Category: Politics

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Joining the Herd?

Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy Will Soon Be the World’s

Lockdown protesters shout ‘be like Sweden’ — but Swedes say they are missing the point

As Europe emerges from lockdown, the question hangs: was Sweden right?

If you thought the politics of coronavirus couldn’t get any crazier, think again. Trump has totally copped out of any pretense to manage the crisis, while the U.S. leads the world in cases and deaths. If so many people weren’t dying, this could be high comedy: see Sarah Cooper above. Did you ever have a nightmare with humorous overtones?

The right wing has begun praising Sweden’s approach after years of vilifying its liberal government. The left wing wants to keep everyone locked down. Wisconsin opens up completely with no protections. Armed protestors get nasty in Michigan. People are fed up with staying home and the economy is suffering badly. So hoping for immunity is apparently a last resort.

Sweden’s opening up is based on the idea that eventually the populace will develop immunities to the virus, a herd immunity of maybe 60 percent, though that will require voluntary social distancing and other restrictions that the Swedes seem to be buying into. Yet the country has been criticized for “exceeding the per capita death rates of other Nordic countries and in particular, for failing to protect its elderly and immigrant populations. People receiving nursing and elder-care services account for upward of 50 percent of COVID-19 deaths in Sweden . . . .”

So the Swedish response is really a mixed bag, though one site opines that “the economic and social costs of lockdowns are enormous.” It has taken a careful government response to slow the spread of the virus, though this hasn’t been entirely successful. The fact that many Republicans are now praising Sweden is based on a total misunderstanding of the policy and its outcomes. Tucker Carlson praising Sweden is truly high comedy. Nor would the policy work in the U.S., which has large populations of immigrants and low-income people. In Sweden everyone is covered by a healthcare plan.

The idea of herd immunity makes many people skeptical and afraid. And yet, to follow the Swedish argument, we have to “find ways of living with this virus. There is no sign of a vaccine on the immediate horizon. We cannot ruin the world economy indefinitely. Better to concentrate on protecting our health services against it, should it return.”

The Swedish model will certainly not work everywhere. In Sweden there is a high level of trust between the people and the government. That is absolutely not true in the U.S. or, for that matter, the U.K. And the Swedes have a much healthier population that comes from a better healthcare system. They don’t do so well at helping at-risk people.

The U.S. is learning that it ultimately can’t manage a general lockdown. It can’t even manage to produce enough swabs. The country is going to be forced into adopting a kind of herd immunity because, as Trump’s folly has shown, there’s no other workable choice.

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Testing, Testing, Testing

Not Even the Coronavirus Will Unite America

The US economy can’t reopen without widespread coronavirus testing. Getting there will take a lot of work and money

Trump refuses to lead a country in crisis

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that reopening the economy depends on a program of massive testing. One wonders why it takes a new coronavirus task force of business brains (sans Mitt Romney) to figure this out.

“States can do their own testing,” Trump said. “We’re the federal government. We’re not supposed to stand on street corners doing testing.” Well, there is no way the states and their governors can coordinate and provide the millions of tests per week required. It seems undeniable that any reopening of the economy will result in big spikes in the virus, and who knows how many deaths. Q.E.D.

The Rockefeller Foundation, a major player in health care funding, has a testing proposal.

“It’s going to [initially] cost at least $100 billion and upward of $500 billion over the long haul,” said Eileen O’Connor, senior vice president for communications, policy and advocacy at the Rockefeller Foundation.
The foundation’s plan, which will propose that the cost be financed directly and subsidized by the federal government, estimates that 20 million to 30 million tests each day would need to be performed to get many Americans back to a more normal life.

Their plan will target health care workers first, then food production workers, then truckers. “After that, the goal would be to have tens of millions of tests done every day to have the country fully return to work.” The very idea of implementing such a plan seems totally beyond the thinking of the Trump administration.

At the same time, bureaucratic screwups have made things worse. Nature magazine tells us that their “investigation of several university labs certified to test for the virus finds that they have been held up by regulatory, logistic and administrative obstacles, and stymied by the fragmented US health-care system.”

