Bill McKibben is never one to praise official goings-on. But as the latest marathon UN climate talks closed with the most substantial global agreement ever on fighting climate change, even he could barely contain himself.

“This agreement won't save the planet,” McKibben tweeted late Saturday. “(But) it may have saved the chance to save the planet (if we all fight like hell in the years ahead).”

That even McKibben, the dour éminence grise of the global grassroots climate movement, saw real value in the new UN “Paris Agreement” on climate change drives home the significance of what happened here at the latest UN climate summit in Paris the past two weeks.

After decades of gridlock and finger-pointing, 195 countries entered the room, laid down their national demands, listened to each other, took the warnings of scientists seriously, worked through the last three nights and ultimately emerged with a document whose lowest common denominator was far higher than many ever expected, and certainly far higher than anything that’s come before.

Previous hard lines melted away and many current concerns were put aside. China did not stand in the way. India did not stand in the way. The United States did not stand in the way.

“History is here,” said French President Francios Hollande before the final text was gaveled through on Saturday evening, more than 24 hours after the official conference deadline.

Follow all of our coverage of the Paris talks and the global climate crisis

We are decades from knowing what sort of history it will turn out to be — a real turning point or a tiny squiggle on the way to catastrophe. But the very fact of the agreement, and many of its themes, if not its specifics, are a huge departure from the past.

The document acknowledges that “climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet.”

It sets a goal of holding the rise in global temperatures from pre-industrial levels to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) — the outside limit of what many scientists say the planet’s climate system can handle without catastrophic global impacts — “while pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C,” a level at which scientists say the damage will still be significant but more limited (the world already passed the 1°C mark just this year).

It recognizes the responsibility of all countries, subnational authorities, civil society, the private sector, financial institutions and all other stakeholders — essentially everyone in the world with the power to do so — to take action, but — crucially — each according to their own “differentiated responsibilities … capabilities (and) national circumstances.”

It calls on all countries to set firm goals for cutting carbon pollution and revisit those goals every five years with the intention of strengthening them as emerging science dictates and developing technology and economics allow, and it establishes a common mechanism for reporting and reviewing progress on meeting those goals.

It seeks to reach zero net emissions of global greenhouse gas pollution by the second half of this century.

And it commits wealthier countries to deliver more than $100 billion a year to poorer countries to help cut emissions and deal with the impacts of climate change.

For many people who’ve worked for years on the science and politics of climate change, and the technology and economics of addressing the crisis, the agreement was a breakthrough.

“As a climate scientist,” Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech posted on Facebook, “this is like the best Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Your (National Science Foundation) Grant Was Funded Without Revisions all rolled into one big package with fancy French wrapping, ever.”

Nicholas Stern, a British economist and author of an influential review of the economics of climate change, called it “a turning point (that) creates enormous opportunities as countries begin to accelerate along the path toward low-carbon economic development and growth.”

Even Kumi Naidoo, the South African activist who heads Greenpeace International and strong critic of the UN process and the wealthy countries that dominate it, struck a hopeful tone.

“The wheel of climate action turns slowly but in Paris it has turned,” Naidoo said, and added — echoing McKibben — “this deal itself won’t dig us out of the hole we are in, but it makes the sides much less steep.”

Al Gore (L), former US vice president and Climate Reality Project chairman, and Greenpeace International Director Kumi Naidoo, during the World Climate Change Conference 2015, December 10.

Credit:

Stephane Mahe/Reuters

But the praise was far from universal, and there are big holes in the agreement.

Perhaps the biggest is that there’s no specific means for reaching its targets for capping warming. Countries are left to come up with their own means for cutting emissions, and pledges made so far come nowhere near meeting the 2 degree challenge, much less 1.5.

“Estimates suggest that current pledges will result in a 2.7 and 3.7 degrees (Celsius) temperature increase,” said Steffen Kallbekken, of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research — Oslo.

Perhaps as evidence of the difficulty of achieving consensus on how to meet those temperature targets, the 31-page document does not mention fossil fuels, which are at the core of the problem.

It barely mentions energy at all, even though achieving its goals will require nothing less than a global energy revolution.

It does not actually require countries to meet their national emissions targets — a major concession to the US, which almost certainly would not have been able to get such a requirement through the Senate.

And while it calls for big transfers of funds from rich to poor countries to aid the transition, the document is short on specifics and expressly avoids making the countries that largely caused the problem legally liable for damages or compensation.

There is also no mention of a “carbon budget” — the idea that only a certain amount of carbon can still be emitted, and so only a certain amount of fossil fuels can still be burned, to avoid overshooting the temperature targets — and so no mention of who should get to use those remaining resources. Poorer countries such as India have argued that they should get the lion’s share of that remaining budget, since rich countries have used up most of it already.

“There’s not enough in this deal for the nations and the peoples on the front lines of climate change,” Greenpeace’s Naidoo said. “The nations that caused the problem have promised too little help to the people who are already losing their lives and livelihoods.”

Asad Rehman, of Friends of the Earth International, put it more harshly.

“We can say that the iceberg has been struck, the ship is going down, and the band is still playing to the warm applause of our political leaders,” Rehman said. “But even more damaging is that the poor are being denied a place in the lifeboats.”

In a statement, Rehman’s organization denounced the Paris agreement as “a sham.”

Even those who praised the agreement were quick to point out that the real work has just begun.

“This agreement is a turning point for a world transformation,” said Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. But Rockström also told reporters that “to stand any chance to stay within a 1.5 degree Celsius future … countries in Europe, in North America, Australia, the whole OECD bloc, need to be zero fossil fuel use at 2030 … So basically we need to shut down the light Monday morning after (this meeting) to stand a high degree of chance to be able to have that transition.”

And that, many here say, is the crux of the challenge but also the bottom line of the agreement. Between the hundreds of lines of diplomatic language, couched terminology and untouched hot buttons, is a message to the global business community: we are ushering in the end of the fossil fuel economy.

Children of AVAAZ NGO activist group hold letters reading "farewell fossil fuels" as they demontrate at the entrance of the venue for the World Climate Change Conference 2015.

Credit:

Jacky Naegelen/Reuters

“Although different countries will move at different speeds, the transition to a low carbon world is now inevitable,” said Mohamed Adow of Christian Aid. “Governments, investors and businesses must ride this wave or be swept away by it.”

Many businesses and entire industries will no doubt resist that wave. But most of the hundreds represented at the Paris summit were relieved by what they called the strong signal it sent to global markets.

"Microsoft stands with the many voices within the private and public sectors” at the summit, said the tech giant’s Rob Bernard. Bernard said the agreement will “provide the certainty required for corporations around the world to accelerate their low-carbon investments and foster the creation of a true low-carbon global economy.”

To get there will require massive shifts in investment in and deployment of green technologies, breakthroughs in efficiency in the generation and use of clean energy, and very likely development of technologies that don’t even exist yet. And nothing that comes out of the Paris meeting will do anything to avoid the damage to human communities and vital ecosystems that is already “locked in” due to the billions of tons of CO2 and other climate-altering pollutants already dumped into the atmosphere.

But the Paris Agreement is, as so many here put it, a turning point. The ship may already have hit the iceberg, but Paris may have bought time to patch it up and keep it from sinking.

“The job is far from done yet,” said Greenpeace’s Naidoo. “We’re not out of the hole yet. But we feel there’s enough hooks there that can help us climb out of the hole.”

A small drone mounted with a GoPro camera lifts off, hovering over a field in the outskirts of the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. The drone operator keeps it low; the highest he normally flies it is 100 meters.

The drone belongs to two men who run an aerial photography company. They’ve asked me to withhold their names, because what they’re doing is technically illegal. In January of this year, Kenya placed restrictions on drones that, for all intents and purposes, have amounted to a complete ban on their use. Anyone who wants to fly one has to secure permission from both the Ministry of Defense and the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA).

“There’s a friend of mine who applied in March and still today he hasn’t gotten feedback from KCAA,” the drone operator says.

The ban has certainly caused headaches for small businesses, like the one run by these photographers. But it’s also put the brakes on bigger initiatives, like a drone journalism project called African SkyCam.

