30/03/2020

Professor Sees Climate Mayhem Lurking Behind Covid-19 Outbreak

Bloomberg - 

Professor Jem Bendell says Coronavirus (COVID-19) ‘feels like a dress rehearsal’ for global warming
Photographer: Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images

Jem Bendell is a professor of sustainability leadership and founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria. Professor Bendell is the author of Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, and has written extensively on monetary economics in response to environmental crises.
Jem Bendell doesn’t shy away from doom and gloom.

The lockdowns and social distancing caused by the coronavirus are giving humanity a taste of the disruptions to daily life that will be caused by climate change, he said.

“In modern industrial societies, the fallout from Covid-19 feels like a dress rehearsal for the kind of collapse that climate change threatens,” Bendell said in an interview. “This crisis reveals how fragile our current way of life has become.”

The University of Cumbria social-science professor is well-known among environmentalists for his theory of “deep adaption.”

In a 2018 paper, Bendell said that time was up for gradual measures to combat global warming. Without an abrupt transformation of society, changes in the planet’s climate would bring starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war -- the collapse of civilization -- within a decade.

Now he’s focusing his scalding assessments on the parallels and links he sees between climate change and the pandemic.

As edgy as people may find him, Bendell shares common ground with some of the world’s most sober-minded financial types, like former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney.

Bendell is a former consultant to the United Nations, has presented papers to the European Commission, co-authored reports for the World Economic Forum and advised Britain’s Labour Party.

He said the first effects of climate change are disasters such as the wildfires in Australia and California, African hurricanes, South Asian typhoons and harvest collapses in the Middle East. Because those factors can disrupt wildlife migration, the second effects of climate change are pandemics, he said.

Carry Diseases
While there’s no direct evidence linking global warming with Covid-19, animals are moving to cooler areas, according to Aaron Bernstein of Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. That’s brought humans in closer contact with them and the diseases they carry, he said. Epidemiologists say the novel coronavirus originated in bats.

Bendell is more willing to make the connection between coronavirus and climate change. He says that a warmer habitat may have caused the bats to alter their movements, putting them in contact with humans.

Partly because of that connection, Bendell said governments should commit only to “fair and green” bailouts, and shouldn’t save carbon-intensive industries such as airlines, oil, gas, coal or cement. Instead, they should let the companies approach bankruptcy and nationalize one or two of them to get them aligned with national climate policies.

“Keeping the most polluting industries afloat will increase the likelihood of future pandemics,” Bendell said.

A Fantasy
Returning to business as usual is a “fantasy,” Bendell said. Policy makers and business leaders must recognize that climate change will be even more disruptive than the coronavirus, he said.

Not everyone is on board with Bendell’s view of the future and his paper, “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.”

The paper wasn’t peer reviewed, and Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University, said that Bendell “gets the science wrong on just about everything.”

“Bendell’s paper is a classic example of climate doomism, where the science is exaggerated grossly in favor of a doomist narrative,” Mann said in an email.

Bendell, a professor of sustainability leadership, said it was strange that climate scientists are viewed as authorities on predicting climate’s impact on human societies. He said academics in areas such as sociology, economics and politics are better suited for that.

Some authorities echo Bendell’s views. Carney said financial companies could face a “climate Minsky moment,” or a sudden collapse of values, if they didn’t address climate change. Economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. warned that the most extreme risks of climate change, including the collapse of human civilization, can’t be ruled out. Consulting firm McKinsey & Co. said intensifying climate hazards could put millions of lives at risk, as well as trillions of dollars of economic activity.

Steven Desmyter, co-head of responsible investment at Man Group, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, also agrees with Bendell.

“No one saw Covid-19 coming,” Desmyter said. “With global warming, there’s a catastrophe of equal or greater magnitude on the horizon that we can still do something about.”

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29/03/2020

Why Public Health Experts Support These Youth Suing The Us Government Over Climate Change

DeSmog - Dana Drugmand



Leading experts in the medical community, including two former U.S. Surgeons General, recently filed supporting briefs backing a youth climate lawsuit against the federal government because, like the current coronavirus pandemic, the climate crisis poses “unprecedented threats to public health and safety.”

