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Wednesday, December 15, 2021

Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert

This was on Obama's summer reading list (which I have barely cracked, meanwhile he probably has an end of the year list in the works), and while I rarely read nonfiction, I am not sorry when I do. The author's previous book is about a mass extinction we are at risk for secondary to human activity. This book is a kind of sequel to it, describing the tehcnological solutions scientists are developing to fix various aspects of the Anthropocene disasters: from saving dying corals over controlling invasive species, to carbon capture and global geoengineering. Hence the title, because there are men of science who want to shoot tiny aerosol particles into the stratosphere to block out the sun and decrease the global temperature. As a side effect, that is expected to turn the sky white instead of blue. PS, this is a solution that might work in the short term but is doomed in the long run. So the book is largely about humans trying to fix the damage they themselves caused. Sometimes the humans are trying to fix the damage they caused by trying to fix another damage previously.

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