Episode 30: Turning Bad News into a Great Read
How do two of America's leading nonfiction writers turn some of the biggest issues affecting us into juicy narratives that change hearts and minds — and maybe even policies? Patrick Radden Keefe on how he rendered the opioid crisis as a dramatic tale of money, power, and human suffering in his book Empire of Pain, and Elizabeth Kolbert on how she illuminates what we are losing as global temperatures rise, as in her most recent book, Under a White Sky.
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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I cover national security broadly defined and I often turn to numbers to help me understand the scale of any given problem.
Here are a couple of remarkable statistics about two major stories affecting our world. In 2022, 107,000 Americans died of a drug overdose… and the majority of those deaths were caused by fentanyl, which is now a leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45. Here’s another number: 1.2 billion. That's how many climate refugees the Institute for Economics and Peace estimates there could be by 2050.
Those numbers are striking, but they can’t capture the whole picture. And more important than that, they can’t captivate you in the way a story can. A story with characters and stakes, maybe an unexpected twist or two. Certain writers have the ability to take a really big problem like the opioid crisis or climate change, and use their reporting and literary talents to turn them into page-turning books that help us to better understand the world.
We could talk about climate change, and its implications for global migration. Or, we can visit a village in Alaska that’s actually moving its location, because of the warming climate.
Elizabeth Kolbert: Someone mentioned this tiny town on this island off Alaska, that had sort of voted to move, because it was getting swallowed up by climate change.
That’s Elizabeth Kolbert, who’s written a number of extremely compelling books on climate change. She’s figured out how to harness the plight of a single village or a really obscure species of fish to see how deeply and irreversibly we humans are changing the fragile world that we live in.
Patrick Radden Keefe: If you go back to the early days, it really starts with one company and one drug. And the company was Purdue Pharma, this Connecticut pharmaceutical company, and the drug was OxyContin.
And that’s Patrick Radden Keefe, who through dogged investigating, insatiable curiosity, and a talent for finding those novelistic details that draw out character, has taken an all too familiar story — the opioid crisis — and revealed the puppeteers behind the scenes. The result is an indictment of the ways wealth can shield the powerful from accountability.
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So today, how do two of America's leading nonfiction writers take on the national security issues that affect all of us, and transform them into lasting works that change hearts and minds — and maybe even policies?
I’m Peter Bergen, welcome to In the Room.
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Patrick Radden Keefe specializes in a variety of reporting called the ‘write around:’ writing about a subject who isn't going to answer your calls, much less sit down with you for an interview. When it comes to national security, a great many subjects fall into this category. His first write around was almost comically ambitious: he took on the National Security Agency, which for many years was known as the “No Such Agency.”
Patrick Radden Keefe: There's some hubris there, right? I was in my 20s, to taking on the most secretive secret agency imaginable, where there wasn't a huge literature there. You know, this law student with no journalism background, trying to come to Fort Meade and do interviews was not something that they were particularly open to.
Keefe always knew he wanted to be a writer.
Patrick Radden Keefe: I think I figured that out in high school. But it took me many, many years to engineer that. [KEEFE LAUGHS] So I went to college. I went to grad school in the UK for a few years. I studied international relations at Cambridge. Came back, went to law school at Yale. I went to law school for a variety of reasons. I liked school. I was good at it. My sense was if I can make this thing last, as a kind of a cover story, so it looks as though I have real plans in my life, even though what I'm really doing is just hoping that somebody will accept… [KEEFE LAUGHS] will accept my pitch to write articles to sign up for this dying industry.
Keefe didn't want to be a reporter just anywhere. He aimed for the pinnacle of longform nonfiction writing, The New Yorker, which was pretty cheeky considering for many writers a gig there is the culmination of a long career of excellence.
Patrick Radden Keefe: And so I was pitching The New Yorker like crazy. And they wouldn't take anything. And September 11th happened, and I had done some graduate work in the UK, looking at eavesdropping by intelligence agencies. So suddenly this kind of pretty obscure, at the time, thing that I had been interested in became much more germane overnight after 9/11. And then eventually what I did was pitched a book. And that was a book called Chatter that came out in 2005.