From increased risk of asthma and respiratory illnesses to the spread of vector-borne disease, the unfolding climate crisis comes with significant health hazards, and children are particularly vulnerable, according to these medical experts.

“The medical community agrees that children in the United States will face compounded health harms over the course of their lives if our current trajectory of [greenhouse gas] emissions continues; ‘[w]ithout significant intervention, this new era will come to define the health of an entire generation,’” public health experts stated in their legal brief.

That brief backs a group of 21 youth plaintiffs seeking judicial intervention to order the U.S. government to devise a plan for rapidly turning away from fossil fuels and drawing down greenhouse gas emissions. The lawsuit Juliana v. United States, first filed in 2015, alleges that the federal government’s actions enabling a fossil fuel-based energy system violate the Constitutional rights of young people.

In January a pair of judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the case due to concerns about a court ordering the government to take large-scale climate action. The plaintiffs filed a petition earlier this month asking the full Ninth Court to review this decision. Experts in law, children’s and human rights, and public health recently filed amicus or supporting briefs urging the court to revive the case and allow it to proceed to trial.

Two of the 10 briefs filed came from public health experts. One, from former Surgeons General Dr. David Satcher and Dr. Richard Carmona, referred to the climate crisis as an “unprecedented public health threat” and said that courts can and should play a role.

In cases like this, where children’s health and very lives are at stake, their injuries can and should be redressed by the courts,” Satcher and Carmona wrote. They explained that they usually “do not involve themselves in judicial matters, but feel compelled to make an exception in this case.” And as they wrote in an op-ed last year, “our views on this issue transcend political affiliation.” It is an issue, they say, that “represents a profound threat to the public’s well-being.”
Another brief, filed on behalf of leading experts in public health and medicine and organizations representing thousands of health professionals, echoed this warning and described some of the health impacts stemming from climate change that disproportionately burden the nation’s youth. Young people in the U.S. born after 1995, the same generation as the Juliana plaintiffs, will suffer more from climate-related health impacts, the health experts say.

“The Juliana Generation faces an increasing burden of heat exposure, extreme weather events, infectious disease, and less nutritious, more expensive food,” they write in their brief. Drought, for example, worsens wildfires, which are linked to poor air quality and respiratory disease.

Air pollution associated with fossil fuel emissions is also a concern. “The production and use of fossil fuels not only emit [greenhouse gas emissions], but also emit other air pollutants that pose hazards to children’s health,” the health experts’ brief explains. Exposure to pollutants like ozone and fine particulate matter could increase children’s risk of developing asthma or other respiratory conditions like bronchitis.

And air pollution likely exacerbates the challenge of fighting respiratory infections like COVID-19. Although there is not yet definitive data on the link between air pollution and COVID-19, scientists studying the SARS coronavirus in 2003 found that infected people living in areas with higher air pollution levels were 84 percent more likely to die than those in less polluted areas. Research shows that communities of color are more likely to live with air pollution.
The climate crisis does not necessarily mean there will be more outbreaks of disease like the current coronavirus, but it does increase the risk of certain infectious diseases spread by ticks and mosquitoes or related to fungal or bacterial exposure in soil and water linked to rising temperatures. Ticks carrying Lyme disease are becoming much more prevalent in a warming world, and a mosquito that transmits disease-causing viruses like dengue and Zika is also increasing its range as temperatures rise.

“Between 2004 and 2016, annual reports of vector-borne diseases in the United States more than doubled and the areas reporting diseases expanded,” the health experts’ brief states. The Infectious Diseases Society of America says it “recognizes climate change and its impacts as a public health emergency in the United States and around the world.”

As the U.S. battles its most serious public health crisis in recent memory, medical professionals are telling us not to lose sight of the urgency of addressing climate change and associated health impacts. “Adverse public health impacts can be significantly mitigated if the federal government acts to reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions,” the health experts write. “The window of opportunity for such action, however, is rapidly closing.”

