 My name is Andres Martinez. I'm Vice President and Editorial Director here at the New America Foundation. Welcome to all of you, and thank you for joining us. Before we get started, a housekeeping note. Just be mindful that today's program is being livecast on the web. So everything is obviously on the record. And when we have questions and comment periods, please wait for a microphone that will be circulating. And please identify yourself. Today's event is the latest in our Future Tense series. Future Tense is a collaboration between New America, Slate Magazine, and Arizona State University. Today's compelling program has an additional co-conspirator, I should say, and that is the 11th Hour Project and the Schmidt Family Foundation. And I want to acknowledge and thank Sarah Bell, who's a program manager with the 11th Hour Project. And thank you so much for your support and leadership on this compelling issue. The 11th Hour Project is doing a lot to build capacity and to fund research on the compelling issue that brings us here today, which is how are we going to feed the world while the earth cooks. And that's a somewhat provocative way to put it. But I think it's a tale that can be told. The challenge that we face is a tale that can be told by two books. So I'm here to plug New America Fellow Books. Getting Better by Charles Kenney, who's one of our Schwartz Fellows here at New America and you'll be hearing from later on today, wrote a fantastic book called Getting Better, which really chronicles many of the ways in which the last decade has been a tremendous success in raising living standards around the world and creating this newly minted global middle class in much of the emerging world. And that's the good news. But as we all know, this is happening against the backdrop of a time when our planet and our resources are very constrained. And that is a tale that has been told probably more ably than by anybody else by Mark Hertzgaard, who is our Schmidt Family Foundation Fellow here at New America and will be our master of ceremonies for much of the day. Mark wrote, hot, living through the next 50 years on Earth. So oftentimes when we think about this challenge of feeding the planet, you know, feeding our fellow humans, particularly at a time when their consumption rates are exploding as people become wealthier in some emerging markets and now clamor for the kind of lifestyles that we have, while at the same time continuing on with the struggle of feeding the world's neediest, how you accommodate that categorical imperative with the categorical imperative of being better stewards of our planet. This is often, I think, thought of as a zero-sum game. And one of the issues that Sarah Bell and her team in San Francisco and many of the people we're going to be hearing about from today is trying to get away from thinking about this as a conflict, that we have to choose one or the other. What technologies can be brought to bear? What breakthroughs will it take so that we don't have to choose between feeding our fellow humans and taking better care of the planet? So that is why we're here today and we have an exciting lineup of thought leaders and researchers on these subjects. And before we go any further, though, I just want to share a little anecdote about my childhood in Chihuahua, Mexico. Back when I was... That was a little bit delayed. It's got to be louder than that. Higher. So this is a joke. I'm not going to burden you with a childhood anecdote, but we're just trying out a new system of having... It's just kind of like the Oscars when somebody goes on too long. We're going to put on music to cut them off. When we program these events, often we get very greedy because there's so many people that we want to hear from and so many different perspectives that we want to bring to this platform. So as you can see by looking at the program today, we're being very ambitious. We want to really have a robust exchange of views and hear from many different perspectives. We've really been ambitious in programming and there will be few breaks, although you're obviously welcome at any time to stretch your legs, get out, grab coffee. But we've really jam-packed the day and to keep things moving in an orderly fashion and trying to keep to the clock, we will put on music when it's time to segue. So apologies in advance to people that we cut off and I think the music needs to be a little bit louder, but we'll work on that. So that's where they're due. I do want to introduce our thought leader on this subject at New America, Mark Hertzgaard, who's going to kick us off and then moderate and be master of ceremonies for the rest of the day. Mark, as I mentioned, is our Schmidt Family fellow foundation here in New America and the author of Hot. So, Mark. Thank you, Andres. Good morning, everyone. Nice to see you all here. Thank you for coming out for this. I think this is one of the most important questions facing humanity today. How are we going to feed ourselves in the 21st century? And it's something that I've been... the issue of food is something I've been following since I was an undergraduate student at Johns Hopkins University years ago and I have followed it throughout my reporting career, including reporting from about 25 different countries around the world for outlets ranging from the New Yorker and Vanity Fair and Time magazine to NPR and the BBC and the Nation magazine, where I'm now the environment correspondent. And as I have looked at this and the years have gone by, it turns out that, as Andres foreshadowed, that climate is going to be a major challenge in this regard. And so I'm very happy to be here and I'm looking forward to a great day of conversation and occasionally debate, I think. Let me tell you a little bit just to set the stage in terms of the collision course that