And the public is so polarized that even a brutal pandemic can’t bring it together. Writing in The Atlantic, Dominic Tierney proposes that nothing short of a powerful human enemy, a Kaiser, a Hitler, will unify the country.

Every aspect of the crisis is colored by partisanship, including beliefs about which information sources to trust and views about who is worthy of federal aid. Even the act of social distancing is political—another way to show tribal colors—as liberals urge people to stay at home and conservatives chafe against government restrictions. The evangelical Liberty University has decided to welcome back thousands of students . . . and has instructed professors to hold office hours in person.

How can one even imagine a program of adequate testing within this kind of tribalism? As the poet said, thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

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The Trump Administration Will Be Our Downfall

The Trump administration’s botched coronavirus response, explained

An outbreak of incompetence

Covid-19 Is Twisting 2020 Beyond All Recognition

Do yourself a favor and stop listening to the president’s press conferences. How much more waffling and incompetence can you take? “Wear a scarf if you like,” he said the other day. After weeks of fumbling, the CDC has recommended face masks for all. “I don’t think I’m going to be doing it,” said Mr. Vanity. “Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens—I just don’t see it.” Who can bear to listen to this daily testimony to blather? He can’t even bring himself to issue a national stay-at-home order.

People are fed up, as a slew of recent articles demonstrates: I’ll give you excerpts from a few of these.

Jennifer Rubin, ex-Republican writer for the Washington Post, is one of the more fiery anti-Trumpers. Today she wrote:

One has the sinking feeling that things are going from bad to worse. Trump and the feds declined to act swiftly, in particular failing to get widespread testing up and running. Now they are failing to remedy the dire medical crisis that their negligence brought on.

She tasks the administration for much that’s gone (or is going) wrong—messed-up stimulus disbursements for small-business loans; the Navy brass who fired the captain pleading for help for his thousands of sailors fighting the virus on board his ship. Rubin concludes:

The chaos, confusion and incompetence at the federal level magnify our daily anxiety and uncertainty. We have lost control of our lives, and those supposed to lead us through this ordeal are deepening our national trauma. Years of contempt for expertise, for competent government and for truth itself on the right now haunt us all. God help us.

Thomas B. Edsall, the Columbia professor, frequently offers scholarly political opinion in the New York Times. His critiques are detailed and thorough. Recently, he said, “The current pandemic shows signs of reshaping the American political and social order for years to come.” Trump’s reelection is increasingly in doubt, and partisanship is the major cause.

A new study, Edsall notes, claims that “Partisanship is a more consistent predictor of behaviors, attitudes, and preferences than anything else that we measure.” In other words, the political split in the U.S. largely determines how people respond or fail to respond to the pandemic. That is frightening.

Another piece by David Roberts of Vox documents the “devastating public health consequences” of another partisanship study, which has “Republicans expressing more skepticism and taking fewer precautions, largely following the cues of their political and media leaders (as most people do).” Roberts says partisanship in the U.S. may no longer have any limits:

If a large bloc of the public cannot be convinced of the threat or the need for a response, that bloc can prevent collective action all on its own. It can ensure the virus spreads faster and more widely, no matter what the majority does.

Finally, Vox’s German Lopez presents a historical catalog of how the botched response to the virus “has been a disaster years in the making.” It started with John Bolton’s dismantling of the team in charge of pandemic response in spring 2018 and proceeded through the unbelievable testing failures, the backwaters on “social distancing,” the cutting of funds to critical agencies like EPA, NIH and CDC, and the total foot-dragging on the response to the growing virus threat. Trump has made clear that the lower the numbers, the better his chance of reelection. Now he’s cast his own destiny.

And we learned yesterday that Jared Kushner is now running the coronavirus response. As Rubin said, God help us.

On a personal note: some of you know of my long involvement with jazz music. The past week was especially sad as the coronavirus claimed the lives of three great musicians—Ellis Marsalis, Bucky Pizzarelli and Wallace Roney. I play their music in memoriam. So should you.