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(AU) Great Barrier Reef’s Latest Bleaching Confirmed By Marine Park Authority

The Guardian -  |

Severity of damage has increased, with areas spared in previous years experiencing moderate or severe bleaching

In-water and aerial observations by the Great Barrier Reef authority have confirmed a third mass coral bleaching event has occurred with previously unaffected areas in the south suffering damage. Photograph: Suzanne Long/Alamy Stock Photo

The government agency responsible for the Great Barrier Reef has confirmed the natural landmark has suffered a third mass coral bleaching episode in five years, describing the damage as “very widespread”.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said the assessment was based on information from in-water and aerial observations, and built on the best available science and technology to understand current conditions.

Guardian Australia revealed on Wednesday that Prof Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, concluded the reef had experienced severe mass bleaching in the 2019-20 summer based on his findings from a nine-day aerial survey trip.

By Thursday Hughes had assessed more than 800 reefs, covering 344,000 sq km, with another 200 sq km at the southern end to go. He was joined on the trip by an observer from the marine park authority.

In a statement, the authority said the accumulation of heat, particularly through February, had caused bleaching across large areas of the reef. The severity of the damage varied widely, but some southern areas that had been spared during mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 had now experienced moderate or severe bleaching.

It noted there was positive news for the tourism industry: reefs they rely on in the northern and central parts, including near Cairns and Port Douglas, experienced only moderate bleaching, and most corals there should recover. Some pockets of the reef remain unaffected by bleaching.
The authority said it would have a better understanding of the extent and severity of the bleaching once surveys finished on Friday, with analysis to continue over coming weeks.

“Once the aerial surveys are complete we will be able to compare this event to those of 2016 and 2017,” the statement said.

It stressed bleached corals would not necessarily die. “On mildly or moderately bleached reefs there is a good chance most bleached corals will recover and survive this event,” it said. “Equally, on severely bleached reefs, there will be higher mortality of corals.”

Global heating caused by escalating atmospheric greenhouse gases is a major threat to the world’s coral reef ecosystems. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found the published evidence suggested a majority of tropical coral reefs would disappear even if heating was limited to 1.5C and would be “at very high risk” at 1.2C. The globe has warmed about 1C since the industrial revolution.

About half the reef’s shallow water corals bleached and died in 2016 and 2017.

The authority reiterated that climate change was the “single greatest challenge” facing the reef. “While the strongest possible global efforts to reduce emissions are essential, it is critically important we continue to deliver the work already being undertaken to enhance the resilience of the reef,” it said.

Environment groups said the mass bleaching underlined the need to move away from fossil fuels.

Australian Marine Conservation Society campaigner Shani Tager said the news was devastating for the reef, the species it supports and the communities that rely on its health. She said reef industries reeling from the impact of coronavirus needed short- and long-term support.

“When the restrictions from this pandemic lift we will need the beautiful places in this world like our reef more than ever to heal, reconnect with each other and the natural world,” she said. “That means we need a healthy reef and climate policies that will give it a fighting chance.”

Kate Smolski, from Greenpeace Australia, said future economic stimulus packages must include measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Gavan McFadzean, from the Australian Conservation Foundation, said: “With help, the tourism industry can recover after Covid-19, but only if there is a healthy Great Barrier Reef to visit once this crisis is over.”

Specific observations from the aerial surveys include:
  • Inshore and offshore reefs between Tully and Townsville were severely bleached.
  • Offshore areas in the northern section, including highly valued tourism reefs, were more moderately bleached.
  • Inner and mid-shelf reefs between Townsville and Mackay were mostly severely bleached, though some areas used by the tourism industry were only moderately bleached.
  • Bleaching of reefs in the Swains and Pompey groups, at the marine park’s far southeast, was highly variable, with some severe, some moderate and some with minor or no damage.
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8 Documentaries On Climate Change You Need To Watch Now

Vogue - Emily Chan

From fashion documentary The True Cost to Sir David Attenborough’s Netflix series Our Planet — these are the most informative films and TV shows that will up your climate IQ while self-isolating.



