Juan Cole on climate change and pandemics

A perennial problem for political institutions, democratic and otherwise, is that it's very tempting to postpone addressing real long term problems. Showing immediate results is more politically appealing. At least it's very tempting for politicians to see it that way.

Even cataclysmically threatening problems like nuclear weapons proliferation and climate change are difficult to address. Unfortunately for humanity, the laws of physics and chemistry don't put themselves on hold in order to save humanity from ourselves. So more attention to how such natural laws work would be advisable.

Juan Cole writes about Why Burning Fossil Fuels is to Today’s Pandemics as Fleas were to the Black Death (Informed Comment 03/14/2020).

Sheri Fink at the NYT reports that Center for Disease Control scientific modeler Matthew Biggerstaff estimated in a conference call that the coronavirus pandemic could last for many months or as long as a year and could infect half to two-thirds of the population of the United States. Between 200,000 and 1.7 million people could die.

The Trump administration could have avoided this prospect by swinging into action with testing kits, tracking cases, and selective isolation practices months ago. Instead, Trump did nothing, and indeed, tried to deny the severity of the threat. He has still been lying about it this week, worried about how the outbreak will affect the stock market or the economy or, apparently, his image. But his weird insouciance and clear cluelessness had the opposite effect of the one he was going for, tanking the market. It wouldn’t have been necessary to close down so many things and harm the economy so deeply if steps had been taken early on.

There is an exact analogy between Trump’s treatment of Covid-19 and his treatment of the climate emergency. In both cases, he and his surrogates attacked the science and took pride in giving the finger to reality. Trump actually promotes coal and petroleum, the dirtiest fossil fuels, as though he is impatient to see the lower floors of his Trump Tower in Manhattan under water. Likewise, he takes pride in holding infectious rallies and shaking hands. Last weekend, he met with another Covid-19 and Climate Emergency denialist, Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, whose government spokesman was along for the trip and was a carrier of Covid-19. So Trump and the Mar-a-Lago gang were exposed because of being damn fools. [my emphasis]

He discusses the ways in which climate change are likely to make pandemics like COVID-19 more likely and frequent. "If we go on heating the earth so radically and rapidly, pandemics could become a way of life."