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The Sanders and Biden Climate Plans

Why climate voters made Biden the front-runner

How Biden’s climate plan stacks up to Bernie’s

The four biggest differences between the Biden and Sanders climate plans

If you follow the politics of climate change, you know that Bernie Sanders has the support of the hard-core environmentalists. Despite the practical challenges to his plans and the incredible costs predicated ($16.3 trillion over 10 years), the Sanders followers are proclaiming the rainbow.

Joe Biden’s plans will cost $1.7 trillion over 10 years and tackle the same issues as Sanders does—but in much broader, less time-restrictive strokes. Since his big Super Tuesday win, the environmentalists are getting on Biden’s case. Here are the major differences between the two:

  1. Fracking, the two-edged sword: natural gas has been a big factor in taking down coal-burning plants but makes its own contribution to global warming. Bernie wants to end fracking immediately; Biden wants to limit the release of methane, fracking’s by-product, and fund research into carbon capture.
  2. Nuclear: Sanders would end all nuclear energy production (some 20 percent of all U.S. energy now). Biden would explore development of advanced nuclear technologies, relying on perhaps promising innovations in the works. No target dates.
  3. Emission deadlines: for Sanders everything must run on renewable energy by 2030; Biden calls for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Biden’s climate plans aren’t less thorough than Sanders’s. He makes detailed recommendations for action, but they are less time-bound if not less urgent. Yet they seem to have been a factor in winning him Super Tuesday votes. He’s building a broader coalition.

One explanation is that

most voters don’t meaningfully distinguish between the candidates’ climate plans. Although some voters take cues from green groups who score candidates’ plans or provide endorsements, last night demonstrated the limits of their power—at least for the moment.

 . . . Biden’s climate plan was scored at or near the bottom of the field by the Sunrise Movement, Greenpeace, 350 Action, Data for Progress and the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund. The Sunrise Movement endorsed Sanders and campaigned for him aggressively.

That didn’t stop Biden from winning a plurality of climate voters across Super Tuesday states, according to a Washington Post compilation of exit polls.

Biden took 33% of those voters compared to 28% for Sanders, 16% for Sen. Elizabeth Warren and 11% for billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

The climate movement may be finally taking shape politically. More people are paying attention, and the upcoming two-person contest will generate still more interest in climate. That may well redound to Bernie’s credit, though Biden will surely highlight the unfeasibility of his plans.

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Emergency without Urgency

Trump’s Coronavirus Press Conference Wasn’t Exactly Reassuring

Climate risk and response: Physical hazards and socioeconomic impacts

A Very Hot Year

If you watched El Cheeto’s incoherent news conference on coronavirus, you saw someone attempting to announce an emergency and minimize it, while continually congratulating himself on the good job he’s doing. It was a disgusting performance, totally unreassuring and self-serving. If you’re telling people everything is fine, there is no urgency. The stock market reaction shows us something different.

It was later reported that Dr. Anthony Fauci, “the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was told to ‘stand down’ and not appear on five Sunday morning talk shows to discuss the coronavirus.” Presumably, he would only scare people.

Climate activist Bill McKibben recently wrote: “It is far too late to stop global warming, but these next ten years seem as if they may be our last chance to limit the chaos.” That’s the urgency. Government and university labs have been predicting the climate crisis for thirty years and more. And what’s been done about it? McKibben tells us how the emergency was predicted, with the World Health Organization calling it “potentially the greatest health threat of the 21st century.” We are not even close to accepting that; coronavirus is so much more immediate.

McKinsey, the management consulting firm, has been taking it on the chin recently, not without cause. They recently published a study about climate impacts, showing their severity. It was an impressive summary, though their lame conclusion was not:

Societies have been adapting to the changing climate, but the pace and scale of adaptation will likely need to increase significantly. Key adaptation measures include protecting people and assets, building resilience, reducing exposure, and ensuring that appropriate financing and insurance are in place. Implementing adaptation measures could be challenging for many reasons. The economics of adaptation could worsen in some geographies over time, for example, those exposed to rising sea levels. Adaptation may face technical or other limits. In other instances, there could be hard trade-offs that need to be assessed, including who and what to protect and who and what to relocate.