Coronavirus is understandably at the forefront of everyone’s minds. But with a crucial UN summit due to take place in Glasgow in October, experts have warned that 2020 is the year the world needs to urgently ramp up its environmental efforts in order to prevent irreversible damage. To up your climate IQ while self-isolating at home, here are eight must-watch documentaries that will help you stay abreast of the action needed to save our planet’s future.

Image credit: Juliette Abitbol and Amélie Pichard
1. An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
For many people, it was Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth that first made them aware of the serious consequences of global warming. The former vice president of the US set out the stark facts, before warning of more flooding, droughts, hurricanes and climate refugees caused by rising temperatures — concerns that certainly ring true nearly 15 years later. Since then, Gore has continued to speak out about the climate crisis, with his follow-up documentary An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (2017) looking at the efforts being made to tackle the issue.

Image credit: The True Cost
2. The True Cost (2015)
The 2015 documentary The True Cost will change the way you think about your clothes and crucially, about how they are made. Following the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse, which killed 1,134 workers, director Andrew Morgan set about investigating both the human and environmental cost of fast fashion in countries such as Bangladesh, India and Cambodia. The filmmaker also speaks to some of fashion’s best-known environmentalists, including Stella McCartney and Livia Firth, who are calling for urgent change within the industry.

Image credit: RiverBlue
3. RiverBlue (2016)
Fashion’s water-pollution problem is highlighted in 2016’s RiverBlue documentary, which shows how the chemicals used in manufacturing our garments are having devastating effects on rivers in China, Bangladesh and India — which can no longer be used safely by the local communities living there. One of the most memorable quotes from the documentary comes from Fashion Revolution co-founder, Orsola de Castro: “There is a joke in China: they say you can predict the ‘it’ colour of the season by looking at the colour of the river.”

Image credit: Getty Images
4. Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014)
While veganism is undoubtedly on the rise, the link between climate change and the cattle industry has not always been so apparent. Leonardo DiCaprio-produced documentary Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret sees filmmaker Kip Andersen questioning why no one was talking about the issue back in 2014. The film has had a major hand in making people aware of the environmental impact of meat, despite controversy over some of the claims made in the documentary.


Image credit: Getty Images
5. Before the Flood (2016)
DiCaprio took his environmental mission a step further in Before the Flood, this time appearing in front of the camera. The actor and UN Messenger of Peace spent two years investigating both the causes and effects of climate change across the world, from deforestation in Indonesia because of the palm oil industry to melting glaciers in Greenland and the Arctic. The film culminates with DiCaprio giving a rallying speech at the UN on Earth Day 2016, telling world leaders: “You are the last best hope of Earth. We ask you to protect it. Or we — and all living things we cherish — are history.”

Image credit: Sophie Lanfear
6. Our Planet (2019)
If you need a reminder of why nature needs us to tackle the climate crisis, look no further than Sir David Attenborough’s Our Planet. The eight-part Netflix series looks at how global temperature rises are affecting wildlife around the world, from flamingo chicks in Africa to lowland gorillas in the Congo rainforest. It comes after Attenborough’s Blue Planet II (2017) shocked viewers by showing how ocean plastic and rising sea temperatures are endangering our marine life.


Image credit: This Changes Everything
7. This Changes Everything (2015)
Following her bestselling 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein made a documentary that asks the question: “What if confronting the climate crisis is the best chance we’ll ever get to build a better world?” After visiting frontline communities affected by climate change — including those on the south coast of India and the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, Canada — Klein highlights the connection between our economic systems and the crisis facing our planet.

Image credit: 2040
8. 2040 (2019)
Australian filmmaker Damon Gameau sets out a positive vision of the future in 2040, imagining what the world could look like in 20 years’ time if we adopted the technology and thinking already available to lower the carbon present in our atmosphere. This includes having nearly 100 per cent renewable energy, electrifying our transportation systems, moving to regenerative farming and carbon sequestering. Gameau calls it “fact-based dreaming” — something we can surely all get on board with.

