To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Changing Climate Change

From Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI Public Radio International, it's to the best of our knowledge and Jim Fleming. We may argue about the details, but one thing's for sure, the earth is heating up and we're in big trouble if we don't do something about it. Some 20 years ago the UN tried with the Kyoto Protocol, 187 nations signed and ratified it. But one nation, most notably, did not. The US, a nation that is responsible for some 25 % of all greenhouse gas emissions. Now, we have a chance to try again at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The US is in the hot seat as the UN strives for a broad and binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol. So this hour, as our world leaders dig into the details of a new climate change treaty, an overview of the problems and some solutions. Up first, environmental icon at Whole Earth Catalog Founders Stewart

Brand, he says it's time to get pragmatic about this whole climate change thing. Brand lays out his ideas in the new book Whole Earth Discipline, an eco -pragmatist manifesto. It has to say the least, proven to be controversial. Brand says cities are green, nuclear power is green, genetic engineering is green, and geoengineering is probably necessary. And Strange Hemp set down with Brand to discuss his eco -pragmatist approach to climate change. Stewart Brand, for people who remember you best as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, what you have to say in your new book may come as something of a shock. Basically, you're laying out a pro -urban, pro -nuclear power, pro -genetic engineering manifesto. What changed? Well, probably I got older, but mainly the world changed. Climate change came along. Nuclear technology got better. Genetic engineering technology came along. And partly because I'm trained as a biologist back when, I've always thought that that was probably good news. And now I'm persuaded that it is

completely good news and very green. Still, I guess your conclusions are not remotely those of a lot of the majority of environmental leaders and activists these days. What do you think you're seeing that they aren't? I'm doing what they're doing with climate, which is paying close attention to the science. And insisting that we do the same with these other domains, such as biotechnology and nuclear technology. You know, as they say, those who know the most about climate are the most frightened, and those who know the most about nuclear are the least frightened. And I guess I'm trying to match those realities and get the rest of the environmental sun board. How do you lay out the case for nuclear power? The case for nuclear power is double. One is that it's mainly a very carbon free source of energy that's very proven. And you know, existing technology has been there for quite a while. And it's getting better all the time. People have, I think, lost track of the next generations being so good. But the main point is it's coal versus nuclear. As far as getting what's called base load electricity. That is, you

know, the electricity that's on all the time. Which solar and wind, nice as they are, are not. Unless we figure out a way to store their energy when they're not running. So nuclear versus coal, coal always wins in terms of price. And nuclear always wins in terms of climate. And I think we're now in a situation where a climate trumps price. And that's why governments are setting about making coal very expensive. Well, it's just kind of a hard mental transition for decades. Being green was practically synonymous. Was being anti -nuke. Being pro -nuke just sort of seems wrong if you're pro -environmental. Yeah, and it's one guy, Steven Tyndale, who is head of Greenpeace in the United Kingdom, described as almost a religious conversion to give up on being anti -nuclear. But in his case, about two years ago, he was persuaded by new positive feedbacks and climate of methane melting out of the melting permafrost in the North -Far North. He realized he had to get way more serious about

where the electricity was going to come from. And he switched to being now very actively pro -nuclear in Britain. Britain, you may know, is in the process of setting up to build 10 new reactors. What about the problem of nuclear waste? The problem is political. It's not technical. We've known how to deal with nuclear waste for quite a long time. They're in the Midwest. You know, we park it up back in the parking lot in those dry cask storage and they're fine there. That's the case with all 121 nuclear reactor sites in the US. It's a good place to put it while we think about it. We may want to put it in the ground, in which case, the place where we've been putting in the ground in New Mexico down in a deep salt formation is good, but we may well want to reprocess it, or we may even want to use it as direct fuel in the next generations of nuclear reactors called the fast reactors. So you wouldn't mind having one in your own neighborhood? Yes, please. It seems to me that a lot of your arguments come down to pragmatism. In other words,

correct me if I'm wrong about you, but I have the impression that you think, you know, it might be nice to rely on solar power or wind power rather than nuclear, but we can't afford to anymore. Do you have a very strong sense that we're just running out of time? Yeah, climate change, because of it's such an unstable, non -linear system, as they say, it keeps surprising us with things like the Arctic ice melting 40 years ahead of schedule, according to the IPCC models. That kind of thing shows signs that it's going to keep occurring, and so things happen rapidly, and they come from the side. They come from areas you don't expect. And as that happens, I think a sense of urgency will continue to increase, and it's one of the reasons, I think, for example, that geoengineering, direct intervention and climate is something that will come to sooner rather than later. What might geoengineering, intervening in climate look like? Pretending to be a volcano. Climateologists love this