By the time Keefe wrote Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, about the origins of the opioid crisis, he had two more books under his belt and a lot of experience with write-arounds.
Patrick Radden Keefe: I've always been very interested in the illegal drug trade and in 2012, I wrote a cover story for the New York Times Magazine about the Sinaloa drug cartel. Particularly the business model of the cartel. I was very interested in the idea that you have these cartels that we think of as, you know, these very violent transnational criminal organizations, but they're also multi-billion dollar commodities enterprises. I was interested in the way that they function as business organizations.
Patrick Radden Keefe: In 2010, the volume of heroin crossing the U.S. border from Mexico suddenly spiked and nobody could figure out why. It was this riddle. Why was there all this heroin suddenly coming? Because a cartel like the Sinaloa Cartel is diversified, you know they moved cocaine and marijuana and methamphetamine and heroin, now fentanyl. The answer turned out to be the opioid crisis. That there was this generation of Americans who actually hadn't started with heroin. They started with FDA approved, doctor prescribed, licit opioid pharmaceuticals. The company was Purdue Pharma, this Connecticut pharmaceutical company, and the drug was OxyContin.
ARCHIVAL Purdue Pharma Advertisement, Patient: I got my life back. Now I can enjoy every day that I live. I can really enjoy myself.
Patrick Radden Keefe: A big part of the way that they did it was with this marketing pitch that, unlike opioids that had come before, where doctors were often reluctant to prescribe them, except in very extreme situations because of a well-founded fear that they could be quite addictive, the marketing pitch for OxyContin was, ‘not anymore.’
ARCHIVAL Purdue Pharma Advertisement, Doctor: The rate of addiction amongst pain patients who are treated by doctors is much less than 1%.
Patrick Radden Keefe: And so that was sort of the, the big lie. We have this powerful opioid, more powerful than anything that's ever been on the market, and it's not addictive. We've figured out a way to hack it. As I delved into this, I learned that, that Purdue Pharma was owned by the Sackler family. And that was when the penny dropped for me because I knew the Sackler name. Because I grew up in Boston, I've lived in New York, I've lived in Washington, D. C., I've lived in London. These are all places where... if you look for it, you could see the Sackler name everywhere: on all these cultural and educational and medical elite institutions. And I didn't understand how they could own this company that had done these terrible things, and not even really be asked difficult questions about it. And so that was the disconnect that I was seeking to resolve.
Peter Bergen: You know, one way to read the book is sort of an indictment of the entire billionaire class. I know that wasn't your intent. But the second and third generation of this family and their efforts to sort of distance themselves from where the money came from, is there a bigger story here, not just about the Sacklers, but in the way in which, say, New York society operates?
Patrick Radden Keefe: Yeah, absolutely. And I would even go further than that in terms of the larger significance of the story. I mean, I think on the one hand, there's this issue of reputation-washing and the way in which institutions that should know better, and I'm thinking specifically here about institutions of higher learning, but this would go for the art museums as well, are, you know, they're so desperate for cash that they are readily enlisted into this project of reputation washing. And I would say, you know, this is hardly unique to the Sacklers. After my book came out the photographer Nan Goldin, took a great interest in this and really campaigned to have the Sackler name taken down.
ARCHIVAL Protestors: [CHANTING] Take down their names!
Here’s how one media outlet covered those protests.
ARCHIVALNewscaster: In New York City, protesters took over the Guggenheim Museum Saturday night to call out the museum's relationship with the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, produces the prescription painkiller OxyContin.
And here’s how Keefe, voicing the Empire of Pain audiobook, transports you to the scene, on a chilly Saturday afternoon, following Nan Goldin into the Met:
ARCHIVAL Empire of Pain: [KEEFE NARRATING] She was dressed in black from head to toe and wore a long black muffler around her neck and bright red lipstick, her crimson hair flopping down over her eyes. Once she was inside the museum, she made her way to the Sackler Wing. She had not come alone. When she reached the hall, with its great wall of banked glass looking out onto the park, she blended into the throng of afternoon museum goers. But she was quietly coordinating with a group of a hundred or so other people who had arrived incognito, just as she had. Suddenly, at 4 p.m., they started shouting, Temple of Greed! Temple of Oxy!
