by Bill Nye
We have started down the right path at least, even if it (yet again) took crisis and conflict to get us started. World War II showed the terrifying possibility of global self-destruction; its aftermath inspired new institutions to promote constructive collaboration on a worldwide-scale. Some of it appeared in the form of international treaties. Some of it appeared as networks of related science, technology, and environmental-research programs. The United Nations, despite its limits and shortcomings, provides a forum for international discussion and decision-making. Doctors Without Borders engages physicians from all over to provide medical services to those in need. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and Conservation International work to stop poaching and conserve threatened species. The Conference of Parties in Paris in 2015, known as COP21, produced the most meaningful international agreement yet on reducing greenhouse gases.
Ideally, we would have regular meetings establishing regular treaties and agreements akin to COP21 for all manner of global issues. In Bill Nye’s perfect world, scientists and engineers from many nations would meet to establish clean air, clean water, and renewable electricity standards. The wealthier nations would work to help the poorer nations by providing know-how and education for all students in every country. We would address strategies for equitable development and poverty reduction. We would collaborate on inspirational projects to cure cancer in all its many forms, on physics experiments, and up and out there in space exploration. These are big ideas, but I often hearken to the incontrovertible truth: The longest journey begins with but a single step.
And don’t feel left out, because a lot of those little steps need to come from you. Personal behavior counts. Every penny in a bank adds up. We make decisions about what kind of car to buy, what kind of home to live in, what type of furnace or air conditioner to install. In many places, you can choose how your electricity is produced from the local utility. You have tremendous influence over what your children learn and what kind of values they adopt. You can be an agent of change at your local school. Think about all the ways you can amplify your control over the Earth. International treaties and trade agreements are instrumental in the conservation, preservation, and improvement of the environment. These agreements do not come out of nowhere. They emerge in response to politicians’ perceptions of the things that are important in the world—especially what is important to voters. The same is true all the way down through the national, state, and local levels.
As I say every chance I get: Vote. Vote! Wait—maybe you thought I was kidding: Vote! That is the fundamental way we influence policies in democratic nations around the world. Right now, it is clearer than ever that elections matter. Even nondemocratic nations are greatly influenced by what they see other major countries doing. Those of us fortunate enough to live in the United States or one of the other progressive democracies around the world have a responsibility to ourselves, and to the rest of the world, to set a good, proactive example. Making your political voice heard is essential because the business of politics is not only setting policies but also finding and choosing our leaders. With the right policies, the right budgets, and the right leaders in place, we can get down to business. Don’t get demoralized when an election doesn’t go your way. Don’t get complacent when it does. Apathy is one of the greatest obstacles to nerdy progress.
Okay, Bill, let’s say voting is the most important thing a citizen can do. Then how do citizens choose for whom to vote? This is just another filtering problem. We have to count on advocacy organizations, the ones with a track record of supporting good causes and producing real results. Some of the organizations I mentioned earlier, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, also pay close attention to which politicians are most supportive and effective in advancing global environmental and human-welfare policies. UCS also conducts independent analyses of the health consequences of public policies and issues guidelines about development strategies to members of Congress and to the congressional staffers who craft much of the policy language. My beloved employer, The Planetary Society, reports on relevant political developments. As it is a nonprofit corporation, we do not lobby in the technical legal sense. Instead, we advocate. We convene expert meetings, meet with elected officials, and encourage our members to petition their representatives. It may sound subtle, but it absolutely is effective. After all, governments are composed of people. Policies are crafted largely as a result of reasoned arguments that are accepted or rejected based on relationships between people.
It’s up to all of us to be a part of that relationship, to find those organizations and evaluate their work, tell our friends and colleagues about them, and, ultimately, support them with our money and our time. The complexity of our society requires us to take an analytic approach to voting and the management of our resources. What I’m saying is: We have to all pay attention to politics and be participants in the process, not just kibitzers. Sometimes that means speaking up (calling your local representative, showing up at a town hall meeting) when you don’t feel like it. Sometimes that means supporting a politician or piece of legislation even if it (or she or he) is less than perfect. Since you are responsible for a whole planet, there are times when you need to be pragmatic.
As you may have picked up by now, I feel that the more nerdy thinkers we have in high places, the more successful we will be in managing this planet of ours. Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of popular backlash against the idea of trusting “experts.” I’d find it troubling if it weren’t so absurd. Think about it for just a moment. Would air traffic be better without any experts in radar? How healthy would we all be if no one took an interest in the chemistry and microbiology of wastewater treatment? Would our highways be better with no one who understood how to place and light road signs? These are all specialized skills that are fundamentally technical, and we do not want to be without them. I suspect that the attacks on experts are more about tribalism than about expertise itself. Some people fear that addressing poverty abroad means less wealth at home; they imagine that acting globally means offering less help locally. It is an utterly flawed argument from a logical point of view, but it has a lot of raw emotional power. It taps into the us-versus-them mentality.