one, because it's what they call an existence proof, a natural experiment. In 1991, a volcano in the Philippines named Mount Pinotubo blew up and sent 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, 20 miles up, and suddenly the next year the whole earth was half degree Celsius cooler. You had more ice in the Arctic, you had as a result, more polar bears. The cubs were born that year were referred to by a biologist, as the Pinotubo Cubs. And they ran the models and realized that if you had a pinotubo over a year, you could cool a planet by three degrees Celsius, which is a lot. And it's not that expensive to put sulfur dioxide, which we have vast quantities of up there. And if we do that, then we can buy some time while we do all the necessary things to cut back on our carbon forcing of the atmosphere and hopefully catch up with things. Okay, so wait a minute, I'm not sure I totally get this. We would sort of create a volcano that would pump sulfur into the air. Well, one of the schemes that Nathan Mervold and Seattle was working on is basically a garden hose pumping liquid

sulfur dioxide up to 10 ,000, 12 ,000 feet, where it's getting into the stratosphere and hanging it off of wedge -shaped blamps. And not very much expense. It's a few hundred million dollars to do that a year, so compared to the costs of all the other things we want to do about climate, it's pretty small. And it could really work? What it does is it puts sulfur dust into the stratosphere, where it does slightly dim the amount of sunshine reaching the Earth's surface. That in fact offsets the warming that we're getting from our forcing of more carbon dioxide and methane and nitrous oxide and so on into the atmosphere, while we get over doing that. And so it's just a by -time deal. It's a form of global dimming. But doesn't it make the world darker and then reduce the amount of sunlight for crops? Because remember when Mount St. Helena blew, people said there were serious climate changes as a result. And no doubt with that approach, as we had with Pint of Tube O, there's some side effects you don't like. And that's one of the reasons you don't do it unless you feel like you have to. Right, so that'd be an effort of last resort,

but worth it. Yeah, it's a desperate activity, but you would do it only when you have lots of knowledge of how it works. You've tried it locally in the Arctic region, for example, to see if it does work and if there any really bad side effects you don't want. It's easy to turn off if that happens. I think incremental experiments in this area are what we need to go ahead with. You know, on the one hand, there's something so hopeful and optimistic about thinking that science and technology may actually be able to improve the climate, but it also makes me nervous. Doesn't it seem like an example of exactly the kind of arrogant, big science that got us into the mess we're in now? Dangerous and crazy comes to mind and you would only do it if you were absolutely head your back against the wall. And my great hope would be in all the people working in this area, their great hope is that we would never use this, but if we need to use it, you need to have schemes you're pretty sure will work.

And so that's why we need to put serious money, a serious engineering, as well as serious science into moving ahead on these schemes, to see if we can find any that can work if we need to use them. And then let's keep them on the shelf until we get desperate. Have you gotten a lot of flak for this book or are you finding that it's generally being applauded by your old environmental colleagues? Various a lot. Most of the kind of the knee jerk freak out response like it is in relation to the nuclear stuff. I guess because it is a semi -religious issue like we suggested. And there's a little bit of that with the genetic engineering. There's a certain amount of, oh my god, now hold it. And does thinking this mean I have to think that and the sort of working through the process. And then some flat outs applause. And so Edward O. Wilson, the guy who invented the term biodiversity and has completely transformed biology a number of times in his life, said this is one of the basic

texts that should be used for humanity to decide what to do about these various issues. Do you see it as a book that is more optimistic than pessimistic or the other way around? I guess I'm really asking which are you optimistic about the future of the planet or not so much? My sense is that the situation is headed towards sufficient desperation that people will rise the occasion. And there's quite a lot of us. And in the developing world, there's quite a lot of very smart people who are developing the skills and now enough prosperity to act that I think there's no end of innovation and resourcefulness out there. And that once we get it all pointed in one direction, it could well rise the occasion. And that's the source of my optimism. But that's against a frame of pretty deep worry that we may be headed toward what James Lovelock expects of a five degree Celsius warmer world in which there's carrying capacity for maybe a billion billion and a half people. And how we get from where we are to