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28/03/2020

Here’s What The Coronavirus Pandemic Can Teach Us About Tackling Climate Change

The Conversation - 


James Ross/AAP
Dr Natasha Chassagne is a University Associate, University of Tasmania.
Dr Chassagne holds an undergraduate with Honours in International Studies from the University of South Australia and a Master's in International Law & International Relations from the University of New South Wales.
She is currently writing a book titled 'Buen Vivir as an Alternative to Sustainable Development: Lessons from Ecuador', to be published by Routledge later this year. 
Every aspect of our lives has been affected by the coronavirus. The global economy has slowed, people have retreated to their homes and thousands have died or become seriously ill.

At this frightening stage of the crisis, it’s difficult to focus on anything else. But as the International Agency has said, the effects of coronavirus are likely to be temporary but the other global emergency – climate change – is not.

Stopping the spread of coronavirus is paramount, but climate action must also continue. And we can draw many lessons and opportunities from the current health crisis when tackling planetary warming.
Action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions must not be compromised by the coronavirus pandemic. EPA/MAST IRHAM

A ‘degrowing’ economy
S&P Global Ratings this week said measures to contain COVID-19 have pushed the global economy into recession.

Economic analyst Lauri Myllyvirta estimates the pandemic may have reduced global emissions by 200 megatonnes of carbon dioxide to date, as air travel grinds to a halt, factories close down and energy demand falls.

In the first four weeks of the pandemic, coal consumption in China alone fell by 36%, and oil refining capacity reduced by 34%.

In many ways, what we’re seeing now is a rapid and unplanned version of economic “degrowth” – the transition some academics and activists have for decades said is necessary to address climate change, and leave a habitable planet for future generations.

Degrowth is a proposed slowing of growth in sectors that damage the environment, such as fossil fuel industries, until the economy operates within Earth’s limits. It is a voluntary, planned and equitable transition in developed nations which necessarily involves an increased focus on the environment, human well-being, and capabilities (good health, decent work, education, and a safe and healthy environment).

Such a transformation would be profound, and so far no nation has shown the will to implement it. It would require global economies to “decouple” from carbon to prevent climate-related crises. But the current unintended economic slowdown opens the door to such a transition, which would bring myriad benefits to the climate.

The idea of sustainable degrowth is very different to a recession. It involves scaling back environmentally damaging sectors of the economy, and strengthening others.

Reduced air travel is helping drive global emissions down. James Gourley/AAP






A tale of two emergencies
Climate change has been declared a global emergency, yet to date the world has largely failed to address it. In contrast, the global policy response to the coronavirus emergency has been fast and furious.

There are several reasons for this dramatic difference. Climate change is a relatively slow-moving crisis, whereas coronavirus visibly escalates over days, even hours, increasing our perception of the risks involved. One thing that history teaches us about politics and the human condition in times of peril, we often take a “crisis management” approach to dealing with serious threats.

As others have observed, the slow increase in global temperatures means humans can psychologically adjust as the situation worsens, making the problem seem less urgent and meaning people are less willing to accept drastic policy measures.

The human ability to adapt to climate change can make it seem less urgent. CHAMILA KARUNARATHNE/EPA






Key lessons from coronavirus
The global response to the coronavirus crisis shows that governments can take immediate, radical emergency measures, which go beyond purely economic concerns, to protect the well-being of all.

Specifically, there are practical lessons and opportunities we can take away from the coronavirus emergency as we seek to tackle climate change:

Act early: The coronavirus pandemic shows the crucial importance of early action to prevent catastrophic consequences. Governments in Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore acted quickly to implement quarantine and screening measures, and have seen relatively small numbers of infections. Italy, on the other hand, whose government waited too long to act, is now the epicentre of the virus.

Go slow, go local: Coronavirus has forced an immediate scale-down of how we travel and live. People are forging local connections, shopping locally, working from home and limiting consumption to what they need.

