Quick and drastic action can flatten the curve for coronavirus and free up healthcare resources, lowering death rates. The pandemic is a cataclysmic event so big and disruptive that it can be measured in the planetary metrics of climate change. Tehachapi, California. The missing wild animals, even the tiniest, are the species that kept the Earth beautiful, fruitful, habitable and alive. A recent cartoon in a major German newspaper featured a drawing with a Corona truck kicking a climate change truck off the road: as the whole planet plunged into the Corona crisis, worries about our planet’s climate and, as I would add, the eminent loss of biodiversity have been put on hold. By Julia Jacobo. In America, we started thinking about the beach as a real destination after World War Two, the rise of the automobile, and policies that encouraged development in flood zones. Our health entirely depends on the climate … Like past global epidemics, it’s a warning that nature has had it with the ecocidal proclivities of man. ( 2011 ). The Earth, I think, is still beautiful, fruitful, alive and sacred. The wave of shutdowns and shuttered economies caused by the coronavirus pandemic fueled a momentous decline in … Obviously, the coronavirus will knock down this year’s consumption, he writes, and, “by the time that demand picks up again, all of the growth may be supplied by renewable energy sources.”, Sometimes activists work for a long time without being able to fully gauge the effect of their efforts. He kept the national lands of the American West (some 450 million acres) open to fracking, oil drilling, mining, logging and feeding millions of cattle: all this destruction of public lands was for private enrichment. A physician and great environmentalist in the UK, Rosemary Mason, shares my concern about pesticides. Stay-at-home orders to slow the coronavirus’ spread caused cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. Now we face an incredibly costly (and far more disruptive) effort to keep it from taking down our entire society. For several decades, starting in the 1970s, I observed admirable efforts in the United States to change the dangerous Biblical obsession with human dominance of nature. © 2021 Condé Nast. According to the British charity, Population Matters, some 10,000 years ago, humans made up 1 percent of the animal population. Laws passed that said we had to limit our stupidity and greed to ourselves. I simply don’t like humans harming the environment-natural world because they are harming all plants and animals, including me. Sign up to receive future installments. In this country, we delayed; the President didn’t want “the numbers” growing, and was convinced that it would somehow “go away” by itself, maybe when the weather warmed. A petition they’re circulating asks the A.A.R.P. The pope, 83, was responding to whether he believed coronavirus could spur ecological conversion, the idea for people to lead more environmentally conscious lives through the … The good news is, climate change is not directly at play with the coronavirus. He relied on Wall Street to dissipate the financial meltdown brought to America by Wall Street. The beach as a place of leisure is a constructed concept. The coronavirus outbreak is part of the climate change crisis Therefore, climate action should be central to our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Obama factor hangs all over him. However, behind Obama’s enthusiasm, there lurk a demon to also do the bidding of the polluters and the oligarchs. In that process, he says, the alternative technologies would create 24 million well-paying jobs. This lesson about time has been very hard-earned, and we dare not forget it. This week’s reflection has to do with time, which is a variable we seriously underappreciate. By Julia Jacobo. These industries, funded largely by giant banks, are triggering global pollution and climate change. Last week, when the National Mining Association asked the White House and Congress for bailout money, it noted, “Under pressure from environment groups, financial institutions have divested from carbon-intensive industries, specifically coal, over the last decade, leaving very limited options available to the coal industry.”. Why would he have done such a sellout to the very institutions that nearly destroyed American and world economies? Virus pandemics are merely symptoms of these overarching anthropogenic attacks against the Earth. Sanders understands that, but keeps fighting. Evidence is already emerging that shows, for instance, that air pollution is increasing the odds that people will die from COVID. For example, the Laboratory of Pharmacology and Toxicology in Hamburg, Germany, has been following the playbook of IBT, falsifying animal studies for the approval of pesticides. Meanwhile, we’ll chip away at it—delaying a solution extends suffering along the way, but it doesn’t necessarily make a problem ultimately harder to solve. “There is an expr… About 67 percent of non-wild animals were food for humans. (In fact, we call the diagram that outlines our dilemma the Keeling Curve, and it just keeps rising.) The new edition of the crucial “Banking on Climate Change” report, from Rainforest Action Network and other N.G.O.s, came out last week. The Nature of Crisis. Lancet, 394 ( 10211 ), 1836 – 1878 . How would you describe your work on waterlines? Like most people of the world, Americans fail to see the broader significance of the pandemic. Where did it come from? He left the chemical industry alone, and did nothing about pesticides or agribusiness. We’ve emitted more industrial carbon since 1988 