is described in your schedule there about the research that I did in the reporting that I did for HOT, the book that Andres mentioned, which is actually coming out in paperback this week. I remember seeing a father and my daughter just turned seven last week. And so as I was reporting around the world, I invariably was drawn to the other little people who reminded me of her. And I've come to think of them, the young people in the world today, as generation HOT, because through no fault of their own, these children, and I would include there, this really shows my middle age, I suppose, everyone up to the age of 25, people who were born, I guess what, 24, actually, who were born after June of 1988 when the eminent NASA scientist James Hansen first came to the United States Congress and testified that, in his view, human activity was raising the temperatures on this planet. And to his great credit, the New York Times ran that story above the fold on the front page the following day, which in effect put it in every newsroom around the world. And as a reporter at that point, you could see the difference. Our editors, our producers, were much more willing to hear that story, to do an environmental story. I heard that from colleagues overseas as well. And that was amplified when Time Magazine later that year chose in a quite unprecedented move for its person of the year to name the endangered planet Earth as its person of the year. And there was a lot of attention internationally. Margaret Thatcher, some of you may recall, the first world leader who made a major speech saying on the international stage that we have to pay attention to climate change was Margaret Thatcher. I wish that some of the people in the polarized debate in Washington, D.C. today could remember that. It was Margaret Thatcher, a scientist herself, who said we have to pay attention to this. And crucially, let's not fight about how much it costs, whatever it costs. We have to deal with it because we're talking about the basis of life on this planet. So we certainly had our warnings. And in 1990, the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued their first scientific report. And it looked like something was really going to happen. In 1992, there was the famous Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that will be repriezed in a couple of months in Rio at the Rio Plus 20 conference in June. But unfortunately, world leaders were not able to really make great progress there, although they did go on record at the Earth Summit in 1992 of saying that they would prevent dangerous anthropogenic man-made interference with the climate system. We now know unfortunately that that promise has proven hollow. The world has not acted quickly enough to prevent dangerous anthropogenic influence in our climate. And as a result, my daughter and the other 2 billion young people born on this planet since Jim Hansen's testimony in June 1988 are now fated to spend the rest of their lives coping with the hottest and most volatile climate that humans have ever faced since we started practicing agriculture 10,000 years ago. So that is the challenge that we're now facing. How do we manage in the face of that kind of heat and extreme weather? We have changed the weather on this planet. And over the next 50 years, climate change is going to transform almost everything we do from how we deploy our militaries to how we write insurance to how we talk to our children about the future and above all how we grow food. I'm going to give just a couple of quick examples before I introduce our first 2 panelists that may help put this into perspective for those of you who like me are not scientists. But I have as a journalist the privilege of introducing a lot of eminent scientists and trying to share their views with the rest of us. I was very struck by the example of corn which as you may know is the major crop grown in the United States by volume. It is inside of virtually not every product that you see on your grocery shelves but well over half. My brilliant colleague Michael Pollan has written about how corn is the basis for so much of the modern American diet and it's also important in many other countries obviously. But it does not reproduce when it is exposed to extended periods of 95 degree fahrenheit heat. Won't germinate. Now in the past that was not a terrible problem. In Iowa for example Iowa experienced three straight days of 95 degree temperatures only once a decade throughout the 20th century. Once a decade. But by 2040 that's less than 30 years from now. My daughter will be my age by then she might be having kids herself by then. By 2040 if we stay on our current greenhouse gas emissions path experiencing 95 days fahrenheit for more than three days of the stretch those kinds of heat waves not one year out of ten but three years out of four. Three years out of four. At the same time we're going to have an increase in global food demand. As Andres mentioned our current population is about seven billion on this planet. The U.N. projects will increase by 2050 that's two billion more people and at the same time as the rise in middle income global middle income people increases they will be wanting diets that are more varied more ample and therefore will be requiring more resources and anyone and I'm sure there's many in this room like myself who have spent a lot of time in countries you really see this quite dramatically or other parts of Asia or Latin America or Africa who with any heart could say to those people no no you can't have that the earth can't manage that especially after we have had it for so long and enjoy it so bountifully so is this a collision course this kind of rising demand and the constraints that the weather will be putting on us that's what we're here to discuss today and the goal that I hear from