I hope that thinking and talking in terms of our control of the whole Earth can help. Nobody wins if the planet loses; more relevant, perhaps, nobody loses when the whole planet wins. We want to make the world more fair (at least I hope you do, too), not just because it is the right thing to do but because it is the best thing to do for all of us. I’m not sure there is anyone who doesn’t think fairness is a good thing. But fairness is not a stand-alone value. For fairness to flourish, we need to be free to have open discussions and we need to be honest with one another. Echoing Franklin Roosevelt, we also need the basics for a healthy and happy life. In my role as Uncle Bill, the most serious complaints I hear from my nieces and nephews is “But, that’s not fair!” (“My sister got to go on the haunted house ride at Funland. Why can’t I?” etc.) I don’t think it ever changes. Perceived unfairness is what causes conflict well into adulthood. Fairness is an essential element of a better world.
Controlling the planet requires the right policies, check. It requires the right goals, check. It also requires the right science and engineering: the best inputs for any program of directed global change that we might develop. When we are trying to decide what we want to do to the Earth, we need to know exactly what we can do, now or very soon.
We know enough right now to establish more comprehensive agreements and treaties for the fair allocation of water resources, both within the United States and around the world. We can agree not to overfertilize our farms so that nitrogen-rich effluents don’t end up in our rivers, gulfs, and seas, where they cause deadly algae blooms; those algae blooms are killing off large populations of fish. And there is no controversy (except among those whose job it is to create controversy) about the need to stop burning coal to cook, heat, or generate
electricity. All these things will help bring our planet back into balance.
We can improve our agricultural practices over the next few decades so that we can grow food for 9 or 10 billion people using less of Earth’s arable land than we have now. Genetically modified crops are likely to be an important part of the solution. We can engineer plants to tolerate hotter weather, resist drought, and be sturdier in windstorms. We know that these climate challenges are coming. I can imagine inserting new genes into trees so that they are impervious to invasive species we have transported; this challenge is already here. Then I can imagine a system of international agreements that enable farmers and geneticists to create seeds for improved crops or for bug-stopping trees that can be traded through a worldwide development arrangement. These actions will help compensate for global changes we have already made that cannot be undone.
Earth’s entire ecosystem is powered by sunshine, and in our nerdy, reengineered world, a lot of our electricity will come from sunshine, as well. The Sun itself will be our generator. I recently learned about Rayton Solar, a California company whose engineers have found a way to manufacture solar cells that produce much less waste than traditional methods. The cells are also thinner and more efficient. Today, typical solar panels can turn about 20 percent of the solar energy they collect into electricity. If we could reach 50 percent efficiency, it would change the world in a hurry. There are many companies, universities, and government research groups working to get there. Then, acting purely on economic interests, power companies would rapidly switch from fossil fuels to solar. Developing countries could set up low-cost solar generators to plug the many holes in their grids. It would become much easier to move toward an economy that no longer enriches Earth’s atmosphere with greenhouse gases.
In similar fashion, we can reengineer the landscape so that we pull energy out of the wind as it blows by. We could place wind turbines throughout the Midwest United States. All along the eastern seaboard, where half the people in the country live, there are enormous untapped wind resources. The energy is there; we just have to capture it, distribute it, and find better ways to store it. There is work to be done. We need to reengineer the electric grid to handle the variability of wind power. We need more efficient ways to move electricity around and more cost-effective ways to hold onto it until we need it. These are manageable challenges if we devote enough resources to them and if we approach them in a smart, everything-all-at-once fashion.
These are some of the major tools at our disposal in the Anthropocene. The science and technology that will allow us to do them will come from the usual place: the nerds. The decision to implement them will come from all of us—nerds, nerd sympathizers, and nerds-to-be (I’m an optimist). But to make the right decisions, we need to break down the barriers of tribalism and spread the message that we are in control of the Earth. That’s why all the actions I’ve been talking about are vitally important. If you don’t set the agenda for the Earth, someone else will. If we don’t control the destiny of our planet deliberately, we will just control it blindly and carelessly. Controlling the planet is not a job you can quit.
Accepting that we all now sit on the Board of Directors of Planet Earth is a huge new responsibility. It is also a jarring change in how we think of our relationship to nature, especially for those of us who have a long involvement with the ecology movement. Instead of “Let nature take its course,” we will be spending a lot more time focused on “We’re in charge now. Let’s figure out how to run this place.” In the long term, it suggests a pretty radical possibility. We are already, by trial and error, finding the levers and switches that control the planet’s climate. At some point, we might decide that we need to work those controls on purpose to keep the planet’s climate as beneficial as possible—not just reducing our inadvertent impacts but introducing new, intentional ones, as well. We accidentally changed the climate one way. Can we manage to change some aspects of it back, in near –science fiction fashion?
