After finishing this book in November of 2023, I wrote,

 

"Quintessential environmentalist Stewart Brand creates a compelling case of why Greens (and all the rest of us) should embrace nuclear power, transgenic crops, and even geoengineering to head of the imminent disaster of global warming."

 

My clippings below collapse a 350-page book into twelve pages, measured by using 12-point type in Microsoft Word.

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See all my book recommendations.  

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Here are the selections I made:

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Drawing on abundant archaeological and ethnological evidence, LeBlanc argues that humans have always waged ferocious war. In all societies from hunter-gatherers on up through agricultural tribes, then chiefdoms, to early complex civilizations, 25 percent of adult males routinely died from warfare. No one wanted to fight, but they were constantly forced to choose between starvation and robbing the neighbors. Their preferred solution was the total annihilation of the neighbors.

 

Only in the last three centuries, LeBlanc points out, have advanced states steadily lowered the overall body count to where just 3 percent of the world’s people die from warfare these days, even though a few of the remaining wars and genocides have grown to world-war scale.

 

A good book on the subject is Fred Pearce’s With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change (2007).

 

Another bizarre event occurred 55 million years ago, when a trillion tons of methane burped out of the oceans from thawing methane hydrates (also called clathrates) on the sea floor. The sudden temperature rise of 8°C (14.5°F) extinguished two thirds of oceanic species and was nearly as catastrophic on land as the dinosaur-killing asteroid 10 million years earlier.

 

The three broad strategies for dealing with climate change are mitigation, adaptation, and amelioration. Mitigation, cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions, has been called avoiding the unmanageable. Adaptation, then, is managing the unavoidable—moving coastal populations to higher ground, developing drought-tolerant agriculture, preparing for masses of climate refugees, and keeping resource warfare localized. And amelioration is adjusting the nature of the planet itself through large-scale geoengineering.

 

The person with the most realistic numbers is Saul Griffith, a materials scientist and inventor who received a MacArthur “genius” award in 2007.

 

A convenient measure of energy generation is the gigawatt: a billion watts. A large coal-fired plant generates a gigawatt of electricity; so does Hoover Dam; so does a nuclear reactor. Multiply that times a thousand, and you have the terawatt—a trillion watts. Humanity currently runs on about 16 terawatts of power, most of it from the burning of fossil fuels. It’s like leaving 160 billion 100-watt lightbulbs on all the time. That’s what is loading the atmosphere with lethal quantities of carbon dioxide.

 

Griffith calculates that, in order to keep the atmospheric concentration of CO 2 at no more than 450 ppm, humanity has to do something that is almost unimaginably difficult. We have to cut our fossil fuel use to around 3 terawatts, which means we have to produce all the rest of our power from non-fossil-fuel sources, and we have to do it in about twenty-five years or it will be too late to level off at 450 ppm.

 

So, Griffith says, “Imagine someone said you need 2 terawatts of wind, 2 terawatts of photovoltaic solar, 2 terawatts of solar thermal, 2 terawatts of geothermal, 2 terawatts of biofuels, and 3 terawatts of nuclear to give you 13 new clean terawatts. You add the existing 1.5 terawatts of biofuels and nuclear that we already use. You can also get 3 terawatts from coal and oil. That would give humanity around 17.5 terawatts—that allows for a little growth over the 16 terawatts we currently use. What would it take to do all that in 25 years?” Here’s the answer: “Two terawatts of...

 

Three terawatts of new nuclear? That’s a 3-reactor, 3-gigawatt plant every week—52 a year, times 25.”

 

Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists helped stop carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe. (Except for France, which fortunately responded to the ’73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear.)

 

One further detail. What would explain the peculiar sudden dips in atmospheric CO 2 between 200 and 600, 1300 and 1400, and 1500 and 1750? Those dates happen to match major human diebacks from pandemics—Roman-era epidemics, the Black Death in Europe, and the devastation of North American native populations by European diseases. Each time, forests grew back rapidly over empty agricultural land and drew down carbon dioxide.

 

Ruddiman notes that “farming is not nature, but rather the largest alteration of Earth’s surface from its natural state that humans have yet achieved.”

