Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart welcomed The New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert to Monday’s taping of The Daily Show to promote her new book and prophesy impending doom on the environment. As Kolbert tells it, all the things that have come to define civilization have contributed to this impending catastrophe, and Manhattan itself is at risk if nothing changes.
Stewart led Kolbert with a half-decent question, “What is it about—because if you are an environmentalist, so, if you think, ‘Okay, global warming is real and it is caused by human activity,’ is it realistic to think—because what we have been told over the last 35 years is, human activity is the cause and we've just got to reduce human activity, but that seems to go against 10,000 years of human activity, which is, I like that easier, faster, smaller, tastier, deader. So, how do we square those things?
Kolbert replied, “Well, I think that that, you could argue that’s the question of our time, but I will answer that question with a story, which I first heard from a climate scientist on the top of the Greenland ice sheet.”
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. steve malzberg