than in all of prior human history, utterly failing to flatten the curve. The pandemic has radically changed the way the Vatican operates, with the Pope celebrating Palm Sunday mass in an empty church and the sites normally packed … He used the Clean Air Act of 1970 and reduced the emissions of cars and coal plants. He cultivated an image of caring for the environment while, at the same time, he feasted with the industry. The hubris of capitalism and state communism did so much damage to the Earth, scientists are describing our era as Anthropocene (human epoch). The corona virus pandemic is no accident. He pretended he wanted to tame climate change, but, in reality, he did the bare minimum. Plants & Animals Jan 12, 2021 The connections between COVID-19 and climate change are real. The need for well remediation could provide ongoing work for precisely the workers who drilled them, allowing them an easier transition to the future. And what’s striking to me is how similar these two examples are. Nevertheless, he is trying to bring Biden closer to his philosophy. media caption Coronavirus and climate change a "double crisis", say activists. In our modern times, however, not only we don’t ostracize these merchants of danger (corporate executives-oligarchs), but we subsidize them to do more of the same. Yes, people are dying and the shutting down of the country has merits. Pope Francis likened the coronavirus pandemic to recent fires and floods as one of “nature’s responses” to the world’s ambivalence to climate change. Subscribers to The Climate Crisis newsletter received this piece in their in-boxes. As a result, we now have to act in far more disruptive ways. The pandemic is a cataclysmic event so big and disruptive that it can be measured in the planetary metrics of climate change. Obama was schizophrenic. Such measures of panic have limited value. Horrible news from Australia, where the Great Barrier Reef is once again undergoing a massive bleaching event, perhaps its most widespread ever, as hot water sloshes across the coral. Firestorms! They are getting ready to bunker down and hide in their homes to avoid infection. He would replace fossil fuels with solar, wind and other renewable zero-carbon alternatives. Environmental pollution gave birth to the cancer plague. Second, I am not an epidemiologist or virologist. This is based on the United States. Like giant dinosaurs, men (primarily of the West) turned science and technology into weapons for the conquest of the world, including land, the seas, and the sky. The Koreans responded immediately, rolling out a widespread testing regimen; it was disruptive, but that nation “flattened the curve” and is now looking at the pandemic in the rear-view mirror. For the past couple of generations, the beachfront town has been the picture of ease and relaxation. A new report finds that “among all the countries and income classes in the study, the top 10% consume roughly 20 times more energy than the bottom 10%.”. An idea beloved of the technorati is that we are actually living not on the earth we seem to inhabit but in a simulation. Too early to call this one a win, but lots of older activists have mounted a campaign to get the A.A.R.P. If heads of state sign an enforceable treaty of ending in the next ten years or so the dependence of their countries on fossil fuels, over fishing, plastics, logging, pesticides, and industrialized farming, there may be a hopeful turnaround in the planet’s spiral towards more potent pandemic diseases, higher temperatures, and catastrophic breakdown. Bryn Nelson Updated Feb. 20, 2020 12:14PM ET / Published Jan. 29, 2020 4:23AM ET It is also smaller than the global recession in the early 1980s that followed the oil crisis of the late 1970s. Ancient Athenians would ostracize and exile such people for ten years. It should come as no surprise that the rich consume far more energy than the poor. The cancer pandemic was killing and continues to kill millions. The corona virus pandemic is no accident. You can see it here and here, and it’s worth staring at, because it’s both stark and subtle. Those who control the production and use of pesticides, and the governments that approve those pesticides, are devoid of ethical norms and harm both people and the environment. These outrageous actions are changing climate and are warming and threatening planet Earth. We’re going to need a big ideological shift in how we value the coast, and people are going need to have the information and resources to make the best decisions for themselves and their families. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Your California Privacy Rights. In a fascinating analysis, Kingsmill Bond, of the Carbon Tracker Initiative, says that we’re probably seeing peak fossil-fuel demand. That gave me a privileged angle from which to test the mission of EPA: that of protecting human health and the environment. Ten years is the time we need to, at least, limit the chaos of climate change. We know that the first cases of the coronavirus in South Korea and the United States emerged on January 20th and January 21st, respectively. And this is truly mind-blowing to me: A 1 microgram per meter-cubed increase in particulate matter raised the chances of death from COVID by 15%. Obama was business as usual. It’s this terrible Republican-like legacy of Obama that threatens Biden. Former vice-president Joe Biden is not as forthright as Sanders on matters of rapid transition from petroleum to solar power. Using the current round of corporate bailouts to advance green energy would make sense. 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