ARCHIVAL Nan Goldin: Temple of Greed!
ARCHIVAL Protestors: Temple of Greed!
ARCHIVAL Nan Goldin: Temple of Oxy!
ARCHIVAL Protestors: Temple of Oxy!
ARCHIVAL Nan Goldin: Sacklers lie!
ARCHIVAL Protestors: Sacklers lie!
ARCHIVAL Nan Goldin: Thousands die!
ARCHIVAL Protestors: Thousands die!
ARCHIVAL Nan Goldin: The Sacklers knew!
ARCHIVAL Protestors: The Sacklers knew!
ARCHIVAL Nan Goldin: Their pills would kill!
ARCHIVAL Protestors: Their pills would kill!
Patrick Radden Keefe: The Sackler name has now been scrubbed from most of these institutions because they've been publicly shamed. But I do think that there is a sense in which they, you know, I mean, other names remain in place, and I think that if there was a reason that a lot of these institutions, and for instance, Harvard, which still hasn't taken down the Sackler name, some of these institutions are very reluctant to, to do it… I think that for them they realized that once you start that process, like once you start subjecting these names and these kind of philanthropic gifts to some kind of basic ethical litmus test it becomes problematic at an institutional level, right? Because there are many other unsavory people uh, who may be giving money now or have given money in the past or potentially give money in the future.
Patrick Radden Keefe: But I would, I would go beyond that and also say that to me, what the book is about is, is impunity. It's about impunity for the billionaire class. It's about impunity for the super elite. And it's about the way in which when you have fortunes of that magnitude, and this would be true for a family but also for a business, it can pervert the basic checks and balances of our system. It can pervert the protections that American citizens and American consumers have and should expect. And so you see this with what I would characterize as the kind of soft corruption of the FDA, of the Department of Justice, which are supposed to stop people from doing bad things and then create measures of accountability when they go ahead and do the bad things anyway.
Patrick Radden Keefe: And really it's a story in which those two things fail to happen again and again and again and again and again. And when you ask yourself why, the answer is always, at root, the money, right? It's not, it's not like a suitcase full of money. It's not a bribe, but it's: I happen to know a well placed attorney who I can hire for top dollar who will come in and intervene with you, Peter, you know, you who are the regulator, you who are the prosecutor, you who are the person who's supposed to be holding me to account.
Peter Bergen: Why is it important for the Sacklers to have their names no longer be on these monuments, to art or to science or to medicine? What's the importance of this symbolism? Is it merely symbolism or is it something deeper?
Patrick Radden Keefe: I think it's mostly merely symbolism. The book came out, more than two years ago now, and I have traveled around the country talking about it pretty much continuously ever since, and anytime I talk to a group of more than, I don't know, 30 people? Somebody in the room will come up to me afterwards and tell me about how they've lost a loved one. When you're exposed to that kind of loss and the sort of rawness of that, as often as I am… you wouldn't want to put too much stock in the idea that the Sackler name is coming down from these fancy institutions and therefore justice has somehow been done.
Peter Bergen: What would justice look like?
Patrick Radden Keefe: Well, what would justice look like? There are a lot of people, there was a rally at DOJ in which a lot of these families who've lost loved ones say they want criminal charges against the Sacklers.
ARCHIVAL Protestors: [CHANTING] DOJ! Do your job! DOJ! Do your job!
WithEmpire of Pain, Keefe has managed to inextricably link the Sacklers to Oxycontin and the opioid crisis. But he's also quick to say his primary concern when he sits down at his desk to write isn't whether the Sacklers go to prison. It’s getting you to want to read about them in the first place.
Patrick Radden Keefe: I need to really engage you, in every paragraph, on every page. I want you to keep turning the pages. My books are designed to be pleasurable to read. The challenge then becomes, how do you take a fiendishly complex fact pattern and distill that into something that ideally is a page turner?