Its founder, Dickens Olewe, recently returned from a John S. Knight journalism fellowship at Stanford University. As part of that, he organized Silicon Valley’s first drone journalism conference. He has plenty of thoughts on how drone journalism could change the news landscape in Kenya, for example, giving journalists access to commercial drones to independently survey flood damage, separate from government-run surveys. Olewe has used drones in other ways too: creating interactive features with 3D models by stitching together hundreds of images taken with drones, and using the technology to explore live-casting virtual reality content.

“We’ve done all that, but as I speak to you today, we are not doing anything,” he says.

This, of course, is because of the ban — a ban that, by all accounts, was caused by a news drone that flew a little too close to the sun.

“The reason why the government imposed this ban in January was that in December 2014, which was the national day of celebration at Nyayo Stadium, somebody flew a drone a few minutes before the president arrived,” Dickens says. “They kind of messed up the space for us.”

An excess of caution is perhaps understandable in this East African nation. Kenya has suffered a series of deadly attacks at the hands of al-Shabaab terrorists in the last few years, most recently the April massacre of 147 students at Garissa University. KCAA director general Captain Gilbert Kibe calls terrorism a concern when it comes to drone proliferation. But Olewe is optimistic the ban won't last much longer, mainly because of good, old-fashioned competition between nations.

“What’s really interesting is that South Africa also did the same thing. They basically said, we are concerned about the use of this equipment, but we also appreciate the amazing potential for the technology. Therefore we are restricting a ban for one year as we engage the industry and we will publish some rule-making in one year,” which Dickens says they did in May.

He thinks the Kenyan government is considering a similar move. An official at the KCAA confirmed that comprehensive regulations were in the works, but did not say when they would be released.

Coming up with these regulations will be no small task. Moses Gichanga is a researcher who has advised the Kenyan government on using drones in anti-poaching efforts. He ticks off a long list of hurdles. First, what happens if a drone hurts someone?

“Who bears the responsibility? Who’s culpable? Supposing they gave you a license, let’s talk about insurance. Who’s going to insure me? Right now insurance companies in Kenya have no framework for how they would even tackle [this],” Gichanga says.

These rank among other problems, like keeping unmanned aerial vehicles out of flight paths and balancing consumer drone safety with keeping them low-cost. They’re thorny problems that even developed nations like the US have struggled to answer. In the US, the FAA recently imposed mandatory regulation on drone operators, and required them to pay a $5 fee, for example.

Until someone puts similar regulations in place in Kenya, these photographers will just keep flying under the radar.

Over the weekend at the COP21 summit in Paris, nearly 200 countries reached a landmark agreement to fight climate change. Though that is welcome news to much of the world, the nations that are actually most vulnerable to the effects of climate change may not feel the benefits of COP21 for many years.

Pollution is currently the single largest cause of the death in the developing world — about one in seven people in low income countries die from pollution.

Richard Fuller, an environmentalist and author of "The Brown Agenda: My Mission to Clean Up the World's Most Life-Threatening Pollution," is trying to spread awareness about the pollution problems facing the poorest people on the planet.

Through stories of specific individuals and families, Fuller's book takes readers to “brown” sites — places where man-made pollutants have spread and poison millions of people each year.

After visiting many of these brown sites firsthand, Fuller founded Pure Earth, a non-profit that organizes large-scale clean-ups in the most impoverished areas on Earth.

“The issue here for us is about health, especially health impacting children,” he says. “A lot of these acutely contaminated places have grown in numbers so enormously over the last 20 or 30 years as we’ve seen low and middle income countries develop quite dramatically.”

To date, Fuller and the Pure Earth team have cleaned up more than 75 sites worldwide and have helped save four million people. He argues that pollution is now the “single largest public health problem in the world.”

“It far exceeds the public health problem of malaria, HIV or tuberculosis,” he says. “In fact, it is a greater risk to health than those three [things] combined, times three. If you break it down, someone dies because of pollution about every four seconds.”

Since its inception in 1999, Pure Earth has worked on the ground in 20 countries to improve human health by implementing clean up programs in places that Fuller calls “acutely toxic.”

“We’re only working in places that are so extraordinarily polluted that if they were here in the US, they’d be front page news for months and months,” he says.

One such place is the Zambian city of Kabwe — about 200,000 people there have been exposed to lead poisoning from an abandoned smelter that operated from 1902 to 1994.

“The lead safe level that’s been given out by the US EPA and WHO is five micrograms per deciliter. Above about 60 micrograms per deciliter you have a far increased chance of dying, but between five and 60 you have a lot of mental retardation, a lot of developmental disabilities, a lot of neurological damage from lead,” says Fuller. “The average blood lead level for kids in this particular town is about 75 micrograms right now.”

People in Kabwe still dig through factory waste piles — many have neurological damage and will lose consciousness while they dig. The government of Zambia has borrowed money from the World Bank to clean up the site.

But beyond relying on governments and nonprofit groups, Pure Earth also works with locals who rely on toxic sites to make a living. In Senegal, Pure Earth coordinated with a number of women who were badly contaminated after being part of an informal network that would search for used lead-acid car batteries to recycle. Pure Earth taught the women how to grow and manage small gardens, and sew so they could independently maintain an income stream.

“For example, people will be recycling car batteries and doing it in a way where they’re not aware of how toxic it is, but they’re spreading the contaminants throughout their neighborhoods,” Fuller says. “When they’re shown alternate ways to be able to do this that are non-toxic, often they’ll also need to find additional employment opportunities so their livelihoods are not damaged.”

Over the last several decades, Fuller says that the global environmental focus has shifted towards biodiversity and climate change — often at the expense of the anti-pollution movement.

“Pollution has just simply dropped off the map,” he says. “This is just an extraordinary result, and one we really need to turn around.”

This story first aired as an interview on PRI's The Takeaway, a public radio program that invites you to be part of the American conversation.

Lonesome George, the last giant tortoise of his kind from Pinta Island in the Galapagos, died in 2012, about 100 years old.

George was a type of saddleback tortoise, whose rare, peaked shells are unique to the Galapagos Islands. Those shells allow the animals to stretch their necks high, four or five feet in the air, to reach cactus leaves to eat during the Galapagos dry season.

“He was a striking individual, as [were] all members of his species," said State University of New York conservation biologist James Gibbs. Now, scientists are trying to revive the ancient species by starting a new breeding program using hybrid tortoises that have some of the same genes as George’s ancestors.

The hybrid tortoises were first identified during an expedition in 2008 to Isabela Island in the Galapagos. Scientists found tortoises living there that had the DNA both of native species and those previously found on two other islands.

“These were not just odd tortoises,” Gibbs said of the discovery. “They were transplants from other islands, and moreover, they were transplants from two islands where the tortoises are thought to have gone extinct.”

One of those islands was Lonesome George’s Pinta Island. The other was Floreana, where tortoises had been gone so long they were nearly forgotten.

"Darwin was really the last person to comment and write about them,” Gibbs said. No one really knows how the Pinta and Floreana tortoises got to their new home, Gibbs said, but one theory is that whalers or traders once collected the tortoises on their native islands, then threw them overboard near Isabela Island.

Last month, Gibbs led an expedition to that island to collect 32 of these hybrid tortoises and relocate them to a research center. Gibbs and his team, including lead geneticist Adalgisa Caccone from Yale University, will analyze the DNA of the animals to find those with the highest concentrations of Pinta and Floreana genetics.

After about a year, the research team, which is working under the Giant Tortoise Restoration Initiative, hopes to start a breeding plan to produce animals similar to those that originally lived on the two islands.

More than 700,000 people had evacuated the central Philippines as Typhoon Melor rolled onto the island of Samar. Just three years ago Typhoon Haiyan devastated parts of that same island.

Typhoon Melor's approach on Monday came less than 24 hours after world leaders reached an historic agreement on climate change — and it serves as a harsh reminder of the work that remains to be done adapting to a world with rising temperatures and stronger storms.

Mayor Stephany Uy-Tan has big plans for Catbalogan, Samar’s capital city. Two years ago, when Haiyan was bearing down, the city evacuated its coastal slums, or barangays — something they just had to do again for the current typhoon.

Like Haiyan, Melor largely spared the small city of Catbalogan, but the city evacuated more than 1,500 people in anticipation of a more direct hit. Right now Mayor Uy-Tan is helping Catbalogan weather the storm. Just last week, at the climate conference in Paris, she worried about future storms.