 

Gaia is no savior, since “she” likes ice ages and doesn’t mind hot ages either. We’re left with intention, with conscious design, with engineering. We finesse climate, or climate finesses us.

 

Of the tools that come to hand, this book will examine four that environmentalists have distrusted and now need to embrace, plus one we love that has to be scaled up. The unwelcome four are urbanization, nuclear power, biotechnology, and geoengineering.

 

Forty years ago, I started the Whole Earth Catalog with the words, “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” Those were innocent times. New situation, new motto: “We are as gods and have to get good at it.”

 

The ten-thousand-year flow of people to cities has become a torrent. In 1800 the world was 3 percent urban; in 1900, 14 percent urban; in 2007, 50 percent urban.

 

At the current rate, humanity may well be 80 percent urban by midcentury. Every week there are 1.3 million new people in cities.

 

The leaders now were Tokyo with 35 million, Mexico City with 19 million, New York still in the game with 18 million, São Paulo with 18 million, Mumbai with 17 million, Delhi with 14 million, Calcutta with 13 million, Buenos Aires with 13 million, Shanghai with 13 million, and Jakarta with 12 million.

 

In 2007 the United Nations Population Fund gave that year’s report the upbeat title Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth. The lead author, Canadian demographer George Martine, wrote, “Cities concentrate poverty, but they also represent the best hope of escaping it.”

 

“The world’s forty largest megaregions, which are home to some 18 percent of the world’s population,” writes urban theorist Richard Florida, “produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations.”

 

If cities are concentrators of efficiency and innovation, an article about the scaling paper in Conservation magazine surmised, then, “the secret to creating a more environmentally sustainable society is making our cities bigger. We need more metropolises.” (I am a contributing editor to Conservation.)

 

Perhaps the most extreme case is Mumbai, with 17 million people more densely packed than anywhere else in the world. The city is half slum, yet it generates one sixth of India’s gross domestic product.

 

The poor have time but no money, and the rich have money but no time; and so they deal.

 

“From essentially zero,” writes Joel Garreau at the Washington Post, “we’ve passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history…. Cellphones are the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users in the developing world than in the West.”

 

The question was usually framed in these words: “What are you going to do about the digital divide?” At the time my standard reply was, “Nothing. This is a case of the haves and have-laters. The haves (that’s us) are going to overpay for crummy early technology that barely works in order to make it cheaper and better for the have-laters, who will get it for dirt cheap pretty soon.” I then went on to say what I still believe: “The have-laters are going to adopt this technology so fast and so widely that very soon all 6 billion people on earth are going to be wired up, and the real thing we should be worried about, if you want to worry, is: What will happen when we are all connected?” 

 

Having just experienced the first doubling of world population within a single lifetime (3.3 billion in 1962, 6.6 billion in 2007), we are discovering that it was the last doubling.

 

Instead of having children, Italians are buying pets. So is everyone in the developed world.

 

Singapore’s advice flipped from “Stop at two” to “Three children or more if you can afford it,” and the birthrate there remains one of the lowest in the world at 1.04.

 

Urban density allows half of humanity to live on 2.8 percent of the land. Soon that will be 80 percent of humanity on 3 percent of the land.

 

“Nuclear energy is green. Renewables are not green.” His argument was based on footprint analysis. “As a Green,” he wrote, “I care intensely about land-sparing, about leaving land for Nature…. Considered in watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors.” The solar energy equivalent of a 1-gigawatt nuclear reactor, he projected—with his own variation on Saul Griffith’s and Gwyneth Cravens’s calculations—would require 150 square kilometers (58 square miles); the wind power equivalent, 770 square kilometers (298 square miles); the corn biofuel equivalent, 2,500 square kilometers (965 square miles).

 

As for scientists, Gwyneth Cravens reported in her book that they invariably poll high in support of nuclear, ranging from 89 percent among scientists in general up to 95 percent for energy scientists and 100 percent for nuclear and radiation scientists. (Those who know the most are the least frightened.)

 

Holding all eight logics and problems in mind simultaneously nets out, for me, to a strong argument for expanding nuclear power.

 

Thus the chemical release of the Bhopal incident in 1984 is treated as far less consequential than the radiation release from Chernobyl, even though over six thousand died from Bhopal versus fifty-six from Chernobyl (forty-seven workers, nine children).