Keefe began with a mountain of documents from various legal cases. And then, after he published a piece in The New Yorker about the Sacklers, and word got out that he was writing a book, more and more documents came his way.
Patrick Radden Keefe: So somebody had figured out where I live and dropped off in my mailbox an envelope and I opened the envelope and it was, it was an index card with a quote from The Great Gatsby… and a thumb drive. And I was so paranoid for a bunch of reasons. You know, some of which may have been quite sensible. That I didn't want to put that thumb drive in any of my devices. So I ended up buying a Chromebook, like a burner Chromebook, just in order to access the thumb drive. I got it open, and there were thousands of pages of internal files and legal files associated with it. This is somebody who'd been associated with Purdue in a litigation capacity, had dropped this stuff in my house. And then I wanted to print this stuff out, [KEEFE LAUGHS] I also didn't want to connect to my printer, because I was still sort of worried that some pernicious... You know, virus or malware would get on it. So then I had to buy a burner printer. It was that for two years.
Peter Bergen: There's something about documents. Documents, of course, are partial in some ways, but documents don't quite lie in the same way that human beings do.
Patrick Radden Keefe: Yeah, it's true. I think there's two senses in which that's true. One is just kind of purely in terms of time. That if you're, if you're coming along, you know, writing a biography of bin Laden after he's dead, your aperture is, is pretty wide. You're sort of looking at the whole thing, and, and one of the wonderful things for me about documents is how contemporaneous they are, the way in which they're sort of, they're only, they're not, you know, they have no idea where the story is going to go.
Peter Bergen: Well, that's a brilliant way of putting it.
Patrick Radden Keefe: They're not able to revise in the way that people would, in retrospect.
Peter Bergen: What's your advice to writers who are looking to write narrative nonfiction that people actually want to read?
Patrick Radden Keefe: I don't know that there's a real secret to it. One of the biggest things that I learned slowly along the way was… in whatever line of work you're in, you know, if you're called upon to write, to write memos, to write emails, to write speeches, I think there's a weird sense in which it's like we have a reader brain and a writer brain, and when you're reading, you're one kind of person, you're having a certain kind of experience. And then when people sit down to write, they completely forget about that other person, the part of them that's a reader.
Patrick Radden Keefe: And so in some ways, the single most important thing that I, the advice I would give a young, a young person, and something that I feel like I learned probably too late, is to have those two parts of me just be more in conversation. So when I'm reading a book or I'm reading an article to just be attentive to what pulls me in. There's nothing I love more than that kind of, I think of it as the undertow, the undertow that you feel when you feel like somebody is just pulling you into a story. And this could be for, this could be a newspaper article, it could be an email. Being attentive to what works, what excites you in a piece of writing. And then by contrast, what repels you? I'm forever having this experience when I'll be lying in bed, you know, reading a novel, and I find myself rereading the same paragraph for the fourth time. And it's like quicksand. I can't get through it. The pages are not turning.
So what gets you to turn the pages in Keefe's books?
Patrick Radden Keefe: I have to have characters that I can build a narrative around. That's just what I do.
Take a really telling detail like this one about Richard Sackler, the mastermind behind Oxycontin. Here’s Keefe voicing that section in Empire of Pain:
ARCHIVAL Empire of Pain: [KEEFE NARRATING] He had a bulldog, which he often brought with him. The dog was named UNCH, after the stock market abbreviation for unchanged, which indicates that a company's share price ended the trading day at the same level where it started. UNCH had a tendency to shit in the hallways, and Richard had a tendency to not pick it up. So visitors to the ninth floor learned to weave around the occasional deposit left by the dog on the royal purple carpet.
Patrick Radden Keefe: Those are the kinds of details that, uh, you spend years interviewing people and sort of eking things out and occasionally you find these little novelistic distillations of someone's whole personality. Uh, that he brings his dog to work [BOTH LAUGH] and it shits on the royal purple carpet and he just keeps moving, confident in the knowledge that somebody else will sweep in behind him.
