Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

If Chicago is the City of the Big Shoulders, the Sanitary and Ship Canal might be thought of as its Oversized Sphincter.

Our fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial ecosystems combined, and our planes, cars, and power stations emit about a hundred times more carbon dioxide than volcanoes do.

Fix 22. (of a plant or microorganism) assimilate (nitrogen or carbon dioxide) by forming a nongaseous compound • lupines fix gaseous nitrogen in their root nodules.

Humans are producing no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future. At this point it might be prudent to scale back our commitments and reduce our impacts. But there are so many of us—as of this writing nearly eight billion—and we are stepped in so far, return seems impracticable.

The cost of the bubble barrier was first estimated at $275 million, then later rose to $775 million.

“People joke about it being a disco barrier,” Shea said. It was a line, it occurred to me, he might well have used at a party.

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In the sort of irony the Anthropocene teems with, the number of free-swimming carp in China has crashed even as pond-raised populations have soared. Thanks to projects like the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze, river fish are having trouble spawning. The carp are thus at once instruments of human control and victims of it.

“In that book the problem—the villain—was the broad, almost unrestricted use of chemicals, particularly the chlorinated hydrocarbons, like DDT,”

One year after Silent Spring’s publication, in 1963, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service brought the first documented shipment of Asian carp to America. The idea was to use the carp, much as Carson had recommended, to keep aquatic weeds in check.

everybody was concerned about all the chemicals in the water. They weren’t nearly as concerned about non-native species, which is unfortunate.”

Now Seidemann makes most of his income from contract killing for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. It seemed rude to ask him how much, but later I learned that contract fishermen can gross more than $5,000 a week.

This round of barrier defense continued for another three days. The final tally was six thousand four hundred and four silver carp and five hundred and forty-seven bighead. Collectively, the fish weighed more than fifty thousand pounds. They were shipped west in the semi, to be ground into fertilizer.

reimposing “hydrologic separation” would, indeed, be the most effective way to keep carp out of the Great Lakes. It would also, in the Corps’ estimate, take twenty-five years—three times as long as the original digging of the canal had—and cost up to $18 billion.

Since the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles.

Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land. Every few minutes, it drops a tennis court’s worth.

Thousands of miles of levees, flood walls, and revetments have been erected to manage the Mississippi. As the Army Corps of Engineers once boasted: “We harnessed it, straightened it, regularized it, shackled it.” This vast system, built to keep southern Louisiana dry, is the very reason the region is disintegrating, coming apart like an old shoe.

If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution.

Except for those that have been imported to shore up the levees and reinforce the roads, there are no rocks in southern Louisiana.

The bill for the project had been $6 million, which, I calculated, meant that the acre we were standing on had cost about $30,000.

Currently, the bill for the project is estimated at $1.4 billion. The next diversion in line, the Mid-Breton, which is planned for the east bank of Plaquemines, is priced at $800 million. Financing for both diversions is supposed to come out of the settlement fund from the BP oil spill, which, in 2010, spewed more than three million barrels of oil into the Gulf, fouling the coast from Texas to Florida.

Corps was charged, yet again, with reinforcing the levees, this time against storm surges from the Gulf. South of the city, the Corps erected the world’s largest pumping station, part of a $1.1 billion structure called the West Closure Complex. To the east, it built the Lake Borgne Surge Barrier, a concrete wall nearly two miles long and five and a half feet thick that cost $1.3 billion.

Building the extension would have added $100 million to the project’s billion-dollar price tag and preserved just three hundred soupy acres. For that much money, you could buy five times as much land in, say, Chicago.

Planning for the simulacrum began in 2006. That spring, a bleak one for pupfish, the census hit a record low of thirty-eight. “People were more than a little bit worried about that,” Feuerbacher told me. While the $4.5 million facility was under construction, pupfish numbers recovered a bit.

I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.

“To watch a small school of pupfish arc through a tiny pool of desert water is to discover something vital about wonder,” Christopher Norment, an ecologist, wrote after a visit to the real Devils Hole. The same is true, I thought, when the water has been piped in and disinfected. But, I wondered, gazing down at the fish in the tank, wonder about what?

?

I really wanted a drink. But I couldn’t bring myself to go back down to the lobby, past Le Concierge, Les Toilets, and La Réception, to find a faux French bar. I thought of the Devils Hole pupfish in their simulated cavern. I wondered: is this how they felt in their darker moments?

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“Our project is acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural.”