 

It appears to me that the main public safety issue around nuclear power is what Luisa Vinton and the United Nations agencies found at Chernobyl: “Fear of radiation is a far more important health threat than radiation itself.” The lesson of Chernobyl is double: one, be careful; two, be careful what you fear.

 

“Annual bird kill in the US: wind turbines, 28,500; buildings, 550 million; power lines, 130 million; cats, 100 million; cars, 80 million; pesticides, 67 million.”

 

France shut down its last coal-fired plant in 2004. It emits 70 percent less carbon dioxide per capita than the United States.

 

We might encourage investigating nuclear propulsion on commercial ships, the current source of 4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions—double the amount generated by airplane traffic.

 

“Nobody 10,000 years ago had blue eyes,” says anthropologist John Hawks. “Why is it that blue-eyed people had a 5 percent advantage in reproducing compared to non-blue-eyed people? I have no idea.” (My blue-eyed hypothesis would be that a number of males and females decided that blue eyes were sexy.)

 

One truly selfish gene has made a million copies of itself, taking up 10 percent of our genome; it seems to have no function other than self-replication.

 

In 2000, GE soybeans were legal in Argentina but outlawed in Brazil. The difference in productivity was so obvious that Brazilian farmers smuggled the seeds across the border, until their government relented and legalized GE agriculture.

 

Following the development of hybrid corn in the 1920s, by 1970 some 96 percent of U.S. corn crops were hybrid, and yield went up from 20 bushels an acre to 160 bushels an acre.

 

Egyptian scientist Ismail Serageldin spoke for many appalled scientists when he responded, “I ask opponents of biotechnology, do you want two to three million children a year to go blind and one million to die of vitamin A deficiency, just because you object to the way Golden Rice was created?”

 

Indeed, microbes make up 80 percent of Earth’s total biomass, says famed microbial taxonomist Carl Woese.

 

Of all ocean life, 95 percent requires a 1000x microscope to see.

 

What is the actual wet weight of microbes we carry around with us? Bacterial cells are much smaller than human cells—like a honeybee versus a cat, as they say. The textbook Microbial Inhabitants of Humans (2004) estimates the total at nearly three pounds, about the weight of our brain.

 

The idea is to “play Nature,” to reverse-engineer the tangled genetic code of eons and “refactor” it—write fresh genetic code that is manageable, that actually does have intelligent design instead of the infinity of moronic kludges and patches that timeless evolution confers.

 

In 1943, a famine in India killed 4 million. Chinese famines between 1959 and 1961 killed 30 million.

 

By some estimates, Norman Borlaug saved more lives—perhaps a billion—than any other human in history. The famines that Ehrlich predicted never occurred, in part because Borlaug, as obsessed as Ehrlich about the dangers of overpopulation, took the approach of providing more food now and striving for lower population later.

 

When Norman Borlaug set about working his magic in Africa in the early 1980s, environmentalists persuaded the World Bank and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations not to fund him.

 

springing up of deserts. Irrigation without arrangements

 

Decade after decade, leading intellectuals in Europe and America explain that the world is going to hell, progress is a lie, and bad people, bad ideas, and bad institutions are to blame for the irreversible degradation of all that is true and good. Overwhelming real-world evidence to the contrary matters not at all to the calamitists.

 

In stark contrast to romantic cultural pessimism, science is imbued with a double optimism. One part is the scientific process itself, driven by accelerating capability: science makes science go faster and better. The other part is the content—much of what is discovered is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever-deepening knowledge, tools, and techniques. Because

 

Literary agent John Brockman points out another angle on the news from science: Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out. Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for space travel. Nobody ever voted for nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, the Web, Google, cloning, the sequencing of the entire human genome.

 

Environmentalists were right to be inspired by marine biologist Rachel Carson’s book on pesticides, Silent Spring, but wrong to place DDT in the category of Absolute Evil (which she did not). Most of her scientific assessments proved right, some didn’t—such as her view that DDT causes cancer. In an excess of zeal that Carson did not live to moderate, DDT was banned worldwide, and malaria took off in Africa.

