During her appearance on The Daily Show in 2014, Elizabeth Kolbert — a staff writer for The New Yorker and a research associate with the College’s Environmental Studies Program — delivered a strikingly sober outlook on the future of climate change.
For seven minutes, the host, Jon Stewart, playfully peppered her with questions about her book The Sixth Extinction, which would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize the following year for its bleak proposition that human beings were catalyzing the Earth’s most devastating extinction event since the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
“On a hopeful note…” Stewart prompted as the segment was reaching its conclusion.
Kolbert reacted with a furrowed brow, leaving a telling pause.
“Was there a hopeful note?” Stewart asked, as the studio audience burst into laughter. “I didn’t see a hopeful note in the book.”
“I’d like to think there’s a sort of Jon Stewart-ian touch in there, that there’s nothing too grim — there’s no subject too grim — that we can’t have a little humor,” Kolbert said to the host.
“Exactly,” Stewart replied. “And that, hopefully, will be the epitaph of the planet.”
In the decade since, Kolbert has published two more books on the subject: 2021’s Under a White Sky, which takes a critical look at technological climate solutions and made Barack Obama’s exclusive summer reading list; and 2024’s H Is for Hope, a collection of 26 essays that surveys the often-contrasting narratives around the history of climate change and potential ways forward, paired with whimsical illustrations by the artist Wesley Allsbrook.
The title of the latter might take a longtime follower of Kolbert by surprise. “It’s a little bit of a bait-and-switch,” she told the Record ahead of her Friday talk on the book at Log Lunch — a weekly event hosted by the Center for Environmental Studies (CES) where members of the College and Town community gather for a vegetarian lunch paired with a talk on an environmental topic. “I am less hopeful than I was a decade ago.”
Kolbert — who has covered the climate change beat as a journalist for over 20 years, and has held a range of positions afilliated with the CES intermittently since moving to Williamstown 30 years ago — has good reason to be pessimistic.
“There was, at the outset, a notion shared by me and a lot of people who wrote about and worked on climate change, that the problem was this information deficit: People didn’t really understand the scale and the seriousness of the problem, and when they did, they were going to do something,” she said. “That has really proven not to be the case.”
At the beginning of her talk, Kolbert showed a graph that is all too familiar to those closely following climate change: the Keeling Curve, a measure of the ever-increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which drives the global rise in temperatures.
“We’re just going to sit there at a very high CO2 level unless we figure out a way to remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere,” Kolbert told the 125-person audience. “It should be a very sobering point, and it tells us why we are in a lot of trouble right now.”
Throughout the talk, Kolbert dipped into the biography of Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist credited with developing the first climate model at the turn of the 20th century, and dissected the “cascading crises” of xenophobia and climate climate, which she argued will likely only intensify as environmental disasters displace millions in the coming decades. There wasn’t much time left in the talk for hope.
Still, Kolbert acknowledged in her talk that she wrote H Is for Hope during a moment of cautious optimism — the year after President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which she described as “the first bill that ever got through the U.S. Congress aimed at reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions” and “a first step” for more monumental climate action.
“As you know, once again we’re in a much, much less hopeful moment,” she continued, referencing the actions taken by President Donald Trump to undermine U.S. efforts to curb climate change — including the firing of thousands of employees at the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, Department of the Interior, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — since he took office in January. “I don’t have to tell anyone that all of this is being ripped up,” she said.
So what, if anything, is there to do?
Speaking to the Record before her talk, Kolbert suggested that the College’s own impact could be a starting point for students taking on the climate crisis.
“I don’t think there’s much energy around climate at Williams right now,” she said. “Williams is very sensitive to the sentiment of its students, and if climate change were top of agenda for students, it would be getting more attention from the administration.”
The College’s Climate Action Plan, which was last updated in March 2024, sets a goal of cutting emissions tied to energy usage on campus 80 percent from 1991 levels. It does not, however, include a target year for reaching such a goal.
“If I were advising students where to focus their energies, it would be on Williams’ own emissions,” Kolbert said, suggesting that a decarbonized Williams could be a “model” of a sustainable campus for peer institutions.
At the same time, Kolbert has been clear-eyed in her public remarks about the limits of activism in the face of the rapidly-deteriorating state of the climate. Giving a Baccalaureate Address at the College in 2016, she told the audience of soon-to-be-graduates, “I would be dissembling if I said that I was confident that you or that anyone has the power to alter the trajectory that we are on.”
She took a similar tone last Friday. “The takeaway, I hope, is that this is a super serious issue that is going to affect your generation profoundly,” Kolbert told the Record about her Log Lunch talk, which ended without any direct call to action. “I don’t have an answer for what people should be doing, but young people in particular should be very up in arms about that.”
“I understand if people just want to retreat and turn inward,” she said. “But I think, unfortunately, history has shown us that that doesn’t protect you.”