there is basically people kill each other off fighting over diminishing resources. Well, let's hope that in humanity's darkest hour, we do manage to pull ourselves together. Yeah, darkest hour, finest hour. They're supposed to go together. Thanks a lot for talking today. What a pleasure. Thank you. Stuart Brand is the founder of the Whole Earth catalog. His latest book is called Whole Earth Discipline, an eco -pragmatist manifesto and strange ship spoke with him. As you can imagine, many in the environmental movement strongly disagree with Stuart Brand. Paxus Cult is one of those people. He's been an anti -nuclear energy activist in both the US and Eastern Europe for more than 30 years. Over that time, Cult says he's learned one very important lesson. The nuclear energy

fight is too important to be left to the politicians or the experts. Conrad Lorenz was a Nobel Prize winner from Austria and he was on a train to Vienna and one of his students walked by and he stopped a student and said, where are you going? He said, I'm going to this protest that's about this nuclear power plant that's been 100 % completed in Austria and there's a popular referendum on whether or not it's going to open. One of the very few popular referendums that were held on nuclear power. Lorenz was not informed on the nuclear issue and he sat down with his student and he listened to him for a long time. He got very excited. His wife said, you should speak at the rally and Lorenz got up at the rally and said, because one of the arguments that had been used to the population was you need to believe the specialist. You need to believe the technicians and Lorenz got up and said, if a scientist tells you that they can't explain something to you, they're either lying to you or they're incompetent and coming from Conrad Lorenz, this was like the thing that tilted the balance because he's

the big scientist and in fact, Austria on a hair thin margin decided not to open that nuclear power plant at his close to this day. Before Chernobyl, we were told that these plants couldn't melt down and then after Chernobyl, we were told, oh, only the Russian plants couldn't melt down. You know, the story changes. All of the current big designs right now, Westinghouse, Arriva, General Electric, all of these designs have major problems. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission came out and just said the Westinghouse design can't handle earthquakes and hurricanes. They're not even talking about airplanes flying into them. The other reason that nuclear power is highly problematic is that we have not actually figured out what to do with the waste. There is 30 countries worldwide that have started civil nuclear power programs, not one of them has figured out what to do with the waste and what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says is we have a waste confidence rule. So when we try and challenge a new nuclear power plant, they say we have confidence that someday this waste problem is going to be solved so you cannot challenge the reactor because there isn't a place for the waste to go. We're

confident that we're going to fix that. Forbes Magazine called the Nuclear Industry in the United States the greatest failure in the history of management. The only reason that we're back now is we've forgotten about Chernobyl, we've forgotten about Three Mile Island, we've forgotten that we were lied to before and now we're looking at a situation which we say, oh, well climate change is the reason that we have to go back to this solution. And you know, nuclear power has this kind of science fiction appeal to it. It's the great big hope. This is how we're going to take on the problem of climate change. That's not how we're going to take on the problem of climate change. The way we're going to take on the climate change is we're going to change our consumption patterns. Now nobody wants to talk about that. Nobody wants to talk about using less. But in fact, one of the tools that's available to us is that we can share our material resources. 95 % of the things that most people have sit idle 95 % of the time. If you want to take on climate change, you look at those numbers. You figure out ways that you can share things

so that you don't actually have to produce a unique everything for every single consumer. But that's really where the solution to climate change is. You know, if you were to triple the number of nuclear power plants worldwide right now, you would only be looking at 6 % of the energy production. It's not the solution to climate change. Nobody realistically thinks you can triple the number of nuclear power plants that in the world right now, except for people who are on the payroll to think that. Texas Cult has been an anti -nuclear energy activist in both the US and Eastern Europe for the last 30 years. He's the chair of the board of the NIRS, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an umbrella organization of over 300 anti -nuclear grassroots organizations. Is nuclear energy the solution to climate change? Or is

it part of the problem? What a chime in? Send us an email at ttbook .org. Coming up, Guy Athearest James Lovelock says, maybe it's too late to do anything about climate change. Notions that cutting back CO2 in the atmosphere will bring back the world we knew are just nonsense. We've already made changes that if we stopped everything, all emissions more farming and so on tomorrow, it would take thousands of years for the Earth to revert to its original state. I'm Jim Fleming. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. The Guy A Theory