 

Quoted in a 2007 National Geographic article, Robert Gwadz of the National Institutes of Health said, “The ban on DDT may have killed 20 million children.”

 

A continental population estimated to have been between 50 million and 100 million in 1491 was reduced to 6.5 million by 1650.

 

Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, articulates a growing realization among environmental organizations: “We have to stop thinking of protected areas as ‘protected from people’ and recast protected areas as resources and assets that are ‘protected for people.’”

 

Ecology needs to be a predictive science,” Edward O. Wilson told me. At present, ecology is still limited to being an observational science because the observation isn’t complete yet. Some 1.6 to 1.9 million species—no one knows the exact number—have been identified since Carl Linnaeus founded taxonomy in 1735. Estimates of how many species there are in the world range from 3 million to 100 million (not including the microbes). In other words, we’re so ignorant, we don’t know how ignorant we are.

 

According to one estimate, parasites may outnumber free-living species four to one.

 

Just as pocket calculators democratized math, DNA barcoding makes the whole world bioliterate.

 

Paul Crutzen, the atmospheric chemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on ozone depletion, coined a word that has resonated. “It seems appropriate,” he wrote, “to assign the term Anthropocene to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch.”

 

One emergent principle might be that deleterious elements should be concentrated. Concentrating people in cities is good. Concentrating energy waste products like nuclear spent fuel in casks is an improvement over distributing the greenhouse gases from spent coal and oil in the atmosphere. Concentrating our sources of food and fiber into high-yield agriculture, tree plantations, and mariculture frees up more wildland and wild ocean to carry out their expert Gaian tasks.

 

Also, as oceanographer Sylvia Earle points out, the ocean “provides home for about 97 percent of life in the world, and maybe in the universe.” That life, most of it microbial, determines most of the Gaian balance of gases in the atmosphere.

 

How do we make sense of what we measure? Blogger Cory Doctorow describes the growing flood of data as a “relentless march from kilo to mega to giga to tera to peta to exa to zetta to yotta.” To be of use to science, the data must be correlated, calibrated, synchronized, and updated.

 

But the tenor of the discussion is changing, and geoengineering is being taken seriously, sooner than expected, because of emerging realizations. Realization 1. The stupendous cost, disruption, and time required to build a low-carbon energy infrastructure—Saul Griffith’s Renewistan—is sinking in.

 

Realization 2. It will become painfully apparent that mitigation is not going to succeed. The whirlwind is coming anyway. Currently imaginable efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions do not level off at the desired 450 parts per million (ppm) of CO 2 in the atmosphere, nor at 550 ppm, and probably not even at 650 ppm.

 

Realization 3. Minds change with events, though usually it takes several in succession. The war in Darfur has not been seen as the drought-driven resource crisis it is. The death of 35,000 in Europe’s heat wave of 2003 was considered an anomaly rather than a window on the future. But more such events will pile up. Cyclone Nargis, which hit Burma in May 2008 and killed over 150,000.

 

was the seventh-deadliest cyclone of all time;

 

Realization 4. News from field climatologists will keep getting worse. When one positive feedback—such as a “gigaburp” of methane released from melting permafrost—takes off conspicuously, a sense of public emergency will take off with it. Already temperatures in the Arctic have gone up over 4°C since 1950. The suddenness of a self-accelerating phenomenon invites proportionally immediate response.

 

Realization 5. Some forms of geoengineering, expensive as they are, may be a hundred to a thousand times cheaper than building Renewistan, and some of them would have an instantaneous effect on climate rather than one delayed by decades.

 

Any one of those realizations is sufficient; in combination they are overwhelming. Geoengineering schemes will be in high demand shortly, but what exactly is on offer?

 

Employing stratospheric sulfates is the first choice of most climatologists because it has already been proven to work.

 

In 1991 a volcano in the Philippines, Mount Pinatubo, erupted explosively, sending 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide twenty miles up into the stratosphere, where the material oxidized into tiny sulfate droplets that absorbed and reflected sunlight. The following year, the entire planet cooled by half a degree Celsius. Sea ice in the Arctic was so durable that the crop of particularly large and healthy young polar bears born in 1992 were called the Pinatubo cubs.