The Sacklers weren’t all that concerned about picking up dog crap in their own office and they also weren't particularly concerned about what they put in their emails. And that became a treasure trove for Keefe later, when he used some of those emails to reconstruct the infighting that was going on inside the Sackler family.
Patrick Radden Keefe: They're constantly bad mouthing each other, um, which is fun. So that was easy. And then I interviewed a lot of people who were close to them. So everyone from Richard Sackler's college roommate to the yoga instructor who went on vacation with Mortimer Sackler Jr. and his family to the Turks and Caicos, to doormen, to administrative assistants, to housekeepers. Lots of people who had a kind of quite intimate vantage point. The Sacklers were not particularly subtle about all these kinds of petty grievances and rivalries. I mean, it's hilarious. I had so much good stuff. I had to, I literally had to leave stuff out of the book because it just at a certain point, it's like too much of a good thing.
Patrick Radden Keefe: I'm interested in the lies that people tell themselves and each other and the ways in which people use charisma to, to break the rules or bend the rules. I'm interested in the lines between what is licit and illicit and how permeable those lines are, the ways in which,, I mean, just to give you an example from today, right, it's like Chapo Guzman is in prison for the rest of his life in a super max and the Sacklers are going to have to console themselves with only 6 billion dollars and some social opprobrium.
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The sheer scale of the opioid crisis is big in the United States but elsewhere around the world it barely registers. But climate change and the other impacts of widespread industrialization are remaking the world for pretty much everybody.
Elizabeth Kolbert uses small scale examples, zooming in on the spectacular details of the natural world, to tell the larger climate story. She covered New York politics before switching to the climate beat.
Elizabeth Kolbert: I was looking for a story that had a lot of significance that wasn't changing all the time. Climate change was already very much on my radar and a lot of people's radar.
You might remember a Vice President by the name of Al Gore. He was one of the first voices sounding an alarm about human-caused global warming.
ARCHIVAL Al Gore: I only wish that the skeptics could change the facts. But they can't. The underlying facts, uh, are real. And the accumulation of greenhouse gasses worldwide continues.
Elizabeth Kolbert: You know it was a very big issue, although not one that was particularly well understood or being particularly well reported at that point.
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Elizabeth Kolbert: I came across Richard Alley's book, The Two-Mile Time Machine, which is about ice coring operations in Greenland, and I, one of the great things about being a reporter is you can call the author up, so I called up Richard, and I said, you know, I really want to go with you to Greenland. It seemed really fascinating, and the ice coring operation that he was working on had been completed, but he put me in touch with these Danes who were drilling another core.
Elizabeth Kolbert: And I did go up that summer to the top of the Greenland Ice Sheet with the Danes. And it was the Danes who told me, ‘whatever you hear, the physics of climate change are irrefutable and this is coming at us and it's super important.’ And that is really what set me on this path. That piece that I wrote about ice cores ended up being about the climate of the past, not really about the climate of the future. It's what we learned about the climate of the past, though that has important implications for the climate of the future. And then I set about trying to write about climate change. It took me a really, quite a long time to find a story, which I finally found when someone mentioned this tiny town on this island off Alaska, that had sort of voted to move, because it was getting swallowed up by climate change.
That story took Kolbert and her readers to Shishmaref, a tiny Inupiat village. We learn, with Kolbert, about the town’s seal hunts, its permafrost and its residents, who take Kolbert under their wing, supplying her with a rain suit, and inviting her to come back. Kolbert has been covering climate change ever since and this approach has become one of the features of her work:
Elizabeth Kolbert: Taking people to places that they are unlikely to go themselves is key to a certain form of storytelling, which you know has an adventure component to it, even as the subject matter that I personally am writing about could be described as sort of the opposite of swashbuckling adventure…into realms that you don't necessarily want to go. Even a medium amount of time on climate change will tell you, once you absorb the… full impact of what it means for just about everything and everybody on planet Earth, it's kind of hard to go back to reporting on anything else.
Peter Bergen: Because it seems so trivial?