Researchers have identified that fears about personal well-being represent a major barrier to political support for the degrowth movement to date. However with social distancing expected to be in place for months, our scaled-down lives may become the “new normal”. Many people may realise that consumption and personal well-being are not inextricably linked.
Stimulus spending should be directed to clean energy. EPA

New economic thinking is needed. A transition to sustainable degrowth can help. We need to shift global attention from GDP as an indicator of well-being, towards other measures that put people and the environment first, such as New Zealand’s well-being budget, Bhutan’s gross national happiness index, or Ecuador’s social philosophy of buen vivir (good living).

Spend on clean energy: The International Energy Agency (IEA) says clean energy should be “at the heart of stimulus plans to counter the coronavirus crisis”.

The IEA has called on governments to launch sustainable stimulus packages focused on clean energy technologies. It says hydrogen and carbon-capture also need major investment to bring them to scale, which could be helped by the current low interest rates.

Governments could also use coronavirus stimulus packages to reskill workers to service the new “green” economy, and address challenges in healthcare, sanitation, aged care, food security and education.

More people are shopping locally during the pandemic. AAP/STEFAN POSTLES


Looking ahead
As climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe said this month:
What really matters is the same for all of us. It’s the health and safety of our friends, our family, our loved ones, our communities, our cities and our country. That’s what the coronavirus threatens, and that’s exactly what climate change does, too.
The coronavirus crisis is devastating, but failing to tackle climate change because of the pandemic only compounds the tragedy. Instead, we must draw on the lessons of coronavirus to address the climate challenge.

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(US) The Analogy Between Covid-19 And Climate Change Is Eerily Precise

Wired - Gilad Edelman

First deny the problem, then say the solution is too expensive? The playbook here is all too familiar.

Photograph: SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP/Getty Images
 
Gilad Edelman is WIRED's politics writer, based in Washington, D.C. Before that, he was executive editor of the Washington Monthly. He has a degree from Yale Law School.
For a brief moment there, it looked as though the coronavirus pandemic might escape the muck of partisanship.

It’s true that President Donald Trump, wary of a recession during a reelection year, had first tried to talk the virus into submission. His counterfactual insistence that the situation was under control did nothing to slow the viral spread through February and early March. It did, however, seem to influence the party faithful, as polls showed Republican voters were taking the pandemic far less seriously than Democrats. In other words, the facts of Covid-19 were already politicized. As I suggested last week, it looked as though this process were unfolding just as it had for climate change—but at 1,000x speed.

Then Trump began to shift his message. Suddenly he seemed to grasp the need for drastic measures (while claiming that he’d never hinted otherwise). The White House started repeating the advice from public health experts: Social distancing would be necessary, maybe through the end of summer. In my last piece, I wondered if this new acceptance of reality might keep an epistemic crisis from developing. Perhaps Americans would coalesce into a common understanding of this public health disaster.

But coronavirus denialism wasn’t in remission; it was only mutating. After a weekend of reported clashes among economic and health officials in the White House, and a spate of skeptical op-eds musing on whether social distancing was really worth its economic cost, Trump laid out a new approach by presidential tweet: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”

By Monday evening, Trump was promising to wrap up social distancing in weeks, not months. “I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” he declared on Tuesday, during a virtual town hall on Fox News. Meanwhile, a rising chorus of Trump followers have been suggesting that some folks will simply have to die to save the economy. “Let's get back to living,” Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick of Texas told Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “Those of us who are 70-plus, we'll take care of ourselves. But don't sacrifice the country.” Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University announced that it’s expecting students and faculty to return from spring break. “Even if we all get sick, I would rather die than kill the country,” said right-wing talk host Glenn Beck. “Because it’s not the economy that’s dying, it’s the country.”

The parallel to climate change, in other words, was even tighter than I realized.

“We went through the stages of climate change denial in the matter of a week,” said Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, who studies how misinformation spreads. Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science who has studied the origins of climate disinformation, spelled out the pattern in an email: “First, one denies the problem, then one denies its severity, and then one says it is too difficult or expensive to fix, and/or that the proposed solution threatens our freedom.”