all the experts and the scientists of what we need to be doing on all fields not just food as we confront climate change over the next 50 years we have to have a two pronged imperative and they call it avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable by which they mean we must avoid an unmanageable amount of global warming and climate change even as we manage what the amount of global warming and climate change that is already unavoidable I'll talk quickly about the second because that is often lost especially still here in the United States where our public discussion of climate change is so much behind the rest of the world because there is a large segment of the political economy especially in this city that still refuses to believe in climate science as a result there is not the kind of appreciation that there should be that this is a moving train and that there is a lag effect the simple laws of physics and chemistry mean that even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions tonight on this planet which of course is impossible because it would mean shutting hospitals and food supplies and so forth but even if we did that the inertia, the sheer physical inertia of the Earth's climate system would mean that the temperatures would still continue to go up for another 30-40 years so we are already locked into a significant amount of climate change and we have got to manage that we are going to be seen at a conservative level at least 3 feet of sea level rise on this planet whether it will be in 100 years 150 years or in the first case scenarios some scientists are now saying in 50 years we could see 3 feet of sea level rise we have got to prepare for that and that will have an enormous potential impact on food production just consider the fact that some of the richest agricultural land on this Earth are in the Delta regions whether it be the Nile or the Ganges in East Asia or here in the United States how are we going to protect them from 3 feet of sea level rise there's a lot of people working on that we can talk about it in the course of the day but it's one of the things we have to prepare for but let's make sure going back to the front part of avoid the unmanageable let's make sure it's not 10 feet of sea level rise that we have to cope with so we have got to both reduce the amount of greenhouse gases up in the atmosphere even as we to avoid the unmanageable to avoid that 10 feet to avoid 3 summers out of 4 in Iowa being too hot to grow corn and at the same time we have to manage the unavoidable and I'll close with a I think the single most hopeful story that I came across while researching hot and it's something that may seem odd at first because it's actually located in Africa which is certainly a place that has suffered a lot because of food but it's also a place that can teach us a lot we tend to think of oh we're the ones that have to help the Africans feed themselves well as Sarah Scheer who is a very valuable source of mind when I was writing hot pointed out much of the world is going to be encountering the kinds of weather that Africans are already facing today and therefore we can look at how they have been adapting to this they have not intended to adapt to climate change most of the farmers that I interviewed in western Africa they're illiterate they don't even know the term climate change but they are adapting to it none the less and how are they doing that they are growing trees they're growing trees amid their fields of millet and sorghum no the average Iowa farmer would scoff at that because you can't drive a tractor through it but in Africa it has turned out to be brilliantly effective because when you grow trees you have many co-benefits including the fact that you lower the temperatures in the field through the shade you above all increase the water retentiveness of the soil because as the roots go down into the soil they aerate it and they therefore allow the soil when you do get those rare bouts of rainfall that the rain soaks in to the soil rather than flashing off and so we have seen and I must say I'm not sure I would have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes that in vast areas of Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso that area of the western Sahel doubling and tripling of crop yields granted from a very low base but doubling and tripling of crop yields and underground water tables recharging some as much as 15 meters in the course of a decade and the most heartening aspect of that is watching little kids my daughter's age and seeing that the malnutrition rate in those villages is shrinking and this transformation in the Sahel is so pervasive you can literally see it from outer space because of the satellite pictures of the US geological survey it has spread that widely you can see the border between Niger where it is practiced and Nigeria where it is de facto outlawed so there are things that we can do and we're going to talk in a second about the role of genetically modified seeds but I think it is important for us to perhaps widen our minds a little bit about where solutions can come from it's not all out of the laboratories as important as they are it has to do with respecting not just the people in those places but respecting the ecological laws that make agriculture possible in the first place and if we do that I think that my daughter and the other children in Generation Hot have a fighting chance at inheriting a livable planet I really do think and Sarah Shearer will talk about this in a moment agriculture turns out to be one of the few tricks that we have up our sleeve as we face this imperative of avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable agriculture is the one sector where we know through photosynthesis that we can actually extract carbon out of the atmosphere