Elizabeth Kolbert: Yeah, I mean, there are many, many major issues in the world. I do not want to trivialize them at all, but climate change will affect all of them. Absolutely all of them.
Kolbert's project is revealing what we’ve already lost and what we will lose as we embark on a new epoch that some scientists are calling the Anthropocene. But defining a new geological epoch, of which there have only been a few in the earth’s 4.6 billion year history, is not something scientists take lightly. And every year geologists gather to weigh the evidence. But Kolbert says, the evidence that a new epoch, defined by geological changes that will be inscribed in the rocks and evident for millions of years, is already pretty compelling.
Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, one thing is we're adding a lot of carbon to the air. That carbon will be incorporated into certain deposits. And so we'll be able to tell millions of years from now that something happened where a lot of carbon got released into the air. So that's just one indicator. We are creating a very, very curious, fossil record of all of our plastic junk, for example, that will also fossilize and be a marker of something very weird having happened at this moment. We are moving species around the world that will definitely be in the fossil record, right?
Elizabeth Kolbert: We move rats all around the world, including to places that are uninhabited by people. That will show up. Some of their bones will be fossilized. We will see an extinction event. We will see that many species dropped out of the fossil record. So the list of ways that we're changing the fossil record is pretty long and pretty compelling. Now, the argument against naming the Anthropocene now, one argument is, well, our impacts are only going to get greater and greater as time goes on. So, you know, no hurry. We can wait, we can rename this, later on. Another question is, how long we're going to be around to affect these changes. If we manage to do ourselves in, how long will these changes last? But I, I think it's very convincing that we have already changed the fossil record. I don't think there's really much doubt about that.
It’s her ability to explain complex scientific ideas in accessible language that makes Kolbert’s writing so effective.
Elizabeth Kolbert: I really try to write in a way that acknowledges the existence of much complicated math in the world, you know, you're not going to get a climate model without a tremendous amount of complicated math. But where you as a reader, you don't have to understand that math. I don't understand that math. I'm not asking you to understand that math. I'm making a nod in the direction. This is what, you know, you would find, if you did all that math, but you certainly don't have to be able to follow all the steps of that math. As I say, I can't.
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Peter Bergen: A big subject is the changing pH levels of the ocean, which was something I was vaguely aware of, but one of the places that you go to is Australia's Great Barrier Reef, which is just basically disappearing. How big is it? Why is it a big deal? Is there anything that can be done?
Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, you know, this is one of the great tragedies of our time. The Great Barrier Reef is basically the size of Italy. It's not really one reef, it's a long string of, of thousands of reefs that sort of is draped along the east coast of Australia. It's the world's largest reef or collection of reefs by far. It's a truly astonishing place or places. I've been to one, tiny corner of it. And what's happening is that corals are pretty, sensitive to water temperatures, and as water temperatures rise, you get this phenomenon that's called coral bleaching, and that is just happening more and more frequently, with very warm water temperatures.
Elizabeth Kolbert: And so you're getting pretty major mortality on the reef, and it's just, it's just shrinking or becoming simpler. So certain kinds of corals that can’t survive are not surviving and, certain kinds that can maybe, uh, will take over. But the extraordinary complexity and diversity of the reef uh, will disappear. And, you know, people are...trying to come up with all sorts of strategies for trying to protect some of the reef or regrow some of the reef, but I think that the bottom line is, if water temperatures continue to increase and at the same time the chemistry of the oceans is also changing in ways that coral reefs don't like, the prognosis for reefs is pretty grim. And that has extraordinary consequences that we're just beginning to sort of understand, but a lot, a lot of marine life depends on coral reefs, and a lot of people depend on coral reefs.
Peter Bergen: Well, I was surprised. I think in your book you say that the low-end estimate for the number of species dependent on reefs is like a million.