These strategies, Oreskes explained, can exist side by side, depending on the context. The crudest skeptics, like the snowball-wielding senator from Oklahoma, Jim Inhofe, still deny the phenomenon itself: Humans aren’t warming the planet, look how cold it is outside! More sophisticated players, confronting a tidal wave of scientific data, may accept that the Earth is warming, but they argue that the ill effects are overstated and incommensurate with the costs of aggressive action. As a Wall Street Journal op-ed from 2017 put it, the economic damage one might expect from climate change “does not justify policies that cost more than 0.1 percentage point of growth.”

Now we’re faced with the threat of another global catastrophe arising from the clash of nature and modern human activity. As with climate change, the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic are difficult to predict with confidence. As with climate change, the uncertainty interval encompasses utter cataclysm. As with climate change, any serious effort to mitigate or stave off this disaster will require major economic disruptions. And, as with climate change, such efforts to save the world must be put in place before any of the experts’ doomsday warnings could ever be proved true.

So we see the same pattern of skeptical response from Republican elites. Whether it’s driven by self-interest (corporate profits, a president’s hopes of reelection) or by small government ideology, the approach sends a powerful signal to the party’s voters. If you take this problem seriously, you must be one of them, not us.

“The climate change issue has been transformed into a badge of who people think they are,” said Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist and environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “So if you’re a good card-carrying Republican in the Midwest, then you’d better be against that climate change stuff. And if you're a West Coast liberal, or you live in Boulder, like me, of course you support fighting climate change.” When scientific questions become political issues, he added, people’s beliefs become statements of identity. “To some extent we see that with the coronavirus.”

This partisan bubble effect is only amplified by the situation on the ground, where the distribution of infections has been anything but politically neutral. The worst-hit areas so far are deep blue cities in deep blue states: Seattle and New York, as well as San Francisco. For that reason, Pielke holds out hope that the coronavirus debate might not devolve completely into partisan identity signaling. “I’m not ready to say this fits our conventional motivated reasoning model of Republicans and Democrats that we’ve seen on other issues,” he said. As the disease spreads and hits its peak in different places, the impact of direct experience could overwhelm the power of identity.

There is some early evidence for this: A daily tracking poll by Civiqs shows a pronounced rise in concern among Republican voters over the past two weeks. On the other hand, the increase doesn’t directly track the spread of Covid-19: Republican voters in Wyoming (29 confirmed cases), for example, express far more concern than those in Wisconsin (more than 400 cases).

There’s a lot riding on the outcome of this looming clash between partisanship and reality. At minimum, the politicization of pandemic makes it even harder to evaluate the costs and benefits of the radical policy prescriptions currently on the table. (This is perhaps even harder than it is with climate change: None of the leading proposals to address global warming involves tanking the national economy and launching millions into unemployment.) Debates in good faith will be impossible if positions harden into partisan commitments, and social distancing won’t work very well if Trump keeps urging Americans to get back out there, and half the country listens.

It’s frightening to think what the pattern of climate denial means for the coronavirus crisis. But it might be even more terrifying to think what the pattern of coronavirus denial means for the climate crisis. If a plea to sacrifice human life for the sake of the economy becomes Republican dogma, this does not bode well for our ability to handle the even greater threat of rising temperatures around the world. After all, the worst effects of global warming are still decades away. Our elderly ruling class, and the elderly voters who elect them, may be dead and gone by the time Miami is underwater. But those same old folks are precisely the ones who are most at risk from Covid-19.

“I think what [all this] illustrates is the depth of the problem we’re facing with climate change,” said Pennycook of the University of Regina. “If we can’t get bipartisan agreement on a global pandemic that’s presently spreading, it’s making me less optimistic that we’ll ever see any change on people’s attitudes toward climate change until it’s too late.”