revolutionized science and the environmental movement. It claims that the physical Earth, along with all its inhabitants, make up one single living organism called Guya. James Lovelock, the creator of the Guya Theory, says Guya is also self -regulating. And right now, Guya is reacting to too many greenhouse gases in its atmosphere. This reaction could mean the end of humanity as we know it. Lovelock's new book on global warming is called The Vanishing Face of Guya, a final warning. Steve Paulson spoke with James Lovelock about the book. Near the beginning of your book, you have to say kind of a curious comment. You say our planet does not need saving. It will look after itself. All we can do is to try to save ourselves. Can you explain what you mean? Yes, I think there's a false idea that we, by our efforts, can save the planet from some sort of fate that we've brought upon it. I think this is completely wrong. Our planet is a very tough entity. It's existed with life on it for three and a half billion years and withstood

insults far worse than anything that human industry has threatened it with. You're saying that we, as a species, may die out, but the planet will keep changing and will look after itself. Exactly. But I will be horrified if we do die out. I don't think we will. I think we're very tough species and not only that, we're an enormous benefit to the planet as well as a disadvantage. You see, we're the first intelligent, social animal it's ever had. And this means, since we're part of it, that it can see itself in space and see what a beautiful planet it is. So what do you see as the root of the problem right now? Why we're facing this potentially environmental catastrophe. It's probably just a matter of the evolution of a species like us. It was almost inevitable that we'd behave as we have behaved. In the same way, when photosynthesizers were involved two or three billion years ago, they reached havoc on a scale far worse than we're doing by producing oxygen

and putting it into the atmosphere. Because when oxygen first appeared, it was nearly as toxic as a chlorine would be if some organism produced it in large amounts in the atmosphere now. So the photosynthesizers had to wait a long time to become redwood trees. And the same way, we may have to wait quite a while in the evolutionals sense to become really a part, an acceptable part of the planet. Is your basic argument that there are simply too many people in the planet right now? And as a result of that, we're ruining our atmosphere. Yeah, there are too many of us. And this kind of thing again happens. I think with the photosynthesizers, they went through cycles. There were too many of them and they were cut back. And in biology, this nearly what happens, species emerge and then multiply if they're too successful. And then they're cut back by disease, by predation, by almost anything. Your book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, suggests that global warming may have reached a point that is irreversible. Is that what you're saying? I am indeed.

Which means what? If you want me to expand on it, yes, please. It means that notions that cutting back CO2 in the atmosphere will bring back the world we knew are just nonsense. We've already made changes that if we stopped everything, all emissions more farming and so on tomorrow, it would take thousands of years for the Earth to revert to its original state. But we've got much beyond that. We've almost certainly set it on course to warming to a new stable state, about five degrees hotter than now. What do you see as the most alarming evidence that global warming is already wreaking havoc on our planet? Well, perhaps the most obvious one is the melting of the floating ice around the North Pole. You see a couple of years ago, as little as 40 percent of that ice that floats on the North Pole Ocean was left at the end of the summer. And they reckon that within all five to 20 years, all of it will be gone at the end of the

summer. Now, when that happens, the dark sea absorbs so much more sunlight than the white ice did, that the additional heat load to the Earth is about equal to all of the CO2 we put in the air to date. So, I mean, that is why I think it's irreversible. And that's only one of five similar things that are happening that make it irreversible. Given your status as the godfather of Gaia, you've become one of the great gurus of the environmental movement, and yet here you are in your new book advocating nuclear power, as the only hope that we have to find a viable energy source for the future. You dismiss biofuels and wind power as useless, or maybe even worse than that. How do you come to these conclusions? I come to the conclusions out of a sense of what we need. I don't sort of plug nuclear power quite as strongly as you suggest. I think it is an unquestioned answer for

densely overpopulated countries like the United Kingdom where I live, or Germany and Europe and other European nations. They don't have much option. You see, 95 % of people there live in cities, and cities can't survive without a constant supply of electricity. If that fails, they die in about a week. So, nuclear is the only solid, reliable, safe way of making lots of electricity. You're never going to get it from wind turbines. You might get it from solar thermal energy. I do think that has quite a bit of promise, but nuclear is ready and available now, and it's only fear stops us using it. What about biofuels? Biofuels are probably the most dangerous and damaging things that we can do. You see, we've already taken more of the earth's surface to produce food for people than is good before we took it to make farms. The forests that were there were helping to regulate the climate of the planet. It's bad enough to do that for food. If we do it to feed our cars, as well as our people, it's just madness.