“Catbalogan is three-in-one: we are very vulnerable to storm surge, flooding and landslide,” says Uy-Tan, who at 32 is Catbalogan's youngest and first woman mayor. “I can just imagine if we have super typhoon number five, I don't know where we will go."

Uy-Tan wants to build a new, “climate-proof” city center 400 feet uphill. It’s planned as a new urban center, complete with government centers, a disaster management hub and public transit. She calls it Catbalogan “sky city.”

“That's the only way that the city could be safe,” she says.

Stephany Uy-Tan is at the head of the table, planning disaster response in Catbalogan.

Credit:

Chris Bentley

Catbalogan is courting investors for the project, which could cost nearly $90 million.

“We are very small," Uy-Tan says. "We lack resources. We lack the technical aspect. And so we need help, technically and financially. We're not begging for ourselves as mayors, but we're begging for our city and for the rest of the world.”

Uy-Tan says she's not asking the world to bail out her city. She just wants the international community to help her reach investors and private developers.

That puts her in an increasingly common position: Uy-Tan can't afford to defend her city from rising seas and superstorms, but she also she can't afford not to. Worse, cities like Catbalogan aren't just in need of long-term planning — they're already bearing the brunt of climate change.

There's the usual route of seeking money through United Nations funds and other international aid. Most of those proposals go unanswered, says Meenakshi Raman, legal advisor to the Third World Network and a member advising the UN on its new climate-finance arm, the Green Climate Fund.

“Many of us are accessing that kind of money, but the pot is very little,” Raman says. “There’s a high demand. There’s more demand than there is supply of money.”

It's hard to get access to that money, Raman says, because the UN takes its time vetting the applicants to make sure they'll spend the money correctly. The problem is even worse for projects whose aim is to help countries “adapt” to climate change, Raman says, because the UN's more focused on “mitigation,” or lessening the amount of carbon emissions in the first place.

“That’s a problem," Raman says. "Because for many developing countries, they have no option but to adapt. If there's a flood, there's a cyclone. If your agriculture is affected, if your coastline is impact and your sea level is rising, you have no choice but to divert your national budgets to these.”

And that makes the problem even worse.

In the meantime, Joan Clos, executive director of UN Habitat, says cities might be able to just grow their way out of this vicious cycle — if they plan well and watch out for inequality.

“Urbanization generates value,” Clos says. “The money should come out of the endogenous economy. You cannot pretend to address the problem of the countries only by foreign aid. This doesn't work. It's not going to work.”

Over the next century, whole cities are going to be washed away by rising seas if we don't prepare — and Clos says the international community can't fix that.

But the Paris agreement could bring a lot more private money into play. In a press conference just after the deal was inked, US Secretary of State John Kerry said, it sends a clear signal to the market: invest in climate solutions or get left behind.

“That will begin to shift the entire marketplace,” Kerry said. “CEOs will begin to be asked the question, ‘How are you doing for your shareholders relative to your responsibilities to live up to this?’ It’s a sea change.”

That sea change can’t happen fast enough for those most vulnerable to climate change.

“Look at the pension funds in the world,” says James Alexander, head of finance and economic development for a global consortium of cities called C40. “If we can find ways to get things like pension funds, investment trusts, if we can get that money to flow in the right direction, not only will we be catalyzing the market, but we'll be creating a whole new sector of green infrastructure that there is enough money in the world to pay for.”

There are trillions of dollars in pension funds looking for safe, long-term investments. Infrastructure projects are already attracting this kind of investment, so why not green infrastructure and projects to make cities more climate resilient?

Sean Kidney has no doubt that this is where we're heading. When it comes to climate change, the world finally agrees on the scale on the problem and, he says, we know what we need to do. Best of all, Kidney says, the world is awash in capital.

“The capital's ready to flow, but all this stuff is risky and new,” Kidney says. “So pension funds and insurance funds are not allowed to take those risks. They have rules that have been set by rich governments. To be able to get around that, public sector bodies — especially development banks — have to bridge those risks, at least until there's enough credit history and credit transparency to be able to convince Standard & Poor's or Moody's that it's not a risk. And that's what we have to do in the next five years.”

Not everyone's so excited about the prospect of globetrotting financiers funding infrastructure in developing countries. It has the whiff of colonialism, and Meenakshi Raman of the Third World Network worries it could entrench global inequality.

Joan Carling is head of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact, and she says international capital might just make it easier for developer and financiers to pile onto supposedly green projects that jeopardize indigenous peoples’ land.

“The way it's being approached is business as usual,” Carling says. “That also impacts our livelihoods.”

The fact that businesses and banks might be getting bullish on climate change could still be good news for Stephany Uy-Tan, the mayor of Catbalogan in the Philippines. She’s plotting evacuation routes for sea-level rise that could be decades away — and for storms that could pick up tomorrow.

She’ll take any help she can get. And she needs it now.

This story was co-produced by our partners at The GroundTruth Project.

Two degrees Celsius. It has become a familiar number to anyone who follows news about global warming and climate change.

Climate negotiators in Paris and others have repeatedly stated that limiting global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius, or about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, is a reasonable target for mitigating the worst effects of climate change. It was even written into the formal COP21 agreement reached over the weekend.

But there’s a problem with this number, according to one prominent scientist: It doesn’t make sense.

“The number was picked out of a hat,” says James Hansen, a former NASA scientist and now a professor at Columbia University “Simply because people thought that's probably the best we can hope for — because we've already got almost one degree of warming and we know there's more in the pipeline. And it’s very difficult to move off of our present largest energy source, which is fossil fuels.”

“We know it’s not a sensible target, because if we look at the Earth's history, the last time it was two degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial [times], sea level was six to eight meters higher than it is now. So why would we set that as a target?” Hansen asks.

Hansen has been asking questions about the Earth’s climate for a long time: he was one of the first scientists to look seriously at the issue back in the 1970s.

At that time, scientists realized that humans were changing Earth’s atmosphere through the use of chlorofluorocarbons. Chlorofluorocarbons were destroying stratospheric ozone that surrounds the Earth and protects humans from damaging ultraviolet radiation. The concern was whether the loss of ozone would lead to more skin cancer. But Hansen asked an even more compelling question: What about the effect on the climate?

The subject became so engrossing that Hansen resigned from another experiment he was running and began to devote 100 percent of his time to climate study.

“I switched from Venus to Earth because there are people living on this planet,” Hansen explains. “I remember remarking to my friend Andy Lacis, ‘This is really going to be interesting. Before our scientific careers are over, we should actually see the climate change. Because that's what we computed in our models.’"

He predicted that scientists would be able to “separate the signal from the noise” within a few decades, and that by the early part of the 21st century, even the public would begin to notice. And it has.

But, of course, Hansen says, the real issue is what's going to happen from now on.

“So far, the climate change is relatively modest,” Hansen says. “We’re beginning to see effects. The frequency of extreme events is increasing. But the potential for what will happen several decades in the future during the lifetime of young people is much greater. It's possible that we could push the system beyond tipping points so that young people cannot control the outcome several decades downstream.”

Hansen is most concerned about the disintegration of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and the effect that would have on sea level rise.

“I would argue that we could very well get large changes by the second half of the present century,” he says, “which would mean just 35 to 85 years from now. ... Because if we look at Greenland and Antarctica, we see that they are beginning to shed mass, and shedding it at a faster and faster rate. And I argue that it is likely to be a very nonlinear process.”

Hansen says scientists don't have models for ice sheets they can trust to give them an accurate prediction for how soon the Earth could see multi-meter sea level rise.

“We don't know whether we've passed a point where we're going to lose, for example, the Western Antarctic ice sheet,” Hansen says. “If we do, that means sea level rise of several meters. We know that we're getting very close, if we're not there yet”

Hansen says scientists can’t predict exactly how fast sea level rise would occur once we pass that tipping point — but they know it would occur.

“We just don't know which generation is going to be feeling the full effects,” he says. “But if we look at the ice sheets now and see how rapidly they're beginning to change, it looks to me like it's going to be our children and grandchildren, not some tenth generation in the future.”

Hansen’s proposed solution is simple: 

“We should add a fee to oil, gas and coal,” he says. “Collect the fee from the fossil fuel company at the source: the domestic mine or the port of entry. And 100 percent of that money should be given to the public. It should not be taken by the government to make the government bigger. Instead, give an equal amount to every legal resident of the country. That way, the person who does better-than-average in limiting their fossil fuel use will actually make money.”

