Hi, I'm Anna Marie Cox. Welcome to with friends like these. I feel like I should put a

content morning on this episode for extremely gloomy. It's about climate change and climate

change solutions or rather some things that seem like solutions. Elizabeth Colbert, a

staff writer at the New Yorker, went out and investigated what would happen if some of

these solutions were implemented and it turns out these solutions create more problems. Elizabeth

is here to talk about her book under a white sky, The Nature of the Future, and she is coming

right up. Elizabeth, welcome to the show. I will lay out sort of for listeners who may not

be familiar with your work. It's about climate change and this book in particular is a kind

of meta exploration in some ways of climate change. It's about trying to fix what we have

done and whether or not the fixes cause more harm. I would say that's at least one enormous

theme. And it is also about that waiting for rescue. Like what are we going to do?

Yes, exactly, exactly. And thinking that rescue will come in one holding onto these sort

of talismanic or token tokens of our rescue that are not necessarily how rescue will

come. If rescue does come, I might have had.

So let's go through some of these examples that I think will make it more clear kind

of the general theme here. There are instances where humans go back and try to fix what

humans have done. And you raise questions about whether or not these are good ideas,

whether or not they'll work. What's your favorite example of this?

At the center of the book is a chapter on gene editing, which is a tremendous topic

and has become tremendously easier over the last decade or so, owing to the advent of

CRISPR. And at the center of that chapter is a toad and imported toad, a keen toad, which

was released in Australia maybe 80 years ago or so and has wreaked havoc, been wreaking

...