 

The estimated cost of injecting stratospheric sulfur would be $1 billion a year, which is shockingly little, considering its impact.

 

Even more attractive, in terms of the ability to turn it off easily, is the idea of a fleet of oceangoing cloud machines. In 1990 atmospheric physicist John Latham came up with the idea of significantly brightening Earth’s albedo by simply adding more water droplets to the stratocumulus clouds that cover a third of the oceans.

 

So far, the most controversial geoengineering proposal has to do with feeding iron to the ocean’s carbon-fixing algae (also called phytoplankton, diatoms, and coccolithophores).

 

An array of floating vertical pipes would provide nutrients to organisms near the ocean’s surface by drawing cold, nutrient-rich water up from the depths.

 

“Once biochar is incorporated into soil,” Lehmann wrote, “it is difficult to imagine any incident or change in practice that would cause a sudden loss of stored carbon.”

 

To dissipate 1.8 percent of the sunlight reaching Earth, which would be enough to offset a doubling of CO 2 in the atmosphere, Angel would float 16 trillion two-foot disks in a cloud eight thousand miles wide and sixty thousand miles long, aligned between the Sun and Earth.

 

Environmental scientists Thomas Homer-Dixon and David Keith wrote in the New York Times that geoengineering “is so taboo that governments have provided virtually no research money.”

 

“It is the business of the future to be dangerous,” philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said.

 

Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants (2010) can be read as a companion volume to Whole Earth Discipline, because he makes it inescapably clear that biophilia and technophilia are not contradictory, but both are part of one long continuity. “Cities are technological artifacts,” Kelly writes, “the largest technology we make.” Humanity pours into cities by the millions for the simple reason that, like all technology, cities offer more options.

 

Obama also committed $54 billion in loan guarantees to cover the building of up to ten new reactors to restart the industry in America. That settled the argument within the administration about expanding nuclear power. Outsiders like Al Gore and Amory Lovins lobbied against it, but pronuclear insiders like Energy Secretary Steven Chu and science adviser John Holdren prevailed.

 

It is Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air (2009), by David MacKay (pronounced “ma-KIE”), who is a Cambridge physicist and chief scientist for Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change. The book provides ruthless analysis, winningly told and illustrated, of what it will take for Great Britain to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions enough to make a difference to climate. As in the analyses by his ally Saul Griffith, the needed measures are horrifying to contemplate in aggregate, but they can get the job done. A quote of his that has gone viral is, “I’m not trying to be pro-nuclear, I’m just pro-arithmetic.”

 

In a final energy comeuppance, I came to regret leaving fusion out of my nuclear chapter. Like most, I figured it was too good to be possible—zero mining (the fuel is hydrogen), zero greenhouse gases, zero waste stream, zero meltdown capability, zero weaponization.

 

There’s been significant news in biotech as well. The environmental and economic benefits of GE crops in the United States were confirmed by an authoritative 250-page study from the National Academy of Sciences. It reported that GE farmers have the advantage of lower costs, higher yields, and greater safety than non-GE farmers, and that significant environmental gains come from their use of less pesticides, less toxic herbicides, and especially from no-till farming enabled by herbicide-resistant GE crops.

 

“Synbio” crossed the threshold into “synlife” with the announcement in May 2010 that Craig Venter’s team had successfully booted up a living, replicating cell with a genome totally created by means of chemistry and computers.

 

His science adviser John Holdren remarked that developing the ability to nudge asteroids “would demonstrate once and for all that we’re smarter than the dinosaurs and can therefore avoid what they didn’t.”

 

Two good books on geoengineering finally arrived: How to Cool the Planet (2010) by Jeff Goodell and Hack the Planet (2010) by Eli Kintisch.

 

Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy (2007), Gwyneth Cravens. Besides presenting a persuasive case for nuclear power, the book is an exemplary account of a Green coming to see the world the way an engineer does. It demonstrates why more should.

 

Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food (2008), Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak. Organic farming marries genetic engineering and lives happily ever after. The book has a real-life texture missing in most works about GE or organic.

 

The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the Twenty-first Century (1999), Gordon Conway. Experience tells. Conway has seen it all and knows exactly how GE fits into simultaneously feeding the world and protecting the environment.

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