Okay, suppose we follow your blueprints, suppose we go ahead and build lots of nuclear power plants. How much do we avert global warming then? Not a lot. It's more a matter of how do we survive. That's the most important thing we have to do is survive and carry on our genes into the future and hope that a more capable human will evolve later on. But extending nuclear power or solar thermal energy won't turn back global heating. It'll only enable us to live more comfortably with it. So, it's spelled out a little bit more for what do you mean? I mean, what will it take for us to survive? Well, I think it'll take a lot of moving migration from the hotter and drier areas of the world to the polar basin, for example, to islands and to Oasis in continents like North America. There'd bound to be some Oasis in the Rockies where there's enough water to grow food. Of course, the great population centers tend to be

in those warmer climates right now. I mean, you're talking devastation coming up in decades. I don't see anything terribly different from that and I think our response is a much too slow and inappropriate force to be able to do anything about it. It really sounds like you're saying the apocalypse is approaching. I know you're not trying to sugarcoat anything, but do you really want to be this pessimistic? I'm afraid I don't have any option. I'm not a natural pessimist. In fact, I'm quite an optimist. I don't think it's all that bad. You see, one of the differences between me and most of the rest of my contemporary scientists is age. You see, I was the student at the beginning of World War II and at that time there were many forecasts of doom. We thought we were all going to be bombed out of existence. There was a Spanish civil war that had given us a rerun of what happened. There's Gernica and so on. We thought London would rapidly become the same kind of hopeless waste. Well, it didn't quite happen like that. Once the war started,

suddenly young people found there were enormous opportunities for them. Life was more exciting. It was more interesting. And I think very much that the same will happen as global warming hits. Those that don't believe in it will stay put and probably unfortunately die. Those that move and do things will be among the survivors and there will be many of them. I hear that you are actually scheduled to go up in a rocket plane that will take its passengers to the edge of space. Can you tell me about this and does this have anything to do with your worry about the state of our planet? Well, I had the chance in 1961. That's 45 years ago. Is it something a bit more than that? Yeah, there's a bit more than that. To work at Jet Propulsion Labs and to, you know, get a few of the Earth's so -to -speak from space by scientific instruments. And that was what led to Gaia's theory of the Earth's complex self -regulating entity.

Then I saw those wonderful iconic astronauts' photographs of the Earth's from space, which I think moved all of us. I never dreamt that by the time I was 90, I'd have a chance to go up where they'd been and look back and see the Earth in that way. I wouldn't miss it for anything. I would think your doctor would not be too thrilled to see a 90 -year -old blast off into space. You don't worry about the health risks here? Heavens know. I mean, even if it did have adverse effects, what a way to go. James Lovelock is a legend in the field of Earth science. His Gaia theory revolutionized science and the environmental movement. His latest book is called

The Vanishing Face of Gaia, a final warning. Steve Paulson spoke with him. Imagine a post -environmental apocalypse, where most of humanity has been lost and the Earth is decimated. Novelist Margaret Atwood says, unfortunately, it's not that hard to imagine such a reality. In fact, her latest novel is just that. It's called The Year of the Flood and tells the story of God's Gardeners, a religion formed after a obliteration of most life on Earth. Steve Paulson sat down with Margaret Atwood to talk about The Year of the Flood. You have always rejected the label science fiction to describe this kind of fiction. Instead, you've called it speculative fiction. Can you explain the difference? Well, it's simply because when people think of science fiction, they think of such marvellous things as Star Trek and Star Wars, and she wells this time machine, and more of

the world's and golden age of sci -fi in the 30s, which had lots of ray guns and flash Gordon in it, and they would be very disappointed if my book said it was the hut, and then they opened it up, and it wasn't. So I just like to be clear about the labeling. I don't have any spaceships in this book. It's not on another planet. It's of the same ilk as say 1984 or Brave New World. So you're saying everything that you write about even the really horrible stuff could potentially happen on this Earth? Yes, we've got the tools. The places where we live right now, the tools are tools that we have right now. So it is a potentially real story rather than one that is quite inconceivable on planet X somewhere far, far in a galaxy far, far away. This is a really bleak portrait

of what might lie ahead for us. And I guess I'm wondering why you seem to feel compelled to create this dystopian future. Why present this possible scenario for what might be? Well, if I really wanted everything to go to rodent excrement, I wouldn't tell you would I? Toby, year 25, the year of the flood. In the early morning, Toby climbs up to the rooftop to watch the sunrise. She uses a mop handle for balance. The elevators stopped working some time ago, and the back stairs are slick with damp. If she slips and topples, there won't be anyone to pick her up. As the first heat hits, mist rises from among the swath of trees between her and the derelict city. The air smells faintly of burning, a smell of caramel and

