She visits the Netherlands, where rising sea levels caused by global warming are expected to swallow up large parts of the country. In areas where there are already periodic floods, a construction firm has started building amphibious homes (they resemble toasters, Kolbert says) as well as "buoyant roads." Another field trip took her to Washington, where she was treated to double-speak by an under secretary charged with explaining the administration's position on climate change. "Astonishingly," she comments in a rare show of heat, "standing in the way" of progress seems to be US President George W. Bush's goal. Not only did he reject the Kyoto Protocol, she notes, with its mandatory curbs on emissions, almost killing the treaty in the process, but he also continues to block meaningful follow-up changes to it.
The US is the largest emitter of carbon in the world, accounting for a quarter of the world's total, with the average US citizen putting out 5,443kg of carbon a year, or about 100 times what the average Bangladeshi does. In two decades, the Chinese will surpass Americans in this disheartening achievement, unless they can somehow be persuaded to build their many projected new coal plants using modern, low-emission -- and expensive -- technology.
Some of the most downbeat (or realistic) observers are climate scientists. "It may be that we're not going to solve global warming," Marty Hoffert, a physics professor at New York University, told Kolbert, "the earth is going to become an ecological disaster, and, you know, somebody will visit in a few hundred million years and find there were some intelligent beings who lived here for a while, but they just couldn't handle the transition from being hunter-gatherers to high technology."
Hoffert isn't giving up in despair, though, but turning to high technology for help. He's trying to find carbon-free sources of energy -- away from Earth. Satellites with photovoltaic arrays could be launched into space, he suggests. Solar collectors could be placed on the moon. Turbines suspended in the jet stream could generate wind power. At least in the long term, "I think we have a shot," he says.
In a final chapter on the "Anthropocene," a newly minted term meaning the geological epoch defined by man, Kolbert turns from her mostly unbiased field reporting to give her own opinion. She is not optimistic, in large part because it appears that Anthropocene man can't be counted on to do the right thing. "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself," she writes, "but that is what we are now in the process of doing."
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