Economic studies show that this would work, says Hansen, and he believes it would make the United States more competitive with other countries in the development of alternative energies.

“If we're an early adapter of this type of policy, we would begin to move our industries and begin to take advantage of our entrepreneurs developing low carbon energy sources,” Hansen argues.

The problem, he believes, is that world leaders are heavily influenced by the fossil fuel industry.

“We have well-oiled, coal-fired senators and representatives who continue to vote for industry over the interests of the public,” he says.

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood

After watching the failures of the UN negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009 and the failure in 2010 of the US Congress to pass even weak legislation addressing climate change, former NPR journalist Wen Stephenson had what he calls his ‘holy crap!’ moment on climate change — and he became a climate activist.

Now he has published a book, called What We’re Fighting for Now is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice.

“I'm a father of two young children — a 15-year-old son and a now 11-year-old daughter. And when I thought about this situation and the world that they are growing up into, and what this planet may be like within their lifetime, it really lit a fire under me,” Stephenson says.

This happened at a time in his life when he had just left his job at NPR and had the immense luxury of choosing what to do next, Stephenson says. After thinking about it, he couldn't imagine getting up in the morning and working on anything else.

“I had the ability at that moment to decide how to spend the rest of my life. I decided this was the thing,” he says.

Stephenson lives in Massachusetts, not far from Walden Pond. So when he had what he calls his “climate freak-out moment,” he was naturally drawn to the works of Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau’s writings inspired him — but not quite in the way you might imagine.

Stephenson realized, as he reread Walden, that Thoreau, who is an icon of the American environmental movement, was not really an “environmentalist.” “That word would have meant nothing to him,” Stephenson contends.

But Thoreau was, unquestionably, a radical abolitionist, Stephenson says. “He was a human rights activist. He was deeply involved in the underground railroad, along with his mother and sisters,” Stephenson explains. “He personally sheltered runaway slaves, defying the fugitive slave law in the early 1850s. At one point, he even spirited [away] an accomplice of John Brown's Harpers Ferry raid.”

Stephenson says he is not comparing comparing climate change to slavery. That would would be perverse, he insists. But he is drawing inspiration from the abolitionists and from the abolitionist movement.

“I'm saying that our situation calls for a movement that’s every bit as radical and resolute, morally and even spiritually, as that movement and other radical human rights movements in our history,” Stephenson says.

Stephenson believes that many people in the climate movement — particularly policy experts and people working at a political level in Washington — don't really like to talk about justice.

“They don't really want to talk about race or inequality. They don't want talk about the distribution of wealth at the national level, much less at the global level,” he says. “They don't really want to talk about these things because they're politically inconvenient ... because it's hard to talk about structural forms of oppression that are at the root of this crisis and that prevent us from honestly addressing it."

Stephenson says he's calling for “a kind of radicalization of the mainstream.”

“At this late hour, to be serious about climate is to be radical, because it's really a radical situation. It requires us to go to the root of the systems that have created this. That's not going to happen until enough people come to terms with and face up to the radical nature of the situation.”

This is the only way that deep, revolutionary changes have happened in the US, Stephenson notes — “when ideas, principles and demands that were once considered radical and extreme — the freedom of African Americans, for example — became mainstream because radicals forced them into the mainstream consciousness and brought about a kind of moral reckoning in our society.”

The truth, he says, is that “we're still a long way from where we need to be on this.”

“I want an honest, national conversation about what the science says we're really facing, what it would really take to address it, and what the consequences of our failure to address it are likely to be,” he says.

No one in American politics, including President Barack Obama, is talking honestly about how large the the so-called "ambition gap" is between what we are told is politically possible and what scientists say is physically necessary to prevent catastrophe.

“I would love to hear Hillary Clinton, for example, or Bernie Sanders for that matter, really explain to the American people — really spell it out for us — just how far we are from addressing this, and how they envision the United States leading the world in closing the gap,” Stephenson says. “This is an emergency situation, and we need to start acting like it. So what do they propose that we do?” he asks.

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood

One of the first things you’ll learn about Shahar Caspi is that he’s not afraid to do things differently. To a point.

“God forbid if my Jewish mother knew that I’m raising pigs,” Caspi says as he greets his pigs, Ava and Adamo, in his backyard.

But he takes his heresy only so far.

“I haven’t tasted one, because I’m afraid to go to Hell for it. We don’t eat pigs,” says Caspi.

The two pigs are an important part of his small farm in the Sierra Nevada foothill town of Oregon House, though. They help recycle nutrients, a key part of his approach to farming.

The pigs Ava and Adamo are part of Caspi's bio-dynamic farming, helping recycle nutrients and hold water in the soil. "“God forbid if my Jewish mother knew that I’m raising pigs, Caspi says. But he doesn't raise the pigs themselves for food. “I haven’t tasted one because I’m afraid to go to hell for it," he says. "We don’t eat pigs.”

Credit:

Andrew Nixon / Capital Public Radio

Another is using as little water as possible.

Caspi moved to California from Israel eight years ago to run a vineyard. Now, he grows produce in a community supported agricultural operation. And while the presence of pigs might be shocking to some, he too has been shocked when it comes to some local farming practices.

For instance, he can’t believe that some California farmers still flood their fields to irrigate their crops.

“You know, first time I came to this country I said, ‘What is that? Something went wrong here. They blew up a pipe or something.’”

That was back before the state’s record drought, now in its fourth year

But even then, Caspi treated water here as he would back home.

Sixty percent of Israel is desert. The country averages less than 25 inches of rain a year. And yet it still produces almost all of its own food. So water is considered a national resource.

“In Israel, if you water your garden during the day, you will get fined,” Caspi says. “Or they will put a lock on your water and you cannot water anymore. So you water only at night. Everybody is aware of it. Why? Because there is no water. One tiny little lake. You have Lake Tahoe. You can fit all of Israel in Lake Tahoe.”

It’s a mindset that’s helped Caspi continue to grow food year-round here in the midst of California’s worst drought on record. It’s helped him turn small plots of rocky dry soil into productive farmland, and boost production in the middle of a grove of cherry trees that weren’t producing much fruit before he took over.

“California is such a big place. In Israel, the trees are much, much closer together,” says Caspi.

So he’s taken advantage of all that extra space by planting four rows of vegetables in between the trees, and he uses organic material like decomposing horse manure and shredded roots to fortify the soil.

“This is a huge amount of organic matter,” he says as he gets down on his knees to dig in the soil with his hands. “When you plant a tree in such a rich environment, we will need to use much, much less water.”

Caspi has planted several rows of vegetables between the trees in a cherry orchard to maximize his yield using the least amount of space and water. Where many California farmers use flood irrigation, Caspi uses organic material to enrich the soil and help hold water, and uses drip irrigation.“First time I came to this country (and saw a flooded field) I said, ‘What is that? Something went wrong here. They blew up a pipe or something.’”

Credit:

Andrew Nixon / Capital Public Radio

Caspi waters his crops using a drip irrigation system whose plastic emitters were invented in Israel.

“I want to make only the very top soil wet, that’s it. Because most of the nutrients are at the very top soil,” he says.

He says it helps a lot that the soil here has never been tilled.

“There are many theories about no-till farming, how it increases the ability of the soil, for water absorption, retention, infiltration all these things,” Caspi says.

None of these methods are unheard of in California. No-till has been around for decades, and nearly 40 percent of the state’s farmland is irrigated using drip systems.

But farmers who’ve been around longer than Caspi have been slow to adopt the water-efficient practices, even as things have begun to change.

“Generally farmers are skeptics about new things,” says Dennis Chessman, state agronomist with the United States Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in Davis, California. “They have something that works and if it works why change it?”

And by many measures, the old approach here has worked. California produces half the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables.

And Chessman says it’s not simple to make the switch to less water-intensive methods.

No-till practices require new equipment and can take a few years to produce high yield, he says, while switching to drip irrigation can be costly.

California farmers also grow high-value crops, so the perceived risks are high too. Until recently he says, there just hasn’t been much incentive to change.

“There are things that we can learn from the way they do agriculture in some of the more arid regions of the world,” says Chessman. “But historically in California, with plentiful irrigation water, we’ve not given much thought to doing that.”

