Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of the 2015 Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, a staff writer at The New Yorker, a visiting fellow at Williams College, and a former member of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board, where she served for three years.

She has long covered environmental topics. In 2005, Kolbert’s three-part magazine series on global warming won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award, a National Magazine Award, and a National Academies’ communications award.

Her latest book, H is For Hope: Climate Change From A to Z, is a collection of 26 illustrated essays on climate change—one for each letter of the alphabet. It explores why there is still reason for some optimism in the fight against climate change (even if time is short and the odds can seem overwhelming).

In this interview with Bulletin executive editor Dan Drollette Jr, Kolbert delved into the over-reliance on quick-fixes, some of the reasons why the transition out of fossil fuels is taking so long, the problems faced by journalists in covering climate change—and why she chose the style of a children’s book to tell the tale.

(Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.)

Drollette: One thing that I wanted to plunge into right away: It seems that every time someone turns around in the world of climate reporting, there’s another kind of loopy idea being floated to deal with climate change. For example, a climate scientist who’d been based in Antarctica[1] told me that one of the latest proposals for dealing with the loss of glaciers is to put a giant plastic fence under the waters of the Antarctic coastline that would be 60 miles long: The idea is that it would prevent warm ocean water from undermining the ice shelves of Antarctica. Why is there this addiction to what some have called “techno-solutionism”?[2] What is the attraction of these long shots?

Elizabeth Kolbert: On some level, your guess is as good as mine. But I think one thing that’s operative here is that there’s a lot of VC [venture capital] money for techno fixes, in ways that just aren’t there for other, more mundane areas.

I can’t prove it, but long-shot climate technological fixes seem to be the sort of thing that the “tech bro” world is interested in. And at the same time, there’s this attitude among them of “let’s bet on fear.” In other words: “Let’s bet on some new technology—and who knows, maybe it’ll pan out.”

So I think that’s part of what’s going on.

Or to put it in a somewhat less cynical way: The facts look pretty dire. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is fated to melt even at today’s temperatures—and we know that the world is only going to get warmer tomorrow. So people are now thinking that we need some sort of a “Hail Mary” move here.

I think all those things are at work.

Drollette: How does one separate out the interventions that seem kind of worthwhile—for instance, I read about scientists trying to breed more heat-tolerant forms of coral[3]—with these highly speculative techno quick-fixes that could go wrong in such epic ways?

Kolbert: I honestly don’t think there’s a good answer for that at this point. You know, humans are not very good at thinking through the consequences of what we do. And you know, that’s definitely one of the points of my earlier book, Under a White Sky.[4] That book was more about the ill-fated attempts of using biological controls to handle invasive species, but the principles are the same: The world is an immensely complicated place, and a lot of the attempts to fix one problem lead to other ramifications that are even more grievously wrong.

For example, when we import some kind of insect to fight another insect—such as a parasitic wasp—it’s hard to know if your new imported insect will safely target only what we want it to target. It’s very, very difficult for humans to know whether it is also targeting other insects; often these things are really, really tiny. They might be egg parasites, they might be parasitizing other insect eggs.

I’ve spoken to entomologists who are quite concerned that we don’t ever do the sort of follow-up that is necessary; we just don’t know the impacts of what we’ve released upon the world. And even things that seem very successful from one perspective might be having dire implications that we don’t even know about.

Drollette: Sort of like the situation with cane toads in Australia—a biological quick-fix that went haywire?[5]

Kolbert: Right, that’s an entire chapter in Under a White Sky.

Drollette: The other day, a climate scientist told me of a new techno-solution proposal making the rounds: Drilling holes in the ice floes up in the Arctic, installing pumps at each hole, and then using them to bring up sea water that is sprayed into the air. The idea is that the spray would freeze and settle back down in the form of a new layer of ice.

Kolbert: Right.

Drollette: It does seem strange to me why these kinds of things keep finding favor. Why is it so hard to simply burn less fossil fuel and switch to renewables? I mean, the price of wind and solar has come down so astronomically, to the point where it’s cheaper to use renewables than coal. Heat pumps are widely available, as are electric vehicles and hybrids.[6]

Kolbert: I think that there’s a lot of different things going on, that are each part of the answer to that question. One obvious part is that we’re a huge fossil fuel producer—I think maybe the world’s biggest right now—but I’d have to look at the latest figures. So there’s obviously a huge pushback against anything that threatens that business model.

There’s also the cynical and very depressing interpretation: There’s just too much money to be made selling fossil fuels.

And fossil-fuel lobbying is very, very powerful.[7]

And there’s a lot of people whose jobs depend on the status quo.