This notion of planet-scale manipulation is often called geoengineering, and some scientists and engineers take it very seriously indeed. (I wrote a lot more about this in my book Unstoppable. It’s a great read. You should pick up a copy.) They have proposed a number of specific experiments, mostly to adjust the clouds, atmospheric particles, or the color of the sea surface so that some extra fraction of the Sun’s energy is reflected back into space. So far, these experiments exist only in the laboratory or as computer models. In the real world, small-scale tests might not be able to yield as meaningful results as large-scale tests . . . Well, you want to be really careful when you are playing around with a planet. We are already living with one set of unintended consequences, and we don’t want to introduce another or a few more.
Here’s hoping that nerd caution and a step-by-step approach, coupled with a few big ideas, will guide our stewardship. And if some form of geoengineering appears reasonable, here’s hoping citizens of the globe will exercise caution and trust in the science. In the let’s-take-care-of-everyone future, we can imagine an upside-down pyramid of design for the whole Earth. It would be wild . . . as well as appropriate on a global scale. Being in control of the planet is the greatest test our species has ever faced. It will take all of our best minds, our best filtering, and our best planning. More than ever before, we need to overcome suspicion and superstition, and we need to embrace reason and logic. Let’s run our planet effectively and compassionately. Let’s run the world nerd-style, to make it better for all.
CHAPTER 29
A Reasoner’s Manifesto
Late in the spring of 2016, during the escalating madness of that very memorable presidential campaign, I headed to Washington, DC, to speak at the second Reason Rally. This is an event organized by and for people who want scientific thinking to guide our governments and our legislation. The rally is also a community gathering. In the same way that some people have religious meetings, religious programming, and religious holidays, Reason Ralliers like to hang out together, socialize, and exchange ideas with others who share their basic outlook on life. The Reason Rally consists largely (though not entirely) of atheists. For them, there is no supercompetent deity running the show. In this community, final responsibility for human actions lies with us, and nobody or nothing else. It had intriguing echoes of my trip to the first Earth Day 46 years earlier, only this time I was up on stage instead of down in the audience.
Now, I don’t generally talk about religion, except when interviewers seek my views or religious people make a direct assault on science. (When a notorious creationist named Ken Ham, who denies virtually everything we know about geology and the natural history of the Earth, challenged me to a debate, I felt compelled to respond; that experience inspired my book Undeniable. Another very fine read that makes a great gift. But I digress.) Other than those instances, I am happy to stick with being the Science Guy and the CEO of The Planetary Society. There are many reasons I’ve held back. Faith is a highly personal thing; conversations about it have a troublesome tendency to produce misunderstandings and conflict. Even a slight misplaced nuance can inflame tribalism rather than soothing it. But in the big-picture perspective of this book, religious belief is impossible to ignore. It influences how many people filter the information around them, how they think about collective responsibility, and how they respond to, well . . . everything. Data can tell you what is happening in the world, but only your internal code can tell what to do with that information—tell you how to change the world for the better, or whether you should bother to try.
To put things in context, I’m absolutely no stranger to religion. I was raised in the Episcopal Church. I served as an acolyte. I carried the cross and performed all the attendant duties with great reverence. And I still enjoy celebrating Newtonmas, the anniversary of Isaac Newton’s birthday as reckoned in Britain, December 25, 1642. (Baby Isaac’s mom knew it as Christmas.) As a young man, I was serious about trying to understand the Church’s answers to questions I h
ad concerning where I and my fellow Earthlings fit into the cosmos. After graduating from engineering school, I sat down every Sunday and read the Bible. I read it from cover to cover twice; it took me about 2 years. I went to a Christian bookstore and bought the maps connecting biblical events to their real or deduced locations in the Middle East. I had a hard time with the biblical heroes who killed one another, offered to sacrifice their sons, recommended stoning their own daughters to death, and so on. Even if I didn’t take those stories literally, they still struck me as morally problematic. I had an even harder time with the idea that a deity killed every living thing on Earth except for one incestuous family and their livestock. That cannot be taken literally, either. The same is true of every miracle in the Bible. If they happened exactly as described, the implications for us humans would be pretty grim.
Here’s what I mean. Miracles are magic, and in science you simply cannot have magic. A miracle is, at best, a shortcut, a just-so explanation for natural phenomena. I recently met three hard-core, very young creationist Jewish scholars in a bar (surprised me, too). They were earnest and curious; they were also (to my further surprise) fans of The Science Guy show. Even so, it took only a moment for their side of the discussion to devolve into magical thinking. Their argument went roughly like this: Science keeps coming up with new ideas, but the Bible never changes. Therefore, the Bible is the only source of truth, and everything we observe with science cannot be accurate, or at the very least, it’s unreliable. They suggested that God could have included the whole apparent 4.6-billion-year history of our planet when He created the universe 5,700 years ago. But then they admitted (one more surprise) that God could also have created the world yesterday, with all of our post facto memories and histories precisely and consistently set in place, if that was what He wanted. My response was, in essence, “So maybe everything is not real? Hmmm. Really? Enjoy your wine, guys.”