A lot of conditional words here (“likely,” “could,” “may”) but no urgency, and unfortunately that’s been typical of much of the writing about climate. Too little of what we write has any immediate urgency. A Guardian writer in the U.S. south put it this way:

In eastern North Carolina, where I grew up and write from, climate change was never a polite topic of conversation. I was told the same in a coffee shop in Mississippi, and by a minister in Georgia. Too many southerners are still dancing around the reality of climate change, and the cost of avoiding the conversation is going to be steep.

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Politics, Confusion and Doubt

Planners talk about resilience in the face of climate change. We need to start using a different R word.

 CLIMATE SCORECARD: 10 critical climate actions that the Democratic nominee for President can take immediately upon entering the White House.

Jeff Bezos just made one of the largest charitable gifts ever

Our extreme level of uncertainty and anxiety today begins with Trump and ends with climate change. We don’t seem capable of dealing with either.

The president is getting away with murder: the pardoning of crooks, the sick cronyism, megalomaniacal acts of revenge, and daily denials of reality reached new heights this week. There seems to be no way to stop him, and the opposition party is in disarray. Mike Bloomberg, as we saw Wednesday night, will be no savior.

Climate change efforts are also in disarray. The Democratic debate saw almost no consideration of what the candidates were calling “an existential problem.” They attacked each other, inflated their accomplishments, blathered on again about healthcare, and so there was no time for talk about the existential issue of our time.

Aside from a few studies there has been a total failure to plan for or address what’s certain to come from climate change.

Around the world, instead of some 50 million people being forced to move to higher ground over the next 30 years, the oceans will likely rise higher than predicted, with a coastal diaspora at least three times larger; by 2100, the number of climate refugees could surpass 300 million. Indeed, sea-level rise looks likely to be measured in yards and meters, not inches or feet.

The world is more unsettled in ignorance and anxiety than at any time I can remember in my 85 years. We’re living in a world where bots on Twitter control opinions, creating more disinformation and anxiety. A recent study finds that

On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from [climate denialist] bots. This proportion was higher in certain topics—bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about “fake science” and 28% of all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon.

Is there any good news? Well, Jeff Bezos the world’s richest man, announced he was giving $10 billion for a climate initiative to “fund scientists, activists, NGOs—any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world.” Maybe this will quiet the ongoing efforts at Amazon to make the company more climate conscious? Probably not.

Are the billionaires like Bloomberg and Bezos finally stepping up to the plate? We don’t yet know how Bezos’s gift will be structured, what it will cover. The devil will be in the details. We do know that the Democratic candidates are all over the map on climate—from Bernie’s pie in the sky ideas to Bloomberg’s and Klobuchar’s proposals which scored at the bottom (1 out of 10 criteria) of a recent evaluation.

When will they ever get a debate format that puts them on the hot seat? There is no accountability in the way we debate climate issues, just as there is no accountability with Trump.

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Threat Assessment

Weather: A novel

Global Climate in 2015-2019: Climate change accelerates

Every Democrat should run on Trump’s disastrous budget proposal

What most keeps you up at night? Thinking about Trump or climate change? Which is the worst threat? Or maybe it’s getting the kids off to school tomorrow?

The answer for many would be Trump, who thrusts himself constantly before us, one high crime and misdemeanor after another, every day a new offense to law and the polity. Climate change recedes to the background because our field of view is so narrow. And yet the daily impacts of both are sometimes comparable, I think.

Jenny Offill’s novel Weather plays with both threats by putting them in the context of a Brooklyn librarian’s daily life concerns and patterns. Lizzie’s words, full of insight and humor, carry the freight of Trumpism and climate change that are behind her daily attempts to succor people and keep a normal life going. She wonders whether to buy a gun. The book plays with the metaphor of weather and how we are all connected.

The impacts of climate short-term are fires, floods, famine and storms—all mostly determined by changes in weather. Weather is our barometer. Long-term, the changes predicted are more frightening and less predictable: sea level rise, heat, populations on the move, illnesses increasing, vast ecological changes. But it seems less and less possible to diminish these to the background, as Lizzie’s life demonstrates.