Now that the state is deep into a severe drought, though, and facing a future that may look more like the present than the recent past of plentiful water, it’s looking at more water-efficient ways to grow food. Chessman says farmers are being forced to re-think how they grow food, and newcomers like Caspi may be helping to show the  way.

Not that Caspi has it completely figured out. He’s still experimenting with the various elements of what’s known as biodynamic farming, which treats soil, plants and animals as a holistic entity.

That’s why he has the pigs.

“You just rotate them,” says Caspi. “When you finish the garden, you just move the animals. They eat. They poop. They fertilize the soil and then the next year you can grow the crop."

“We will get to it. It’s still a little bit complicated.”

Caspi says it may take a few more years to get his farm operating the way he wants it. Meanwhile, using water sustainably just seems like common sense. He says his fellow farmers may need to accept that water in California may become as scarce as it is in Israel.

“It’s a different mentality because this country is so big and huge and so rich and everything is in such great abundance, so why not? But Mother Nature may be showing us that this is not the case anymore.”

Millions of Brazilians were left without access to WhatsApp after a local court ordered a 48-hour, countrywide suspension of the mobile messaging application this week.

That's a big deal in nation with an estimated 100 million WhatsApp users, where the application has been a lifeline for communications between employees, friends and family members. at 

An appeal was accepted later in the week by the São Paulo Court of Appeals — and users have been gradually regaining access.

But a mystery remains: Why was WhatsApp blocked?

Much information that could help answer this question is being withheld from the public. But it appears to be linked to a criminal investigation of a man accused of drug trafficking, armed robbery and association with Brazil's largest criminal organization PCC. This investigation is being conducted in secret, so no further details have been released.

In July and August, Brazilian judiciary officials ordered WhatsApp to release personal data of users who were being investigated by the Federal Police. But WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, refused to release the data, according to the São Paulo Court of Appeals press release.

On December 16, the Brazilian Prosecutor's Office responded by ordering telecommunications providers to block WhatsApp altogether, affecting what the company estimates to be 100 million users in Brazil.

Some websites from the Spanish-speaking part of Latin America reported that users in countries like Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Venezuela also faced disruptions in access to the messaging service. The reason was that operators in those countries share with Brazil a network of submarine cables that connect South America and the Caribbean.

Brazil's telecom operator Oi filed an appeal against the order late on December 16, which the court in São Paulo explained that it had accepted because “it is unreasonable that millions of users are being affected because of the inertia of a company.” As of midday on December 17, the service appears to be back in action.

What does Brazil's Internet ‘Bill of Rights’ have to do with it?

The blocking motion was authorized by judge Sandra Regina Nostre Marques, who based her decision on a provision of Marco Civil, Brazil's so-called “Bill of Rights” for the Internet. The law establishes rules on network neutrality, privacy, data retention and intermediary liability, among other issues, and was approved by President Dilma Rousseff in April 2014.

The Marco Civil also allows state authorities to place sanctions on foreign Internet companies that refuse to comply with Brazilian legislation. As noted in Article 12 of the law, authorities can impose warnings, fines and temporary suspension of a company's services or activities. These penalties can be implemented only with a judge's approval.

The law's Article 23 also stipulates that a judge should take all necessary measures to protect the privacy of users who are facing criminal investigation.

On Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed regret about the decision. “I am stunned that our efforts to protect people's data would result in such an extreme decision by a single judge to punish every person in Brazil who uses WhatsApp,” he posted on his personal page.

Experts debate whether the punishment fit the crime

Francisco Brito Cruz, director of the São Paulo-based research center Internet Lab, speculated on whether the measure was proportional to the needs of investigators — in other words, he questioned whether WhatsApp had behaved badly enough to merit such an extreme response from the government. It's hard to know, he said, given that the process is being conducted in secrecy. He told Global Voices over email: 

"It's impossible to know what the company's attitude was or its justification not to comply with the judicial orders. They could be fair or not, they could have to do with technical issues or the company's own values." [translated]

Even if the company's justification for withholding the user data is up for debate, it is clear that WhatsApp's actions were a violation of the law, Brito Cruz said: 

"[The need for judicial order] guarantees that the authority conducting the investigation (police, the public prosecutor's office) doesn't release data without a judge's approval. If WhatsApp received an order that went through this process and then still did not comply with it, it violated Brazilian legislation, not only Marco Civil." [translated]

But other experts argue that a judge ordering Internet service providers (ISP) to block traffic to a specific application violates the Marco Civil's net neutrality principle, which requires equal treatment of platforms and services by telecommunications providers.

Founder of the BETA Institute for Internet and Democracy Paulo Rená, in an interview in February 2015 about a similar attempt by a judge to suspend WhatsApp, said that Article 12, even though it provides for suspension of an application, doesn't authorize a judicial order to be directed to ISPs. Rená was directly involved in the drafting of the Marco Civil.

In a similar view, Gustavo Gindre, from communication rights group Intervozes, compared the block on WhatsApp to blocking Internet banking services in a Facebook post: 

"To me, the judge's decision is well-intentioned, but wrong. Wrong because there were other ways to punish Facebook (WhatsApp's owner) without shutting down the service, and thereby harming its users. As I have read somewhere, it would be like shutting down a financial system because banks have been refusing to deliver information on their customers involved in crimes. Just issue a huge fine." [translated]

Francisco Brito Cruz, however, has a different take on Article 12: 

"Telecom operators are not allowed to block or filter traffic to an application in a discretionary fashion to satisfy their own interests, but this doesn't keep the judiciary from taking measures like this. It's a sanction, in fact, provided for in the same law that regulates net neutrality. Article 12 list sanctions applicable to service providers that violated the Brazilian law, that is, the particular kind of judicial order that is being applied doesn't matter." [translated]

The case has also thrown a spotlight on tension between a state's sovereignty and transnational Internet companies. As Gindre posted on his Facebook page: 

"How [do we] deal with companies that operate on the Internet throughout the entire planet, but have their own servers installed in a few countries and refuse to comply with the Brazilian justice system? What is the limit to national sovereignty applied to the transborder world of the Internet?" [translated]

Was it the telco lobby?

At first, many thought the blockade had something to do with the aggressive rhetoric of Brazilian telecommunications companies seeking to regulate Internet sevices like WhatsApp and Netflix. Experts, however, have already clarified that in this specific case they are not related.

In August, Amos Genish, CEO of Vivo, Brazil's largest telecom operator, declared that WhatApp is “pure piracy” and defended its subordination to the country's telecom regulation agency, ANATEL. “They use our phone numbers to send free messages,” he told newspaper Folha de S. Paulo at the time.

Two other Brazilian operators, however, have established partnerships with WhatsApp, offering free use of the application to its clients — a practice known as zero-rating. According to consumer and Internet rights groups, this violates the net neutrality principle of Marco Civil, which is still pending detailed regulations on deals such as these.

Despite some bad blood, in similar court rulings in the past Brazilian ISPs have acted in favor of WhatsApp. In February, a judge in the state of Piauí requested WhatsApp to be suspended after the company refused to collaborate with police investigations related to child pornography. Two telecom operators, Claro and Embratel, filed an appeal to which a state judge at the court of appeals later complied, and the app was never shut down.

This story was cross-posted from our partners at Global Voices, which features the work of hundreds of bloggers worldwide. 

When you first arrive at the Maasai Mara in Kenya, you look out over a plateau so vast and beautiful that it’s almost incomprehensible.

Mara means “spotted” in Maasai, and when you look out over the plain you see small dots — hence the name. Some of those are trees, desert date trees to be exact. And some of those spots are animals.

People come from all over the world to experience this landscape and the creatures that live in it, the elephants, giraffes, cheetahs and lions. To see them, you have to hire a game driver. Some 500 game drivers work in the Maasai Mara. Only seven are women.

Sophie Sadera is one of them, a Maasai from this area, and I wanted to find out how she broke into the business. She says her mother worked hard to get her through high school, but when she expressed an interest in becoming a guide, her mother was taken aback.

“That’s a man’s thing,” Sadera recalls her mother telling her. But Sadera approached an uncle working in the hotel industry in the area, and he went to talk with her mother. “If she’s not happy doing what she wants, she won’t perform well,” he told her.

Sophie Sadera on a game ride.