The somewhat less cynical—but not necessarily any more happy—answer is that it’s actually quite difficult logistically. There are huge hurdles or logistical bottlenecks. Here in Massachusetts, for example, some renewables projects are being canceled because interest rates are so high—and these solar and wind projects are very capital-intensive. So everything has to be reworked to make this go right.

At the same time, there’s a lot of resistance on a lot of different fronts, from the utilities and the car manufacturers all the way down to people who just don’t want to winterize their summer homes.

Drollette: Let’s switch gears here, and talk about something more positive. I see where your new book is a collection of short essays, and titled H is For Hope: Climate Change From A to Z. It sounded like Bill McKibben really loved it in the Los Angeles Review of Books.[8]

Kolbert: Well, yes, he was very kind.

Drollette: How’d you pick the title H is For Hope?

Kolbert: As I jokingly said to Bill, D is For Despair didn’t sound too good.

Drollette: I think it solves one of the big problems faced by reporters who cover science and the environment, when it comes to looking for a new angle…

Kolbert: …you mean, how do you tell the same story again, for the millionth time?[9]

Drollette: Right, there’s only so many ways to say that burning fossil fuels heats up the planet, and we’re running out of time to implement change. Which is why I was struck by the approach of H is For Hope. It’s sort of a picture book for adults about climate change, with one climate-related essay for each letter of the alphabet.

Kolbert: Yes, I was pleased with how that approach worked out. Incidentally, that way of presenting things is technically called an “abecedary.”

Drollette: That’s a wonderful word.

Kolbert: I obviously have the same problem that you all have—how to tell the story again. And this was an experiment in how to mix things up a little bit and try a different genre. So we made it a point to include a lot of great illustrations in the book—not by me, but by a professional artist, Wesley Allsbrook. It was an effort to try something new. (See below.)

Drollette: I thought it was a really fascinating, fun approach. It’s kind of like a children’s book, but also kind of like Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey.[10]

Kolbert: Oh, yes, that was definitely part of the inspiration. And doing things this way also had the benefit of breaking down the big, knotty issues of climate change into easily digestible chunks. I think that’s a key part—you can pick up the book, then put it down and come back to it again later.

Drollette: On a related note—how do you think journalists should be covering climate change without being too negative on the one hand and too upbeat on the other? There actually was an article along these lines in The New York Times headlined “Climate Doom is Out. ‘Apocalyptic Optimism’ is In.”[11]

Kolbert: You know, I am pretty straightforward; I believe in the truth. And I believe that people should write the story as it comes—they should let the chips fall where they may. I don’t think it’s really a journalist’s job to decide whether to frame something as a hopeful story or something else, they just have to cover the facts. And so I’m a bit wary about all these sorts of constraints being put out—what’s in and what’s out.

That’s fashion, that’s not journalism.

Drollette: So let the story dictate the angle?

Kolbert: Yeah, that’s it. I do understand that there is a lot of concern that if the story is so dire, it turns people off. But, you know, that’s a problem only in the purely commercial sense—a matter of dollars and cents, of how does one make money in the world of publishing.

But the notion that the public can’t handle the truth is a wrong one. I don’t want to say that notion is flat-out, completely untrue, but journalism is founded on the notion that the truth is important, no matter what. And if telling the truth results in a steady diet of uncomfortable things, well, that’s just the nature of the beast.

I really don’t see what good it does, at the end of the day, to feed people a line of [so-called] “apocalyptic optimism” or whatever you want to call it. So far as the climate goes, things are going to visibly and demonstrably get worse—and much, much, more dangerous—before they get better. Those are just facts.

I’m just not sure that establishing what marketing people call a “relationship” with your readers or viewers or whatever is viable for very long.

Drollette: One last question: We currently have a president of the United States who at least takes climate change seriously. I mean, people can argue about individual steps that he’s taken, but on the whole, I think Biden is at least trying to move forward when it comes to dealing with climate change. Things were very different during the Trump presidency; some reporters once did a Biden versus Trump climate scorecard[12] and got very different outcomes. With that in mind, what do you think would happen if Trump were to get in for a second term? What do you think it would mean for the climate?

Kolbert: People have made calculations of just what Trump and his team can undo—trying to figure out how many billions of tons of carbon are at stake. And it’s a lot.

But I think that even more than the actual tonnage of carbon that the world would get in four years of another Trump administration, there’s the problem of what it means in terms of the seesawing nature of America’s role… As the world’s historically largest emitter and the world’s richest country, we have a lot of responsibility here—whether we like it or not. And this perpetual zigzagging is so unproductive, and it reduces whatever credibility we have left.