I was arranging to visit Gates again, to see how the super corals were coming along, when she wrote to tell me she was dying. Only she didn’t put it that way. Instead, she said that she had lesions on her brain, that she was going to Mexico for treatment, and that, whatever the disease was, she was going to beat it.

Then what? Next highlight... xx

I went to visit Van Oppen almost a year to the day after Gates’s death.

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it was hubris to imagine that people could drive the Great Barrier Reef to collapse without suffering any consequences. But wasn’t it just another kind of hubris to imagine “all-of-reef-scale interventions?”

(The acronym stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.”) CRISPR allows its users to snip a stretch of DNA and then either disable the affected sequence or replace it with a new one.

“The classic thing people say with molecular biology is: Are you playing God? Well, no. We are using our understanding of biological processes to see if we can benefit a system that is in trauma.”

He had, it seemed to me, a face only a genetic engineer could love.

cane toad xx

There are genes that play by the rules and there are also renegades that refuse to. Outlaw genes fix the game in their favor and do so in a variety of devious ways.

Such rule-breaking genes are said to “drive.”

As power stations go, geothermal plants are “clean.” Instead of burning fossil fuels, they rely on steam or superheated water pumped from underground, which is why they tend to be sited in volcanically active areas. Still, as Aradóttir explained to me, they, too, produce emissions. With the superheated water inevitably come unwanted gases, like hydrogen sulfide (responsible for the stink) and carbon dioxide. Indeed, pre-Anthropocene, volcanoes were the atmosphere’s chief source of CO2.

Instead of allowing the carbon dioxide to escape into the air, the Hellisheiði plant would capture the gas and dissolve it in water. Then the mixture—basically, high-pressure club soda—would be injected back underground. Calculations done by Aradóttir and others suggested that deep beneath the surface, the CO2 would react with the volcanic rock and mineralize.

So much have we altered the atmosphere that one out of every three molecules of CO2 loose in the air today was put there by people.

Cutting emissions is at once absolutely essential and insufficient. Were we to halve emissions—a step that would entail rebuilding much of the world’s infrastructure—CO2 levels wouldn’t drop; they’d simply rise less quickly.

what the IPCC really is saying is, ‘We tried lots and lots of scenarios,’ ” Klaus Lackner told me. “ ‘And, of the scenarios which stayed safe, virtually every one needed some magic touch of negative emissions. If we didn’t do that, we ran into a brick wall.’ ”

The burning trash, the acres of glass, the boxes of bumblebees, the vegetables raised on chemicals and captured CO2—was it all totally cool or totally crazy? I paused for a second, then popped the tomatoes into my mouth.

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Shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere struck me as magical, like sprinkling the world with pixie dust.

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The first government report on global warming—though the phenomenon was not yet called “global warming”—was delivered to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. “Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment,” it asserted. The result of burning fossil fuels would, almost certainly, be “significant changes in the temperature,” which would, in turn, lead to other changes.

In 1974, Mikhail Budyko, a prominent scientist at the Leningrad Geophysical Observatory, published a book titled Climatic Changes. Budyko laid out the dangers posed by rising CO2 levels but argued that their continued climb was inevitable: The only way to hold down emissions was to cut fossil-fuel use, and no nation was likely to do that.

“In the near future, climate modification will become necessary in order to maintain current climatic conditions,” Budyko wrote.

David Keith, a professor of applied physics at Harvard, has been described as “perhaps the foremost proponent of geoengineering,”

Keith believes that the world will eventually cut its carbon emissions if not all the way down to zero, then close to it. He also believes carbon-removal technologies can eventually be scaled up to take care of the rest. But all this—quite possibly—will not be enough. During the period of “overshoot,” a great many people will suffer and changes that are, for all intents and purposes, irreversible may occur, like the demise of the Great Barrier Reef. The best way forward, he argues, is to do everything: cut emissions, work on carbon removal, and look a lot more seriously at geoengineering.

“To be clear, I’m not saying that modifications mostly do work. I’m saying it’s a wide, undefined set.”

The best method for delivering aerosols would probably be via airplane. The plane would need to be capable of reaching an altitude of around sixty thousand feet and of carrying a payload on the order of twenty tons. Researchers who looked into the configuration of such a craft, which they dubbed a Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Lofter, or SAIL, concluded that development costs would run to about $2.5 billion.

To deploy a fleet of SAILs would cost another $20 billion or so per decade. Again, this is nothing to sneeze at, but the world now spends more than three hundred times that amount every year on fossil-fuel subsidies.

geoengineering has been compared to treating a heroin habit with methadone, though perhaps a more apt comparison would be to treating a heroin habit with amphetamines. The end result is two addictions in place of one.