tar, and rants and barbecues, and the ashy but greasy smell of a garbage dump fire after it's been raining. The abandoned towers in the distance are like the coral of an ancient reef, bleached and colorless, devoid of life. There still is life, however. Birds chirp, sparrows they must be. Their small voices are clear and sharp, nails on glass. There's no longer any sound of traffic to drown them out. Do they notice that quietness, the absence of motors? If so, are they happier? Toby has no idea. Unlike some of the other gardeners, the more wild -eyed or possibly overdosed ones, she has never been under the illusion that she can converse with birds. Is this a warning to us? Is this just sort of

presenting a possible future? I guess I'm wondering where this impulse comes from for you. I think it comes from the same place that all human creativity comes from. We like to play with their toys, and we do have a lot of toys right now, and we like to play with them both in reality and in imagination. You might say it's like that, but you can also say it's really a very hopeful book because it's still only a book. You can close those covers and you can say to yourself, let's keep that book inside those covers rather than letting it out. You might say that, or you might say, well no one can really predict the future, which is true. There's too many variables, which is also true. One of the big things that we can't predict right now is one of the major determinants of the future, which is the human race. So how we behave now is in fact determining the future, but we don't know how

we're going to behave, so we can't really predict the future. There's a lot of biblical imagery in your novel. There's of course the flood that's part of the title of your book, The Waterless Flood, as your characters call it. There are also atoms and eaves, and your sort of central group of characters go by the name the gardeners. The God's gardeners. The God's gardeners, yes. They are trying to combine science, religion, and nature with somewhat mixed results, and they do have some rather unusual, but not completely out of the question interpretations of scripture that they rely upon. They also have, of course, every religion has got music, so they've got their own hymns, and they have their own special saints, people they honor, such as Saint Al Gore. He will

be a saint in the future. He'll be happy to know. As well as Rachel Carson. Rachel Carson is definitely, and they're all very saintly, and Diane Fosse is a saint, and some people you might not expect, such as Robert Burns. He gets to be a saint because of his empathy with mice, and this group lives on rooftops and slums where they grow vegetables and where everything recycled. They're a vegetarian, unless they get really, really, really hungry, at which point you're supposed to start at the bottom of the food chain. How did you come up with this idea of God's gardeners? I think that we're going there. That is, I think that the environmental movement has a lot of characteristics of a religion right now, so I think that's already happening. There is already a green Bible. I found this out after I finished the book, but there is one. You can get one if you want. It

has an introduction by Archbishop 22. It's got the green parts in green. It's got helpful green things at the end that you can do to be a greener and more virtuous person, so it's moving that way. The gardeners in your book also have a hymn book, and in fact, every few chapters you give us one of their hymns. What was your idea behind this actually creating all these hymns that form to some degree the backbone of the book? I think they would have hymns, as I was looking through the standard hymn book on two recent occasions, namely the funeral of my father and the funeral of my mother, for hymns that would be suitable by which I mean they would have approved of them, and the rest of the family would also be able to deal with them. There wasn't much on these themes. There isn't actually much in the hymn book that has to do with the rest of the world, with the natural world.

There's a few of them, but not really a lot, so my hymns are in standard hymn forms. They're just on subjects that are maybe a little off the beaten track for the hymns of today. And those that they are good. Well, you also have a note at the very end of your book saying that these gardeners hymns could be used for amateur devotional or environmental purposes. Anybody who wants to use them is welcome to do it. The sheet music is up there on the web too, so you can pull off, for instance, the pollination day song, singing out your harvest festival. It's very nice. It sounds like you had a lot of fun. You're basically creating a new religion.