Credit:

Anne Bailey

So Sadera went to guiding school for a year. Now that she's a full-fledged guide, “I must say, she’s the happiest mom,” Sadera says.

And when she’s back home, she tries to find time to visit her old primary school and talk with the girls there. She encourages them to stay in school past primary school and then “get their own jobs. Because many of them think that, ‘I’ll get married by maybe a husband who will be working.’”

Sadera’s love of her job, and her professionalism was evident as we took an early morning ride through the wilderness, stopping along the way to look at animals in the tall grasses. Or in the case of the elephants, right in the middle of the road, blocking our way. We turned around.

Sadera remained calm throughout, which is a trait you want in a guide leading you in an open vehicle around large wild animals. Later that night she admitted that the elephants had gotten a bit close for comfort.

On the morning drive, Sadera was careful to warn us that some animal sightings are quite rare, especially cheetahs. But we saw a cheetah up on a hillside scouting out the landscape for prey. And then it happened: the cheetah found a herd of impala. We watched as it hunkered down and then bolted in for the kill. It’s the kind of experience you remember for the rest of your life. And Sadera helps people find it day after day.

Lunch time at the Honoré de Balzac School in Paris’s 17th arrondissement is usually fast, busy and messy for its 2,000 middle and high school students.

But on this day, the cafeteria is even messier than usual. There’s a food waste experiment under way.

Students in hair nets and protective clothing sort and weigh leftovers from the lunch trays — bread, meat, vegetables and packaging all go in separate bags. It’s part of a project the school came up with to coincide with the Paris climate conference that wrapped up last weekend.

In one corner of the cafeteria, a pile of leftover yogurt containers, still sealed, is growing. According to strict food regulations, the containers have to be thrown out, even if they’re still unopened.

This experiment is in the fact-finding phase, says Jean-Baptiste Lannebère, an environmental science teacher here. His team of students wants to determine what can be recycled, whether portions should be reduced, and what can be composted. Compost will be key here, Lannebère says.

Because the climate conference, COP21, was taking place in their city, Lannebère wanted to get his students’ hands dirty, literally. So they came up with the idea of composting. But the earthworms only eat a vegetarian diet so Lannebère says it’ll take a while to sort out the food waste for them.

Nobody opened these yogurts, but health regulations require the school to throw them out so that's 53 yogurts in the trash.

Credit:

Adeline Sire

Two of the school’s 12th graders, Chaden Alyahya Morla and Nour Fiquet, were planning to attend COP21 as a prize for winning a student environmental journalism competition. Their entry featured a plan to use biogas from decomposing leaves from the schoolyard to heat the school’s pool.

“We were really excited to go,” Alyahya Morla says, “but then with the Paris attacks [and the state of emergency], it wasn’t possible anymore so we were a bit sad.”

Still, she says she was pleased with the final agreement’s global warming target of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius, but her classmate, Nour Fiquet, had a different perspective.

“It’s not that I wasn’t happy about the agreement,” Fiquet says. “It’s not that I don’t believe in it, but for me, this is happening way too late.” And she adds that she doesn’t trust the French government to enforce the agreement.

Another senior, Enzo Laurent, has doubts too, though he says the Paris agreement seems to carry more weight than previous ones.

“Most of the countries that were involved seemed more engaged, especially the most problematic countries like the USA or China,” Laurent says. But “even if this text seems like it’s actually going to impose for the first time actual legal measures, I don’t see how it’s going to be implemented in a way that actually works and that changes things for real, quickly.”

The results of the cafeteria experiment? 30 lbs. of discarded bread, 110 lbs. of compostable waste, and 300 lbs. of non-compostable waste. Not to mention the untouched yogurts and pieces of cheese.

Credit:

Adeline Sire

In the afternoon, the results of the day’s cafeteria experiment come in: 110 pounds of compostable waste — enough to make the worms happy. But there was also 300 pounds of non-compostable waste, plus 53 unopened containers of yogurt. And that went in the trash.

Still, as one teacher put it, the climate conference has made the students and the teachers think about connections to their everyday activities in school — from recycling paper to food waste — and what they can do at their school to make a difference.

Photos from New Horizons' trip past Pluto have revealed new details of the dwarf planet's surface — including three-mile-high water-ice mountains and deep layered craters.

“This is the apex, these are the highest resolution images,” says planetary scientist William McKinnon, who is New Horizons' deputy lead for geology, geophysics and imaging. He and his team have recently received a new batch of photos from the outer reaches of our solar system, and they’re beginning to theorize about what the images might reveal from Pluto’s history

“You can see all sorts of amazing details,” McKinnon says. “You can see the layers on the sheer faces of the mountains. You can see how they're jammed together like logs at a dam and they look like they've actually crushed smaller mountains and pieces of ice in between them. It speaks to some sort of really ancient cataclysm on Pluto.”

Some guesses include a large impact or grand-scale planetary evolution. They’re all in agreement, however, that Pluto is still active. 

“[That] of course is one of the great findings of the whole mission — that we can travel to the ends of the solar system where the sunlight is very feeble and the surface temperature is very low and we still see stuff happening just like it’s, you know, Earth or Mars.”

Some of the photos from Pluto seem to show a sort of shoreline with one material crashing into another, creating a ripple-like surface. McKinnon says materials like water and ice are different in the outer reaches of our solar system. 

“It's amazing,” McKinnon says. “All these mountains are jammed together but then they stop and that's where this place, Sputnik Planum, starts and basically it's a giant sheet of exotic ices. Because on Pluto, water-ice is like rock on the earth. And what takes the place then of water vapor, and liquid water, and water-ice is ices of nitrogen, and carbon monoxide, and methane.”

There are many theories as to what might be causing the ripple-like formations in the new photos. Some think it might be wind. Others theorize that the ices may still be volatile. McKinnon says some of Pluto’s exotic ices are likely flowing and behaving similarly to earth’s glaciers. 

“Inside the Sputnik Planum we actually see flow of what we call the glacial ices, the solid nitrogen and so forth moving down out of the mountains and flowing onto the plains in that big, big basin,” McKinnon says, “Basically sunlight evaporates nitrogen gas which then condenses elsewhere on the planet and it piles up in a not too different way than snow piles up on the Earth. And it basically makes a glacier and it goes downhill. There's a cycle, and as this happens, it creates some of these fantastic landscapes.”

McKinnon and his team are continuing to receive images from the New Horizons spacecraft and will keep getting color and spectral data on Pluto for at least another year. After that they hope to send their spacecraft off even further into the Kuiper belt. 

“It will in effect be the most distant body visited by the human race when we get there in three years,” McKinnon says. 

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday.

“The Crawick Multiverse” is a sprawling piece of landscape art tucked into Dumfries and Galloway in the Scottish countryside. Landscape artist Charles Jencks designed it, and earlier this year completed it. 

Visitors to the site can walk up a large, grass-covered mound meant to represent the Andromeda Galaxy, or another clean-lined geometric rise meant to represent the Milky Way Galaxy. Other landforms are meant to give form to a Supercluster and comet path and there’s a corkscrew walkway of mudstone representing the whole ensemble of universes — the multiverse.

“Everything about this site shouts cosmic,” says Jencks.

This was not always the case. The site used to hold a coal mine, and seeing it transformed into an art installation seemed appropriate to local poet Rab Wilson. 

“This area was decimated economically post the miner's strike and there’s been a a slow death by strangulation for almost 30 years. Perhaps these are the first green shoots that we've really seen. ... So, in a way perhaps, this is a fitting memorial,” says Wilson, who composed a poem in the multiverse's honor. “This is a cosmos distilled to elemental rock and stone depicting that interstellar collision.” 

Jencks, who’s American but lives in Scotland, did a lot of research for the landscape project.

“I've been talking to scientists, working with them,” Jencks says, “ And the new theory is our universe is one of several, and the most beautifully balanced of all universes because it produces life and it produces consciousness and it's so sensitive that we have to explain why it's so beautifully balanced…The only way we can explain that scientifically is to say, ‘Well, there must be other universes which are not well balanced.' ... It’s too much of a miracle, you've got to explain it. Scientists don't want to necessarily use God to explain it. They want to say why, how, and the multiverse theory is the one that does that.” 

Jencks hopes visitors to his site will get a sense of the multiverse by wandering around and looking for meaning. 