At one point she interrupts her thoughts with:

People Also Ask
What will disappear from stores first?
Why do humans need myths?
Do we live in the Anthropocene?
What is the cultural trance?
Is it wrong to eat meat?
What is surveillance capitalism?
How can we save the bees?
What is the internet of things?
When will humans go extinct?

Trump is small potatoes compared to this. Or is he? Each daily dose of scandal displaces the last. As in climate change, the effects pile up and accelerate. Look at Trump’s proposed 2021 budget! The push for political change finally becomes inescapable. The push to deal with climate change will become so.

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The Fire Next Time

Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide

Don’t Let Australia’s Crisis Go to Waste

Public anger builds against Morrison

I borrow the title of James Baldwin’s 1963 best-seller that articulated his personal agonies in the civil rights movement. In our time what could galvanize people to stop the burning? I wish I had the skill and talent of Baldwin. A major part of Australia has already gone up in flames. The Amazon rainforest has just about reached a fiery tipping point. Will Africa be next?

Scott Morrison, Australia’s coal-fired prime minister, is leading his country to suicide, opines Richard Flanagan, a novelist whose recent piece caught the terror and the drama of what’s happening there.

The images of the fires are a cross between “Mad Max” and “On the Beach”: thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze, crowded tableaux of people and animals almost medieval in their strange muteness—half-Bruegel, half-Bosch, ringed by fire, survivors’ faces hidden behind masks and swimming goggles. Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno. Flames leaping 200 feet into the air. Fire tornadoes. Terrified children at the helm of dinghies, piloting away from the flames, refugees in their own country.

Bloomberg’s Daniel Moss puts the crisis in terms of statistics and money. But the problem is much more personal than that. And it’s the blindness of leadership that permitted the crisis come to its present head.

An area larger than Ireland has been destroyed, at least 25 people are dead, 2,000 homes have been razed, and 25 million acres of forest and bush have been wiped out. As many as a billion animals may have been incinerated since September, some species almost to extinction. Tourism, farming and consumer confidence have taken a hit. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been lambasted for too little action, too late. His government announced a $1.4 billion recovery fund over the weekend; with more than 100 fires still tearing through the country’s most populous state, more is bound to be needed.

Morrison’s government still maintains there is “no direct link between climate change and the country’s devastating bushfires, despite public anger, the anguish of victims and warnings from scientists.” This is more than ignorance; it’s murder. Morrison is captive to the coal industry and takes his stance from other climate criminals like Trump and Bolsonaro.

Finally, the activists are on the march in nine Australian cities. Led by student organizations, “tens of thousands” are expected to march this weekend. Melbourne will host the biggest protest. Yet it will take more than activism to displace Morrison & Company. It will take political power.

In 1963 Baldwin asked, “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” Now, it seems, some Australians have no choice except to flee to the sea shore, as in a bad apocalyptic movie. The leadership of climate deniers may not yet go up in smoke but we can hope for their eviction, and soon.

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The Politics May Kill Us

Interstate 66, west of Washington, DC

The Challenging Politics of Climate Change

 How the Climate Crisis Is Killing Us, in 9 Alarming Charts

 Americans Increasingly See Climate Change as a Crisis, Poll Shows

 Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution leads off her piece on climate and politics with a great quote from Colin Jost of Saturday Night Live (10/13/18):

We don’t really worry about climate change because it’s too overwhelming and we’re already in too deep. It’s like if you owe your bookie $1,000, you’re like, ‘OK, I’ve got to pay this dude back.’ But if you owe your bookie $1 million dollars, you’re like, ‘I guess I’m just going to die.’

So there are many reasons Americans (in particular) resist climate change, and Kamarck goes on to document these in a lengthy but very worthwhile essay you should read. In the most recent decade of Gallup’s polling, for instance, we learn that “almost half of the public believes that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated.” A series of natural disasters and dramatic weather events leaves the public mostly unmoved. Jobs, the economy and healthcare top their list of concerns.