Elizabeth Kolbert: The range of life that you can see in one square yard on the reef is just extraordinary, even, you know, sort of with a naked eye. And then when you crack open a piece of reef, I mean, many studies have been done like this, you see what's burrowed into it, what's eating away at it, tiny little creatures. So, a million species is, as you say, the low end estimate. They're not all sort of macro species, they're not all fish. Some of them are tiny little guys, tiny little shrimp or whatever, but they are all dependent on a reef, and the tiny little guys are the food for the bigger guys, so, you know, the whole ecosystem starts to unravel.
The Great Barrier Reef is one of a number of examples in Kolbert’s most recent book,Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, which shows the disastrous effects of human meddling in the natural world.
Take another example: the mighty Mississippi River… which has been redirected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the course of many decades to protect the city of New Orleans from floods. When the river followed its original path, it periodically flooded and deposited its sediment — a buildup of clay, sand and silt.
My wife is from Louisiana. And I’ve been traveling there for a decade and half. Until I read Under a White Sky, I didn't fully understand why so much of southern Louisiana is disappearing so fast.
Because the Mississippi no longer floods naturally it no longer is building up the sediments that composed much of southern Louisiana. To quote Kolbert: “Thanks to the intervention of engineers there had been no spillover… and hence no land building. The future of southern Louisiana has instead washed out to sea.”
By the end of her book, Kolbert has assembled a catalog of examples that show just how inept we humans can be. When we try to solve one environmental problem, we often create new, more intractable problems.
Finally, Kolbert examines a radical option that’s on the table right now, by which we might intervene in the environment yet again, this time in the name of fighting climate change: The untested scientific field of solar geoengineering.
Elizabeth Kolbert: Solar geoengineering is basically mimicking volcanoes. So when you get a major volcanic eruption, for example, Mount Pinatubo in 1991, you get a tremendous amount of sulfur dioxide that gets pushed all the way up into the stratosphere.And it forms these reflective droplets that sort of form this haze, this global haze that gets spread around the world on these stratospheric winds. And that creates these very beautiful sunsets that you get after big volcanic eruptions. And it also has a, a cooling effect temporarily because a certain amount of sunlight is bouncing off of those little reflective droplets back out towards space before it even hits the earth.
Elizabeth Kolbert: So you're getting less direct sunlight hitting the earth. And after about a year or two, those little droplets fall out of the stratosphere and the effect wanes or disappears. But the idea behind solar geoengineering is, well, we could do that ourselves. We could just sort of fake volcanoes, we could pour something into the stratosphere, it could be sulfur, it could be some other compound that's very reflective. and we would then be reducing the amount of direct sunlight that hits the earth, and we could, in that way, have a cooling effect to balance out potentially at least some of the warming effect that we're having.
Peter Bergen: Do you think solar geoengineering might work in the future in a way that actually would really reduce global temperatures, and are there other kinds of unexpected or unanticipated problems with this approach that would come back and haunt us down the line?
Elizabeth Kolbert: These are all questions that are hard to answer at this point. There's been a lot of modeling work done with computer simulations that, you know, do suggest that you could have a cooling effect. And also a lot of these studies suggest that the side effects of doing that would be less bad than the side effects of not doing it. Now, those are just computer simulations. There's been really, virtually no actual experimental work in this field because it's so controversial. And, I think, honestly, rightly so, that it's very controversial. It would be consciously — you know, right now we're sort of inadvertently re-engineering the atmosphere and it's having, you know, terrible consequences.
Elizabeth Kolbert: This would be quite consciously re-engineering the atmosphere and it would, it would almost certainly affect different parts of the world differently. So, after you have a major volcanic eruption, you, you get these regionally different weather patterns. So you can see that, even if potentially the global effect, net global effect, might be positive, the negative effect for certain parts of the world could be very, very serious. And you can see the possibilities for global conflict over this. And there are simply also a lot of, you know, there are the known unknowns and there are the unknown unknowns. Messing with the stratosphere is something that, you know, one should not do, lightly. Let's just put it that way.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Kolbert covers a pretty dark subject. But if we just resign ourselves to the direction in which things are headed, we don’t stand a chance of improving our prospects as a species. I wondered how she balances those competing forces: portraying the bleak reality without extinguishing a reader's hope.