“What I've tried to do here is to unpack that idea bit by bit, and root people in the idea,” Jencks says, “When you go into a landscape that you know is meaningful, you look for more meaning, and you find meanings that I never intended. A meaningful landscape is something that leaves the mind on and the imagination on and I think you have to appeal to the brain and the mind in a landscape. That’s what I try to do.”

This story first aired on PRI's Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen.

There are lots of multiverse theories in play at the moment. They have names ranging from “the quilted multiverse” and “the inflationary universe” and “the ultimate multiverse.”  It all feels exciting and new. But it's not as new as you might think.

Multiverse is defined as "a hypothetical collection of identical or diverse universes, including our own."

“The idea of multiple universes is about 2,500 years old,” says Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a professor of religion and philosophy at Wesleyan University. According to Rubenstein, long before nerds in pocket protectors were debating this stuff, nerds in togas were — the Atomist philosophers, of ancient Greece.

“For the ancient Atomist philosophers, the most desirable thing about what we're now calling the multiverse was that it got rid of the need for a god,” Rubinstein says. “If it is the case that our world is the only world, then it's very difficult to explain how everything is so perfect. How is it that sunsets are so beautiful?”

The ancient Atomists turned to the multiverse theory to explain the world’s perfections. 

“Their explanation was that it's not the case that some anthropomorphic god or gods made the universe so that it was just perfect the way it is, but that actually our world was just one of an infinite number of other worlds that looked totally different from our world and that worlds were the product just of accident, of particles colliding with one another and randomly forming worlds and an infinite amount of space to play in,” Rubenstein says. 

If the multiverse theory continues to grow in popularity it will, as with all new scientific theories and discoveries, present the world with new theological and philosophical problems. 

“Every major development in modern western science since Copernicus has been advertised as this radical de-centering of our influence,” Rubenstein says. “In the pre-Copernican universe, the sun was at the center and we were so important, the story goes. And then Copernicus takes us out of the center of the solar system. And then Darwin takes us out of the center of the Garden of Eden. Freud takes us out of control of our own psyches. As science progresses, we learn that we are less and less important than we thought we were. ... But of course it doesn't seem to be the case that these purported decentralizations of the importance of the human have in any way contributed to our feeling like we're insignificant.”

Rubenstein has written a book about the multiverse theory called “Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse.” She details some of the complications religions will have to deal with if the multiverse theory continues to gain ground.

“You do run into some fascinating theological problems. Things like, for example, if you are operating within a Christian framework, you would need to ask, ‘Well are there inhabitants of those other universes? And if there are inhabitants of those other universes, are they fallen or not right? Have they sinned? Do all creations fall? And if they have fallen, do they also need Christ to go there to redeem them,” Rubinstein says, “If that’s the case, then theology’s got a serious problem.”

This story first aired on PRI's Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen.

Last year, the European Space Agency accidentally launched two Galileo satellites into the wrong orbit.

Their elongated orbits made them inoperable for the ESA’s global-navigation system, but a group of researchers have repurposed the satellites to test an aspect of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

"They were supposed to go in a circular orbit, but now they go in an eccentric orbit," says experimental physicist Sven Herrmann. "And that gives us an excellent opportunity to test ... a very basic prediction of general relativity. That clock [on board the satellite] that is closer to a massive object like Earth will seem to tick a bit more slowly than a clock that is located further away. And the clocks on board those satellites, they are now doing exactly this. They are approaching Earth and going back and forth with every revolution on the orbits that they do about twice a day."

The clocks on board the satellites are, according to Herrmann, "Pretty good clocks. They are maybe not the world's best clocks, but they are designed for the purpose of positioning and navigation. And I think they are sufficient for the test that we want to do."

If all goes well with the experiment, Hermann predicts that the clocks on board the satellites will shift on the order of microseconds as they circle the earth — a shift that would back up Einstein's theory. 

The satellite experiment will last at least a year, enough time to rule out any systematic errors. 

"This general relativity is just such a very basic theory. It's essentially defining our understanding of space and time. So it's a very basic [theory] of physics that I think we are obliged really to test to the best of what technology can provide us with," Herrmann says. "Especially if you look at the problem that is something many physicists try to tackle today — the unification of gravity theory that's General Relativity and Quantum Theory on the other hand. They're two big theories in physics that are seemingly incompatible."

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday.

Sometimes the most genius ideas are the simplest.

That seems to be the rule in Peru, where they’ve hit upon the perfect way to track down a burgeoning number of illegal garbage dumps: follow the vultures.

The idea may be simple, but it’s not exactly easy to pull off, given the extensive range of these airborne scavengers that roam freely above the Peruvian capital, Lima, a sprawling, chaotic city of 9 million people.

The South American country suffers from a serious shortage of official waste disposal plants. Illicitly dumping trash — into a river, over a cliff, or in front of your neighbor’s house — is routine here. Prosecutions are few and far between. 

 

That’s where the technology comes in, and the vultures. Under a new initiative called Gallinazo Avisa, or “Vulture Warns” in English, 10 of Lima’s large population of black vultures have been kitted out with GoPro cameras and global positioning satellite gear.

 

 

And the results so far have been pretty awesome. Check out these photos taken by the vultures of what, for the big birds, are giant lunch counters dotted around the city:

 

 

 

 

In addition to keeping Lima clean, the initiative is aimed at raising awareness about the downside of the country’s addiction to dumping waste wherever people feel like it.

By one estimate, 14 percent of the 6,000 metric tons of garbage Lima produces every day — 840 metric tons — is disposed of improperly. 

The Gallinazo Avisa homepage includes a live map of the city to allow viewers to track the vultures in real time. 

 

It also includes a form for citizens to report trash piling up in their neighborhoods. And the environment ministry even contracted a PR firm to put out an epic, doom-laden video (with helpful subtitling in English):

It warns: “On one hand, pestilence and disease are hidden among the filth. On the other hand, humanity placidly ignoring the danger that threatens to interrupt aspirations of development forever.

“Between them, it’s only us, the cathartidae lineage. The [New World] vultures. The ones who always clean up the garbage. Even though nobody likes us.”

And on the “Act” page of Gallinazo Avisa's website, the vultures — who you can follow by name on social accounts — offer advice on recycling and correct waste disposal:

“For 14 millennia, we have dealt with the trash, but now we can’t do so any more on our own. For this reason, you need to know how to eradicate garbage and handle solid waste.”

This story was cross-posted by our colleagues at Global Post.

The Paris climate agreement, signed a little over a week ago, has been heralded by many as a feat of international diplomacy that may just stave off the worst effects of climate change.

But reactions to the agreement have been far from universally positive, and they vary even among those advocating for similar constituencies.

Take Saleemul Huq, a long-time advisor to the Least Developed Counties group, the negotiating bloc that represents 48 of the world’s poorest countries at the UN climate talks.

"I think it was a much better and a much more ambitious agreement than we had expected going into Paris,” he said. “The biggest thing is that we have all countries working together to fight the problem, not just some.

That is a big change from previous agreements, which largely broke down along lines of rich and poor countries.  But Huq, who directs the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, argued the talks were a success not only because almost every county at the table was involved and pledged carbon reductions. There was also a very specific win in Paris for developing counties and low-lying island nations.   

“We were able to change the long-term temperature goal from two degrees to 1.5 degrees (Celsius), which matters to the most vulnerable and the poorest counties very much,” Huq said.

That’s because that half degree Celsius could make the difference between things like an island nation disappearing or not, or a country being able to grow enough food. But holding warming to 1.5 degrees is a much harder target than two degrees. And in the lead-up to the summit, Huq said the idea wasn’t getting much traction in the international community.

“Going into Paris, neither the rich countries, like the US or Europeans, or even the large developing counties, like China and India, were prepared to change it to 1.5 degrees," Huq said. "That was something that we were able to persuade them to do over the two weeks."

Now, that 1.5 degree target is still just a long-term goal. And so far, countries’ actual pledges to cut carbon emissions have the Earth on track to warm roughly three degrees Celsius. Countries will have to seriously up the ante in the years ahead. But Huq argued the agreement represents a vital start. 

“There are many things that are not right about where we are at the moment, but what Paris does in my view, and which is why I would say it is an achievement, is that it puts everybody on the right path. We are not fighting each other anymore. We are going together,” he added.