And I think the stakes are super high.

We’re probably the most technologically advanced country, and yet we do not have a happy record. In fact, it’s pretty alarming.

Drollette: From reading the literature, I get the impression that it really feels like the next five or six years offer the last, really serious chance to deal with the climate problem.

Kolbert: On the plus side, I do think that one can point to certain trends in the developed world toward lower emissions. It’s certainly true in Europe, where there’s a really concerted effort to get their emissions down. And we’re seeing the beginnings of that in the United States with the Inflation Reduction Act[13]—in other words, serious efforts to really change our energy sources, to just get going on this, to do what we know how to do. But if that doesn’t accelerate greatly—or stalls or reverses—then I do think all bets are off.

Still, it’s hard to say. Who knows exactly where that irreversible boundary is for climate change?

Drollette: I guess it comes down to just how bad things can get, how high the temperatures can go, how much the oceans will rise, how many climate refugees there will be…

Kolbert: Those are what the questions are now. But the thing is, what we have control over—or attempt to have control over—is not simply up to us human beings. At some point, you run into the laws of geophysics, and lose any control.

And that’s obviously the big worry—that we’re pumping so many greenhouse gasses into the air that we’re losing control over these geophysical systems. After a certain point, no matter what you do, the system will follow its own internal logic.

Endnotes

[1] See July 2024 Bulletin article, “Figuring out the most realistic projections for sea-level rise: Interview with glaciologist Rob DeConto”

[2] Originally coined by Evgeny Morozov in his 2014 book To Save Everything, Click Here “techno-solutionism” refers to the mindset that every problem can—and should—be solved with technology, to the point where the use of the technology becomes more important than substantially solving the problem. Techno-solutionism strips context and nuance from the complex and often thorny issues surrounding a given problem, transforming them into one-dimensional questions that are easily quantified and seemingly fixed, while ignoring and downplaying alternative, low-tech solutions (sometimes called “appropriate technology). Think of using a laser beam to kill a fly instead of a rolled-up magazine, for example. See https://www.theguardian.com/global/2013/mar/20/save-everything-evgeny-morozov-review

[3] See “Selective breeding can produce heat-tolerant corals” in Phys.org https://phys.org/news/2021-08-heat-tolerant-corals.html  and “Breeding heat-tolerant corals to save the Great Barrier Reef” in the June 28, 2021 issue of Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01753-x

[4] For more, see review of Under a White Sky in the New York Times’ “Books of the Times,” at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/books/review-under-white-sky-elizabeth-kolbert.html

[5] The purposeful introduction of cane toads into Australia is often cited as a signature case of the failure of biological controls. See “Introduction of cane toads,” National Museum of Australia, https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/introduction-of-cane-toads

[6] For more, see Bulletin interview with Greg Nemet, author of “How Solar Became Cheap: A Model for Low-Carbon Innovation” at https://thebulletin.org/premium/2021-11/the-five-things-that-must-happen-for-renewables-to-fit-into-the-grid-interview-with-greg-nemet

[7] See Bulletin / Climate Desk article by Seth Klein, “Should we ban fossil fuel ads on TV and in movie theatres, like we do cigarettes?”  https://thebulletin.org/2021/08/should-we-ban-fossil-fuel-ads-on-tv-and-in-movie-theatres-like-cigarettes

[8] The Los Angeles Review of Books article can be found at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/d-is-for-despair-didnt-sound-so-good-a-conversation-between-bill-mckibben-and-elizabeth-kolbert/

[9] See previous Bulletin article “Elizabeth Kolbert: Covering the hot topic of climate change by going to the ends of the Earth” at  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1177/0096340214538957

[10] The cover art for Edward Gorey’s book can be seen here at Goodreads, along with some reviews. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47559.Amphigorey. The book was wildly successful, later becoming a play on Broadway known as “Amphigorey: A Musicale.” See Variety https://variety.com/1994/film/reviews/amphigorey-a-musicale-1200436679/

[11] The New York Times, April 21, 2024, “Climate Doom is Out. ‘Apocalyptic Optimism’ is In.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/arts/television/climate-change-apocalypse-optimism.html

[12] See “Climate Change: A Biden vs Trump” scorecard, Bulletin / Climate Desk, February 7, 2021, at https://thebulletin.org/2021/02/climate-change-a-biden-vs-trump-scorecard

[13] The New York Times, May 23, 2024, “The Biden Clean Energy Boom.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/23/climate/the-biden-clean-energy-boom.html