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$2tn US Coronavirus Relief Comes Without Climate Stipulations

The Guardian - 

Airlines get $60bn bailout, but Pelosi’s proposal on halving of emissions by 2050 not included

American Airlines aircraft at Ronald Reagan Washington national airport, Arlington, Virginia. The US aviation industry is to receive $60bn in the government’s coronavirus relief package. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

A $2tn US coronavirus relief package will dole out billions to struggling airlines and offer low-interest loans that fossil fuel companies could compete for – without requiring any action to stem the climate crisis.

The legislation, passed by the Senate late on Wednesday, includes a $60bn bailout for airlines. Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrat-controlled House, had proposed a requirement for airlines to cut their planet-warming emissions in half by 2050, but that provision is not in the bill.

The House is expected to vote on the package on Friday. It also includes nearly $500bn in lending authority that one environment group, Friends of the Earth, called a “corporate slush fund with insufficient guardrails to protect workers, taxpayers and the climate”.

Congressional Republicans have accused Democrats of taking advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to pursue climate policy. The Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said this week that Democrats were “bargaining as usual” with “counter-offers that demanded things like new emission standards or tax credits for solar panels”. Multiple Republican politicians tweeted accusing Democrats of trying to usher in a Green New Deal with massive climate spending during a crisis.

In the end, the stimulus package focused on direct aid to individuals and the worst-hit industries, while setting climate considerations aside.

Annie Petsonk, international counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, said that while the situation for airlines and their workers was dire, the industry should have had to commit to slashing emissions as a condition of the aid.

“The provisions we were focused on simply would hold the airlines to what they already said they’re going to do,” Petsonk said. “People do not want to solve one crisis by making another crisis worse.” The 2008 auto industry bailout, in comparison, led to stricter rules for pollution from vehicle tailpipes.

The bill, the third in a series of stimulus packages, offers virtually nothing to climate advocates, but it is not the last word. Scott Segal, a lawyer and lobbyist with the firm Bracewell LLC, which represents energy industry clients, said a fourth stimulus deal was likely to involve “significant discussions of green objectives”.

“Was this a missed opportunity for climate? I think the answer to that is no,” Segal said. “This stimulus package was primarily about getting money into the hands of individual households and workers and in some service sectors that were particularly hurt.”

Kevin Book, the managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a research firm, said: “Congress is going to be making more deals, and as long as there is a deal to be made, Democrats have made clear what they want.”

Democrats negotiated multiple measures meant to prevent abuse of the $500bn available in lending, including an oversight board, a special inspector general and provisions aimed at limiting Donald Trump’s businesses from benefiting – an issue that has already come under scrutiny.

But climate hawks said those stipulations were not strong enough. “What makes this so frightening is that there are very few binding restrictions on how this money can be used that the secretary of treasury cannot waive,” said Lukas Ross, a senior policy analyst with Friends of the Earth.

“It’s great that [Trump’s son-in-law ] Jared Kushner isn’t going to get a subsidised line of credit. It’s much more worrying in human terms that Chevron, Exxon and every other polluter you can imagine is eligible to be propped up in terms of the stimulus package.”

The bill also does not include specific assistance to the renewable energy industry, although trade associations and lobbyists expect to revisit that possibility as discussions continue about more targeted aid for at-risk sectors of the economy.

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) projects that the US wind industry could lose 35,000 jobs and $35bn in investment. Those losses could lead to lease payment and tax revenue reductions for local and state governments. No tax credit extensions have been granted for the solar and wind industries, meaning they may lose access to credits if they miss deadlines.

“Obviously of primary importance is the public health and keeping the economy moving. We applaud that big effort,” said Tom Kiernan, the chief executive of the AWEA, adding that his group would continue to push for tax provisions to stem industry losses.

The Solar Energy Industries Association said the solar sector could lose half its jobs, meaning “125,000 families who will no longer receive a paycheck”.

Abigail Ross Hopper, its president and CEO, said: “Legislators were really focused on industry-wide protections and assistance, like the unemployment insurance, like the loans for which our companies are eligible, and did not include industry-specific solutions for a couple of particularly hard hit ones.”

In one climate win for Democrats, the bill does not include a discussed $3bn to buy oil to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to lift global oil prices.

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