Then there’s partisanship. And the complex nature of the climate crisis. Plus jurisdiction and accountability: who’s responsible? by whose laws? And the lack of trust in government—at a new low since the administration of G.W. Bush. Finally, our elites demonstrate a lack of imagination, such as described by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement (reviewed here): we don’t talk about climate in fiction or television or film. Is it too threatening?

Matt Simon in Wired tells us how climate is slowly killing us, referencing a massive study in The Lancet, a medical journal, on climate change and human health. Says one of the authors about living in a world 4 degrees warmer than in preindustrial times:

We have no idea what that looks like from a public health perspective, but we know it is catastrophic. . . . We know that it has the potential to undermine the last 50 years of gains in public health and overwhelm the health systems we rely on.

Simon’s series of graphics should properly scare you. Here’s one:

Scorched by Heat Waves

On he goes, with measures of wildfires roaring, diseases blooming, air conditioning heating up cities, crops declining, etc.

In the face of all this a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll tells us that “A growing number of Americans describe climate change as a crisis, and two-thirds say President Trump is doing too little to tackle the problem.”

About 8 in 10 “say that human activity is fueling climate change, and roughly half believe action is urgently needed within the next decade if humanity is to avert its worst effects. Nearly 4 in 10 now say climate change is a “crisis,” up from less than a quarter five years ago.”

That story was posted September 13 of this year, Kamarck’s on September 23. So who’s right? With a well-earned mistrust of polls, I vote for Kamarck because she uses a wider time spread.

We have a lot of work to do.

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Impeachment: More Time, More Evidence

The Impeachment Question

Climate Change in the American Mind: April 2019

Trump’s failure to fight climate change is a crime against humanity

Maybe if the Democrats can pull off their wonderful stunt of withholding the Impeachment Articles until McConnell gives them a “fair deal” in the Senate trial, that will give them time to explore some of the more outrageous things the Articles didn’t cover. That’s a long way of saying they need more evidence. I doubt that people will be convinced solely by what was presented to the House. If the Dems can hold out for more time and more investigations, the stain of impeachment will only spread.

Trump’s waffling and bluster about climate change could be one of those areas to explore. Some 69 percent of Americans believe that the climate crisis is very real and/or very threatening. One other ripe area is the Mueller report, which has been all but forgotten in the proceedings. It doesn’t pertain strictly to climate change but reveals an abundance of illegalities and obstructions. Linda Greenhouse of The Times:

The 182-page volume 2, which analyzes thirty-eight separate incidents as potential obstructions of justice . . .  reads like a cross between Wolf Hall and Richard III, depicting the White House under the shadow of the Russia investigation in a constant state of crisis, as the president’s top aides struggle to both serve their master and save their own skins—not only from his wrath but from the potential legal consequences of carrying out his orders.

My thinking is that people need more time to absorb the depth and extent of Trump’s behavior, which is an essential part of his failure to address climate change.

In August Jeffrey Sachs called this failure “a crime against humanity” and indicted Marco Rubio, Rick Scott and Ted Cruz along with Trump. He cites their total failure to respond to the hurricanes in Houston, Puerto Rico, North Carolina and Florida, in which literally thousands have died. “The first job of government is to protect the public,” and that requires education, legislation, full-scale preparedness and disaster response. Trump and his crew have deliberately ignored all this and made matters worse by eviscerating the EPA and slamming environmental science.

Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic in a reductive piece finds that Trump’s belief in carbonism explains all his actions over climate, including backing out of the Paris Agreement.

Carbonism is a belief that fossil fuels—which send carbon pollution spewing into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change and ocean acidification—have inherent virtue. That they are better, in fact, than other energy sources.

Well, Robinson, who couldn’t have figured that one out? Most of the world lives off carbon in its varied forms. “China burns over half of the world’s coal and will account for 50% of global CO2 emissions by 2030”: thus from Kenneth Richard, a smart climate writer who goes beyond carbonism. Remember that in July Trump delivered a major speech on environment without a mention of climate change.

The point of my declamation here is to urge the Democrats to explore the fiascoes of Trump & Co. on climate and see whether they can establish any more “crimes against humanity.” It will be but one of many he has committed.