Asad Rehman, like Huq, went to Paris to represent the interests of the global south. But he has a different perspective.

“The reality in the cold light of day is that it a huge great escape for the big polluters and ultimately a poison chalice for the poor,” said Rehman, a Pakistani-born Brit who represented the grassroots environmental federation Friends of the Earth International.

Rehman sees the Paris agreement as little more than a face-saving document from an international community desperate for a win.

“After the debacle of Copenhagen, many, many people felt that we needed a successful outcome in Paris,” he said.

Rehman said the aspirational goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees doesn’t actually mean much, and there are other huge holes in the deal. He points particularly to the language on financing, or aid from richer countries to poorer ones to help fight climate change and deal with its effects.

The plan sets a floor of $100 billion dollars in aid a year by 2025.  But it doesn’t explicitly specify that the money will have to be “new and additional,” which Rehman sees as creating a big loophole.  

“Now (existing) money is simply going to be re-packaged and called climate finance,” he said. “So in the best case scenario it’s robbing Peter to pay Paul, in the worst case scenario, it’s just literally any money that you’re spending in any quarters being re-labeled as climate finance.”

In other words, Rehman thinks talk of all that new aid is largely an empty promise.

And while he understands the urge to celebrate after decades of diplomatic gridlock, Rehman argues that the “glass half full” perspective of the Paris deal is actually dangerous, because it threatens to defuse the movement for real change in global climate politics.

“I think it’s not right for us as a movement to be applauding something if that then de-politicizes and takes away the power of the movements,” Rehman said. “So I very much say, if you’re rooted in the global south — then you would not be celebrating Paris.”

But Huq might say that misses the point. 

The Paris agreement means, for the first time, addressing climate change doesn’t have to mean a fight between global north and south. It could mean we’re finally all in this together.

Cheers and applauds filled the mission control room at SpaceX mission control.

The SpaceX employees were celebrating what many consider to be a historic moment for private space exploration.

The company had managed to successfully launch a rocket called Falcon 9 and return it safely back to Earth on Monday night.

Falcon 9, which was carrying 11 satellites, landed in an upright position in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

“Welcome back, baby!” tweeted Elon Musk, entrepreneur and founder of SpaceX.

Scientist Monica Grady says the news of the landing of Falcon 9 makes her very excited. “This means that space exploration for ordinary people is one step closer — and a big step at that,” she says.

Grady, who teaches planetary sciences at the Open University in UK, explains that the fact that the rocket landed safely means that it could be used for future missions.

“This means that we’ll be able to reuse bits of rocket which means prices will come down,” she says, although that might be a few years away.

In addition, she says, this is a step toward making space travel more accessible to ordinary people. “When people first flew across the Atlantic or down to Australia it was only the very wealthy people who could do that. Now anybody can do it,” she says.

This is not the first time that a space rocket has successfully landed upright.

About a month ago a space startup called Blue Origin, founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, managed to safely bring back a smaller rocket from a suborbital flight.

Grady says that Blue Origin’s rocket “went nowhere near as high as the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.” But, she adds, it had a capsule designed to take people into space, which makes it an important achievement.

All these private companies investing and experimenting with space travel makes Grady happy. She explains that these companies have taken on what governmental space agencies can’t.

“NASA or the European Space Agency or any other space agency can’t possibly start developing space exploration travel for people because they don’t have sufficient resource,” she says, “whereas private companies do have that resource.”

“The current rivalry between these companies is great,” she adds, “because that’s how progress is made.”

Sure, it was the plot of a ’90s sci-fi movie, but now "Gattaca" is about to intersect with reality.

Only, according to Vanderbilt’s Michael Bess, the movie didn’t go nearly far enough.

Thanks to recent developments in the field of epigenetics, Bess thinks that people will soon be able to modify both themselves and their children in profound ways. 

Having a “designer baby” — whose intelligence, appearance, or athleticism might be manipulated even before they're born – has long been controversial. But, says Bess, epigenetics means changes can come much later in life, meaning we won’t "have the same issue of parents sort of forcing their children into a certain mold long before those children become adults who can make choices for themselves.”

Instead of changing our DNA, epigenetics changes how molecules interact with our DNA - thoughBess says that parents may still choose to modify their children before birth in order to prevent disease.

“Let's say for example that you discovered that a certain type of trout had a genetic ability to fend off cancer,” he says, “That strikes me as the sort of alteration that many parents would be willing to make in their children at the moment of conception if such a technology became possible … you're just giving them an immunity or a greater resistance to a terrible disease, and I think many parents would opt for that just like vaccinations.”

Bess, the author of "Our Grandchildren Redesigned: Life in the Bioengineered Society of the Near Future," says that before-birth and after-birth enhancements may become mainstream in the next 20 years.

And the consequences could be profound.

Widespread use of epigenetics might usher in different categories of humans: "I think the highly-modified people will run circles around those that are unmodified. So I see a potential gap there, between two types of humanity: the unmodified and the modified."

Bess notes that the rise of modified people could lead to major economic consequences by increasing inequality, especially if modifications are costly, and available only to a wealthy few. “If that's the case, then this will grievously exacerbate the gap between the haves and the have-nots in our society."

It’s a scenario, Bess says, that is no longer the stuff of science fiction. And that should command our attention.

This story first aired as an interview on PRI's Innovation Hub. Subscribe to the Innovation Hub podcast.

The phrase “climate change” often summons images of exhaust-spewing trucks and coal plants blackening the skies.

But there’s a lesser-known source of emissions that the public should fear alongside traffic jams and filthy factories. And if this top polluter isn’t reined in, humanity’s efforts to ward off climate change disaster — exemplified by the recent 196-country United Nations agreement in Paris— could be doomed.

That threat? Annual infernos driven by slash-and-burn farming that sweep through Indonesia’s jungles and choke much of Southeast Asia in a toxic haze. This year’s blazes were the worst in at least 15 years, destroying thousands of acres of forest and emptying an estimated 1.75 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions into the earth's atmosphere.

 

For those who live the region, there is much to despise about these fires. They spew out smoke that sickens half a million people. They drown villages in a lung-searing haze. They force city dwellers from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore to hunker down indoors. 

But even people who’ll never visit the region should fear Indonesia’s flaming jungles. When the forest fires rage hardest, they can spew out more emissions per day than the entire US economy, according to the pro-conservation World Resources Institute.

The fires briefly turned Indonesia — a largely impoverished, Muslim-majority archipelago — into the world’s worst polluter. During particularly smoky spells in September in October, Indonesia daily churned out more greenhouse gases than even China or the US. 

When Indonesia’s fires are tamed, the country is usually pegged as the sixth-worst offender, behind China, the United States, the European Union countries (which are counted as one bloc), India and Russia. 

More from GlobalPost: What the Paris climate deal means for Africa

Indonesia’s official climatology agency has called the man-made fires a “crime against humanity of extraordinary proportions.” A leading analyst of the fire crisis — Erik Meijaard, an Indonesia-based conservation scientist — terms them “probably the biggest global environmental crime of the 21st century.”

But short of a miracle, the world can expect to watch Indonesia burn next year — and belch out a sickening amount of planet-warming gases once more.

 

There are no easy solutions to keep Indonesia’s jungles unlit. Some forest fires are started to clear land for massive agro-conglomerates that produce palm oil, a substance readily found in American supermarkets. It’s used to make everything from cookies to shampoo to packaged bread.

But fires are also started by poor farmers, hunters and others. The “underlying problem of Indonesia’s many million arsonists,” Meijaard says, should be confronted by cops and soldiers threatening legal action against anyone who illicitly lights up the jungle.

That would require an unprecedented burst of competency from Indonesia’s rural police, who are typically disorganized.

The fires, which flare up in the latter half of the year, have currently subsided. It’s unclear whether Indonesia can use the coming months to turn its underpaid law enforcers into a frontline squadron hunting down illegal fire starters. 

But the country is making big promises nonetheless. At the UN climate change summit in Paris, Indonesia vowed that it would somehow cut its emissions 29 percent by the year 2030. 

Though offering few specifics, Indonesian President Joko Widodo acknowledged at the summit that the country’s jungles are “acting as the lung of the world” and insisted his government is “developing Indonesia in a way that is giving due attention to the environment.”

This story was cross-posted by our colleagues at Global Post.