Elizabeth Kolbert: I think people who work in the climate space are often asked that. It's just interesting to me because if you're reporting on the war in Ukraine or whatever, you wouldn't be asked, like, what's the hopefulness here? I guess I come from a kind of an old school, journalistic tradition where I say, my job is to report the facts. It's not to decide how you're going to interpret them or what you're going to feel when you read them. So I do try to hew to that.
Elizabeth Kolbert: Now, I certainly do understand there's a sense of like, why should people read about climate change if it's just all doom and gloom? And will they bother to read what I write if they just feel that it's all doom and gloom? And that is both a practical and an ethical position. I don't want to become complicit in the problem, if that makes sense, by just discouraging people from doing anything. On the other hand, the facts are what the facts are. And I think that if there's one point that I guess I would want to make, it is that we're not going to deal with this problem by denying the scale of the problem. We have to take measures that are commensurate with the scale of the problem and just, things that make us feel hopeful, but don't really have any impact, that's just not going to do it.
Peter Bergen: How do you make people care?
Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, I think people do actually care about other species. Lots of us have pets of various sorts. People are birdwatchers and people are plant lovers and people are very interested in other species, even if they are simultaneously doing things that are very destructive to other species. People care about their kids. I think that's pretty universal. What we are doing right now to the planet will have repercussions that will last for all intents and purposes forever. We are really narrowing down the range of choices that our kids will have. We are guaranteeing them some very, very, very hard times. I think that people care… about themselves. [KOLBERT LAUGHS] We are getting to the point where, millions and millions of people this summer walked out of their houses to see that the sky was brown or orange because of wildfire smoke that was directly related to climate change. And people were breathing in very dangerous air, the air quality in many parts of the country, including where I live for parts of the summer, was really bad owing to that wildfire smoke. So we care about our own health. So there are all sorts of ways, and avenues into, getting people to care.
Peter Bergen: Do you have frustration about the denialism around climate change and other forms of change that exist, or do you just sort of tune it out?
Elizabeth Kolbert: Oh, you know, frustration is definitely too weak a word. I mean, desperation. From a journalistic perspective, you could say it's, it's fascinating. From a human perspective, it's, it's, it's extremely upsetting.
Peter Bergen: How do you deal with the upset?
Elizabeth Kolbert: [KOLBERT LAUGHS] I, uh, I guess I try to channel it into journalism. [PETER LAUGHS]
Seems like a pretty good coping mechanism to me.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
We humans are programmed for story. The longest running prime time series on American TV is 60 Minutes, which debuted more than half a century ago. And there’s a pretty simple reason for that. No matter how serious the topics are on 60 Minutes, Don Hewitt, the executive producer, had a mantra: “Tell Me a Story!”
Hundreds of worthy white papers on climate change and the opioid crisis will gather dust, while Kolbert’s and Keefe’s books will still be read many years from now because they understand that simple imperative: Tell Me a Story.
Patrick Radden Keefe: To me, narrative is, is everything. I don't even know how conscious it is, but I grew up in a family of storytellers and particularly on my father's side is a big Irish American family and we'd get together for Thanksgiving or Easter and at a certain point there'll be, you know, 10 or 12 people around a table, and there's a particular uncle who's retelling a story that we've all heard 100 times. But, but, there's a kind of satisfaction in the retelling. There's a sort of ritual aspect of it, a kind of oral tradition. Anytime I'm talking to an audience, and it can be talking to the people listening to this podcast or giving a talk or writing a story or having a conversation with my wife and kids around the dinner table, I'm always leaning into the narrative features of whatever it is that we're talking about, because to me, those are, those are the most compelling. And I don't know if that's just our vanity as people, but I do think that a narrative about people remains, I think, a pretty unparalleled delivery device for complex information.
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If you want to know more about the issues and subjects that we discussed in this episode, we recommend Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky and The Sixth Extinction, along with Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain and Say Nothing. You can find all of those titles on Audible.
CREDITS
IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.
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Please note: This episode includes excerpts from a broadcast by the Oxford Union.
