in from everyone, especially from your major emitters. You don't necessarily need buy in from your non major emitters, but you do need buy in from any major emitter.

• 46:46Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a good place to to move on to maybe another alternative solution here, which is that aliens visit Earth and give us the technology. We need to get out of this.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Yes, that's always a handy one.

• 46:59Ezra Klein?

  And and hopefully you've just written an article on the the question of whether or not we've been visited by aliens. And I want to start with the meta meta question here. I'm struck now that the issue of whether or not aliens have or are visiting Earth is something you can read about in the New York Times. You can read about in the New Yorker, can read about it kind of everywhere. There are now serious astrophysicists writing about it. What's changed from a decade or two ago on this on this?

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Well, I think one of the things that that's changed, perhaps the most profound thing that's changed. And once again, you know, I'm not an astrophysicist is we now know that there are in just our galaxy has that, you know, many, many millions of potentially habitable planets. You know, NASA has done very serious work on this. If you imagine a habitable habitable planet to be a planet that's solid rocky planet like the Earth to be a certain distance from the sun. So it's neither, you know, perpetually frozen or, you know, perpetually boiling. There are many, many, many, many possibly habitable planets. And this sort of

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Basic, you know, rule in science of mediocrity, as it were, like the Earth is just an ordinary planet, you know, you'd expect if that is the case, would we be the only habitable planet in the galaxy? It seems pretty, that seems pretty weird. How's that?

• 48:27Ezra Klein?

  It does seem really weird. It certainly always seemed weird to me. So let me ask the headline question of the piece. Have we already been visited by aliens?

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not convinced that we have, but the, the piece that I wrote was about a book that has recently come out by a Harvard astrophysicist named Avi Loeb, in which he makes the rather controversial argument in astrophysical circles that what's called an interstellar object, the first interstellar object that has been observed was observed in 2017. And this was, an interstellar object is, is just an object that we can identify that has originated from outside our solar system and is exiting, is leaving our solar system. And, and scientists caught this as it was, you know, coming through, as it were.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  And it had very, very odd properties. And one interpretation of those odd properties, and I should say as a minority opinion here, is that it was manufactured. It's not something, you know, these odd properties suggest a consciousness at work. How's that?

• 49:35Ezra Klein?

  So my understanding of the Avi Loeb book, and I haven't read it, but I've read some stuff from him and some stuff commenting on it, is that his argument is a process of elimination argument, that he basically says, given the set of things this object could have been, once I've ruled this out, and that out, and the third out, and the fifth out, well, really, aliens is all that's left. It's like the old Sherlock Holmes idea, right? The last remaining idea.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. He likes to quote Sherlock Holmes. Yes.

• 50:02Ezra Klein?

  The, the problem I have with that is it seems very strange that once you're talking on the, the intergalactic scale, that the puny human mind would even know, would have any way of knowing what all of the possible explanations are. And so maybe, you know, maybe, maybe aliens. I, I would personally enjoy believing that, and I very much enjoy entertaining the notion. But I'm a little bit skeptical of a process of elimination argument, given how little actual information we have about the, the universe of things to eliminate.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Well, I think you're in very good company, Ezra. I mean, I think most of, of his colleagues would say the same thing. But it makes good copy. And, you know, I wrote about it for precisely that reason. It's a very interesting idea. It makes you think. So, you know, as I say, I think that most astrophysicists would agree with you. But that being said, the piece also does take up an increasingly, I think, widespread view also in the astrophysicist community or astronomer community or astrobiology. That's now a new, you know, that's a whole profession now, that the odds of, you know, there being simply one inhabited planet in

• 51:15Speaker 01

  the universe are very low. And, you know, it raises a lot of questions. Are we alone? Are we not alone? If we're not alone, you know, where are they? The famous question from Enrico Fermi. So it's a lot to think about.

• 51:31Ezra Klein?

  It does seem, though, that there is a moment around this stuff right now. And I've done a past podcast on this back at Box. But so there's Avi Loeb and Co. who are looking at this astronomy oriented piece of evidence, right? This thing they noticed that they think must have some consciousness piloting it. Then there is the set of videos that have been come out of the Navy where you have, you know, skilled pilots up there saying like, what the hell is that? That's nothing I've ever seen. And there are a number of them. And they look, you know, they have a kind of similar drive to them. Then you have Harry Reid and some other pretty high up government people saying, look, I can't say anything more, but I think the government should release what it knows about aliens, which, you know, I don't get to say it so much, but it's clearly something suggestive.

• 52:14Ezra Klein?

  We know there was some army group that was actually studying some of these materials. It's weird. I mean, I don't know what to say about it exactly, but but I feel like it's there's something weird here. And it's a little protected because anybody who talks about it kind of feels a little foolish or is made to feel a little foolish. But there's a lot of little pings on the radar right now.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yes, and I think that, once again, I speak with no particular knowledge, but I think two things are converging, as you say, certain hints or bits of, I don't want to call them evidence, that's probably rising to too high a level, but that combined with pretty fundamental knowledge that habitable planets abound has that. And when you put those two things together, it's extremely suggestive. Now, the other connection that people make, which gets back to our earlier conversation about environmental destruction, is, well, maybe we haven't been visited by intelligent aliens, because intelligent civilizations tend to

• 53:16Speaker 01

  destroy themselves. Whether that's just projecting from our own experience, or whether there's something interesting there, is also a really interesting question.

• 53:25Ezra Klein?

  I think that's good. Good place to end it on, interesting question. So, the final section of this, I'm going to ask you for some book recommendations, and let me begin with this. What book have you read the most times?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Well, it's a pretty, it's a pretty standard one, but I think I've got to go with The Great Gatsby.

• 53:41Ezra Klein?

  What book is your go-to example of just truly beautiful writing?

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Well, I think if I really am just looking for great writing and great ideas, I always go back to my college copy of The Complete Stories of Kafka. So, that's fiction. I want to add a, if I may, add a nonfiction version, a book that I really love and always go back to also looking for inspiration in a nonfiction vein, is The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen.

• 54:12Ezra Klein?

  If somebody wants to understand climate change better, what book should they start with?

• 54:17Speaker 01

  I will offer the book that I myself started with. It's a little bit technical, but not terribly. And so, if you want to really understand the geophysics, I really recommend it. It's Global Warming: The Complete Briefing by John Houghton, who is a British scientist who sadly died recently, I believe, of COVID.

• 54:39Ezra Klein?

  What's your favorite book, fiction or non, about aliens?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  That is actually a really easy one. It's Cosmic Comics by Tal Calvino.

• 54:49Ezra Klein?

  Oh, that's a great, that's a great, that's a great choice, actually. And then I'll add on this one. Is there a children's book you love?

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Well, there are many children's books that I love. And I will offer up my two, I think, what are my two real favorites? The Phantom Tollbooth and Charlotte's Web, which I weep, still weep whenever I read it. Whenever I used to read it to my kids who have now, who have now sadly outgrown it.

• 55:13Ezra Klein?

  And your book, of course, is Under a White Sky. It is phenomenal. I loved reading it. And you are Elizabeth Colbert. Thank you so much for being here.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 55:33Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Roji Karma and Jeff Geld. Fact checked by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.