About three months ago I published a V.B. Price column, 'Public Service Idealism and Scrooge Saboteurs of Clean Water and Public Health'. It was published in his wonderful Mercury Messenger newsletter (which has the wonderful Latin motto,'Nullius in verba' - 'Take nobody's word for it'). You can join his mailing list and get these columns delivered by email - click here.
A few days ago he wrote this piece which he published in the Mercury Messenger and he gave me permission to publish it here. so here we go with 'Will We Always Be Fools About Climate Change?'
With great portions of the global economy put on hold because of COVID-19, with millions of us around the world sick or dead and trillions of dollars lost in the stock market, with joblessness soaring and hardworking people living on the margins and facing dire times because their work has been swept away, when will hard-nosed business people, and their political followers of both persuasions, finally get real about trying to lessen the threat of virus-stimulating climate change?
Or do we actually have to come to the brink of destroying ourselves to do something meaningful about the earth’s hothouse atmosphere, the perfect spawning ground for family-decimating illness, and the human tragedy of communities of small businesses laying in ruins? When will we finally stop being fools!?COVID-19 will probably become, someday, just another background virus that unlucky or foolish persons will catch and likely recover from, just like any other virus. But that someday, it seems clear now, may be a long way away for working people — a year, perhaps18 months, or more.
What is to be done? And where is the new leadership that will help take us out of this terrible bind? Where, for instance, are Joe and Bernie? Have they gone fishing? Who’s filling the void? Democratic governors are, like New Mexico’s, New York’s, California’s and Michigan’s. Is a coronavirus sweeping away the stalemate in the Democratic Party and showing the world what troglodytes the Republicans have become? It may well be. And the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act doesn’t hurt. But how will the largest disaster and economic relief package ever signed into law in this country really help? How long will it take to trickle down to real people and how will it be administered by Republicans who hate government and generally consider helping people in trouble to be disincentive to their own self-help? We won’t hear about the real impact for a long time, I think, if ever.
The crisis we’re facing is a four-fold complication.
First, it’s a public health crisis that could sicken and kill, in the long run, a multitude of us, rich and poor. One estimate has potentially 70 percent of us getting infected. And those of us with asthma, smoking-related lung disorders, cancer, diabetes, bad hearts and any number of other ailments, young and old, are truly in a dangerously precarious place. Most human habitats in the world, even those with farseeing leadership, are poorly equipped to deal with such a deluge of death and illness.
Second, it’s an environmental crisis. Climate change unsettles basic living conditions in such a way that all living things have to make adjustments, and successful evolutionary responses in one species can play havoc with the lives of species around it. Viruses, tiny packets of protein, mutate constantly. It’s their evolutionary “genius,” if you will, to adapt — and adapt faster than one could imagine. But as Bill Gates has pointed out, COVID-19 has stimulated the global scientific community to cooperate more than ever to put an end to this pandemic. He told a TED interviewer, “the amount of innovation, the way we can connect up and work together, yes, I’m super positive about that….We will get out of this, and then we will get ready for the next epidemic.” So maybe human adaptability has a chance of keeping up.
Third, it’s an economic crisis. As of last week, 7 million Americans had filed for unemployment insurance since the outbreak ramped up in the U.S. I’m sure it will be many more this week. I think of all my friends in all the shuttered locally-owned cafes and stores around the city now caught in an economic whirlpool gulping them down, some of them forever. What about the suddenly jobless, responsible and diligent people we know and care for at Garcia’s, the Range, Flying Star, Le Chantilly, Los Poblanos, Café Azul and scores of other places of business? What will become of them, if they are forced to stay away even another month, much less two or three, before they can start earning a paycheck again? Who has an economic recovery plan for everyday workers, not just big corporations?
The CARES Act is designed for emergency relief, not long-term recovery. How can we avoid a virtually complete economic shutdown in the future? And how are we going to economically compensate, as a society, all those health care workers who’ve put their lives on the line every day during this crisis? Who is thinking about restarting the economy in a more equitable way than it existed before?
Fourth, it’s a political crisis. The Repulican party, in its last gasp extremist phase, is utterly useless in this situation, comically so, if this weren’t all so deadly serious. The big Democrats, Joe and Bernie, have been like the Invisible Man in the movies. What are they thinking about? What plans for recovery are they cooking up? What more do they think can we do to limit the damage in lives and livelihoods caused by this virus? The big Democrats are virtually useless too, so far. Is this true for the Democratic party as whole? I don’t think so. Most of those with the grace of leadership talent are governing the states, working themselves and their state governments with hyper-serious intent. They’re getting no help whatsoever from Trump Washington, so they probably don’t have time to think very far ahead.
But somebody in government must start thinking about COVID-19, and future pandemics, holistically as a public health crisis with cascading economic and political consequences unthought of by most of us even two months ago. Now is the time for new leaders with new ideas to rise to the surface. We need big thinkers. The Republicans are so small-minded, so cemented in their prejudices, that it’s not hyperbole to say that it seems like only Democrats have a chance to muster up the mental agility that produces the kinds of thinkers we need.
But will the Democratic Party succeed? Can Joe and Bernie make massive leaps in mental acuity and do the kind of adaptive thinking that will get us out of this four-way bind? Lots of us are listening, but we haven’t heard a thing.
The world ahead will not be the same as the world we’ve left behind — except, tragically, for climate change. And if we don’t stop being idiots about global warming soon, we could well see not only the appearance of waves of new pandemics but also of tyrants riding high on their white horses and promising to save the day with the snap of their fingers.
Enjoy!
"It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country." - Will Durant (thanks to Bill Alley)
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