Well, I didn't try to make it a perfect religion because none of them are, but I did try to make it a plausible religion. That is, you know, Karl Marx, not Karl Marx. Groucho Marx's old line, I wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have me for a member. So I'm not sure that I would totally want to belong with these people because they're pretty severe in some areas. The clothing is not very attractive because they make it all out of recycle and they die in dark colors so they won't have to wash it so much. But their general orientation, I think, is pretty worthy. Margaret Atwood's novel is The Year of the Flood. Steve Paulson spoke with her. You're listening to one of the hymns from the novel called The Earth For Gives. I'm Jim Fleming. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public

Radio and PRI Public Radio International. In 1999, two men, Andy Beckoba, and Mike Bonanno, set up a fake World Trade Organization website and waited. Soon, the parody website began to get inquiries from confused visitors. Eventually, the two men were invited to speak at conferences on behalf of the WTO. They gave speeches in the WTO's name, on such audacious topics as buying vouchers for human rights abuses and organizing third -world vote tempering. These

political stunts were recorded and thus the Yes Men were born. Some of their political actions have been collected in a documentary film called The Yes Men Fixed the World. I spoke with Andy Beckobaum, one half of The Yes Men, about what followed the WTO pranks. After representing the World Trade Organization a number of times, a friend of ours suggested that maybe we should turn our attentions to something more real world, more visceral. The WTO makes all these abstract rules that are dooming the world, but there are actual companies that are directly destroying the world. He suggested looking at Bhopal and Dao. Dao, chemical, head -bought union carbide, which was responsible for the big industrial catastrophe in history, the Bhopal catastrophe, which killed 20 ,000 people over the years starting in 1984 when the leak occurred. So we set up a fake website as Dao and got ourselves invited onto the BBC as

Dao chemical. This just happened a bit by accident. This is another of those cases where you set it up with one intention and were, by this time perhaps not quite so surprised that you got out of the World Wide Web and got an invitation. But I mean, BBC news, that's big. That was the surprise there that it was so big and that we had a chance to say something in front of 350 million people according to the BBC. And what did you say? Well, at that point we decided to say the thing that would bring the most news to the issue and bring the most notice to the issue. And that was to say the opposite of what Dao is saying. And what they're saying is that they have no responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe. They bought the company that caused it. That doesn't mean they should do anything about it. And we and a lot of human beings think that that's completely preposterous. If you buy a company that's performed a crime and has never atoned for it, you have to do something about it. And so we did that. We got on the BBC live on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal catastrophe

and announced, on behalf of Dao, to the anchor who thought we were from Dao. We announced that we were doing the right thing. John this live from Paris now is Jude Finstera. He's a spokesman for Dao Chemicals. We should took over union a carbide. Good morning to you. Do you now accept responsibility for what happened? Steve, yes. Today is a great day for all of us at Dao. And I think for millions of people around the world as well, it's 20 years since the disaster. And today I'm very, very happy to announce that for the first time Dao is accepting full responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe. And I would also like to say that this is no small matter, Steve. This is the first time in history that a publicly -owned company of anything near the size of Dao has performed an action which is significantly against

its bottom line simply because it's the right thing to do. And our shareholders may take a bit of a hit, Steve, but I think that if there anything like me, they will be ecstatic to be part of such a historic occasion of doing right by those that we've wronged. How long did this last, by the way? I mean, how long before they figured out it was about an hour before the news was completely repaired. Maybe half an hour. I think within a few minutes they had called the Dao headquarters or vice versa and found out that it wasn't true. But during that hour Dao's stock lost two billion dollars. So you've now made two, at least, big presentations to the world at large, pretending to be somebody else. And you didn't want to stop there. This led directly to the survival ball. That's right. We found ourselves having done this. We decided we were making a movie at this point. This was such a big announcement and such a big event. And there was such a big lesson in this

with the Dao stock value losing two billion dollars because it had apparently done the right thing. We wanted to make a complete movie about this. And the story of Dao's stockfall, we felt was very important and that it showed that if we just let the stock market decide what to do, it would not do the right thing. And neither would any other company. And the ultimate victims of all that would be the entire world with climate change. And the ultimate example of that we decided to, we got ourselves invited to a conference on the US Gulf Coast as Haliburton and decided to show what the ultimate solution, the ultimate corporate solution to climate change would look like. And that would be the survival ball, which was a six foot diameter inflatable grub suit, basically, that would protect corporate managers no matter what might happen to them, no matter what might happen to the planet as a

result of the corporate manager's actions. I have to get you to describe the survival ball at this point because you built several examples of it. Yeah, we built three of them to take to this conference. They're basically round and the wearer's face shows up right in the middle of it. And other than that, you just have this big blob. A big blob, but it has little, they look like teats hanging off of it. But in fact, they're, well, I'm not sure what, in fact, they are. That's just, it begins to look more and more like a pig, which I suppose has some comic value of its own, doesn't it? It's a pig or an insect larva or maybe just an amoeba. It's just a formless, incredibly stupid looking costume. Now you and I would look at that and laugh, but, but we put it in the context, this conference that people trusted, we said we were from Halliburne. And this

suit was the solution to climate change. Because if there are disasters, even if it's the end of the world, like the end of the great day luge in the Bible, was an opportunity. And this end of the world could be an opportunity too, as long as you survive. We want something that's going to be able to save a human being, no matter what mother nature throws at him. And so this is the answer. This is the Halliburne Survival Ball. It's three easy steps for deployment, suiting up, inflating, and of course, launching, launching out of a building. And we have an artist's rendition of what it might be like in Houston when we launch our survival walls. In the event of extreme catastrophe, there might be a scarcity of resources. In this case, we've got a survival ball here that's going up and extracting resources. In this case, from an animal, you don't want to be exposed to the elements, but you still want to be able to extract resources from, for

example, a cow. They're going to be able to go underwater, rated at 50 feet. They can be used in any condition. It doesn't matter whether you're in a landslide in California or even in the Arctic. Of course, any other conditions, whether it's tsunamis or tornadoes, the survival ball is designed to withstand. I hardly know what to say after this. There's that point when you think, now, nobody can be taking this seriously anymore, but you've moved well past nobody's going to take us seriously because you now know they will. Right. They generally do just sit there and that's kind of been, yeah, that's been the lesson that we've tried to convey with this movie is the message that there are people who will just listen to this and not be shocked. They will just listen to Halliburton saying the rest of the world can, you know, go to Helen Handbasket, will protect the corporate managers and everything will be okay. People can sit

there, listen to this and not be shocked and that is deeply shocking and that indicates just how far we've gone. Free markets are working miracle after miracle of economic growth. Open markets and rule -based trade are the best engines we know of. But when the government step back and let the free enterprise system do its work, then the better we did, the more robust our economy grew, the better I did and the better my business grew. For the last 30 years, the leaders of most powerful countries did whatever the free marketeers recommended and what they recommended was simple. The solution is not to have government to intervene or regulate in some way. In fact, most problems will solve themselves if ignored and let free people working in free markets address them. Now, you know, this could be pretty depressing at this point. It is pretty depressing at this point that you should be able to pass this off as real. But you've actually found a way to find some hope in this. There's a parody of The New York Times

that you created, it shows up late in the film. I've actually seen a copy of it. What I liked best I think maybe was that when you passed them out and you passed out thousands of them, I guess. It's full of the news you wish you could read in the paper and people liked it. Right. Yeah, that is the hope here. We printed 100 ,000 copies of The New York Times, which by the way only cost $6 ,000. It's relatively inexpensive and volunteers passed them out all throughout Manhattan. It was one week after Obama had been elected, so around November 12th. And it was post dated though, six months in the future to July 4th. The idea was to show the world as it could be in six months with Obama, president. If there's a headline, for instance, it says, Iraq war ends. Right. That's one of the maximum wage law enacted, you know,

big oil companies, profits go to fight climate change. National, I'm just looking at it here, nationalized oil to fund climate change efforts. Treasury announced true cost tax plan. Right. Except you can tell you're apologizing for WMD score. I thought that was interesting. Right. And in each of those articles, there's a little bit about how it was only thanks to public pressure that it happened. The article starts out, describes what happened, and then describes how it happened, which was that people rose up and demanded that it happen. And without that, it wouldn't have happened. We printed a paper with the headlines that we'd like to see. So if these are the headlines that people were so excited to read this morning, let's make them happen. Make change happen. Put, you know, put your effort on the line to make something happen. And that's what kind of we did here. And, you know, no, I know, yeah, and if a few people at the top can make the bad news happen, and why can't all of us at the bottom get

together and make the good news happen for change? I mean, for real. Andy Bickelbaum and Mike Bonano are The Yes Men. We spoke with Andy. The Yes Men's documentary film is called The Yes Men Fix the World. It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Jim Fleming. You can stream to the best of our knowledge on our website at ttbook .org, where you will also find a link to the weekly podcast. You can buy a copy of the program by calling the radio store at 1 -800 -747 -7444. Ask for changing climate change. Program number 12 -6 -A. To the best of our knowledge is produced at Wisconsin Public Radio. This hour was produced by Charles Monroe Cain with the help of Anne Strange -Champs, Veronica Record, Doug Gordon, and

Mary Lou Finnegan. Our executive producer is Steve Falson. Our technical director is Carillo Owen.