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Puerto Rico faces another disaster: The coronavirus pandemic

by Nicki74Lqco Posted on March 20, 2020

Puerto Rico has experienced a whirlwind of public health crises in the last few years. In 2017 Hurricane Maria left roughly 3,000 dead and thousands more displaced, making the island something of a patient zero for a world in which warmer global temperatures produce ever more deadly disasters. Then, this January a series of disastrous earthquakes once again put the U.S. territory’s strained infrastructure to the test. Now the new coronavirus has reached its shores.

Puerto Rican Governor Wanda Vázquez signed an executive order on Sunday to shut down the majority of businesses on the island (supermarkets, pharmacies, gas stations, and banks are exempt) and impose a 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew through March 30. People who violate the lockdown order could face a fine of up to $5,000 or six months in jail. The move comes as Puerto Rico confirmed five COVID-19 cases on the island in the last few days.

“We already have a fragile social fabric, because we’ve had to experience a great number of shocks” in recent years, said Christine Nieves, co-founder and president of the nonprofit Emerge Puerto Rico (and member of the 2018 Grist 50). “Now, we have a situation where we have to remain indoors, but there are negative side effects to that. In particular, older people alone at home could be potentially put in a situation where no one is checking in.”

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More than 20 percent of Puerto Rico’s population of nearly 3.2 million is 65 or older — an age cohort that is particularly at risk for severe and fatal COVID-19 infections. The island’s health infrastructure has not yet fully recovered from the shock of Hurricane Maria, when insufficient power and fresh water compounded patients’ suffering even after they had been admitted to the hospital.

Puerto Rico is also still grappling with the aftermath of the January earthquakes that destroyed three major hospitals and sent thousands of frightened people in the southern part of the island to camp outdoors, making them more vulnerable to the spread of illness — including the novel coronavirus. Nieves told Grist that the government still has not restored feasible housing options for people in the camps and that many of them are still living precariously in makeshift tents out in the open. (Puerto Rico’s Department of Health did not respond to requests for comment.)

“It’s been three years of nonstop shocks,” said Nieves. “People are tired. They are burnt out, and their immune systems are likely low, because they’re not taking care of themselves.”

The pandemic is also decimating tourism, a major component of the island’s economy. On Tuesday, Governor Vázquez demanded that the Federal Aviation Administration suspend all domestic and international flights to the island for 14 days and let her shut down airports.

It’s a new test for the island’s government. The Vázquez administration has been criticized for not acting swiftly enough as soon as the virus escalated in the mainland U.S. and (perhaps unfairly) for not more quickly obtaining test results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, after a few suspected cases initially emerged. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico’s health secretary, Rafael Rodríguez-Mercado, resigned last Friday.

“Frankly, the government has been so negligent in responding,” said Nieves. “Our biggest bet right now, the one thing that we’re holding on to, is that the virus doesn’t spread because of our island’s temperatures.”

But Nieves noted that, unlike the common flu — which peaks during the winter season and then dies down as temperatures warm — it’s not yet known how the novel coronavirus fares in warmer temperatures.

Regardless of the circumstances, Nieves sees the nascent outbreak as an opportunity to step back and reflect on what Puerto Ricans have learned from previous disasters.

“The coronavirus does present a stop in rebuilding,” she said. “But it also presents a window of reflection, because not necessarily being fast and efficient can get us to where we want to go — so it’s a great opportunity and a great moment to consider what kind of world we are rebuilding for.”

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Puerto Rico faces another disaster: The coronavirus pandemic

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Democrats want travel industry to reduce emissions in exchange for coronavirus bailout

by Laurind2964 Posted on March 19, 2020

As you read this, U.S. lawmakers are rushing to push a third coronavirus aid package through Congress to help alleviate the economic burden the pandemic has placed on people and industry. (The first, passed two weeks ago, was an $8 billion package that boosted funding for COVID-19 testing, and the second round of funding, signed Wednesday night, was aimed at providing paid family and sick leave to affected Americans.) Democrats want the new package to include measures that will reduce emissions from major polluters.

In a letter to the majority and minority leadership of both houses in Congress on Wednesday, eight Democratic senators, including former presidential candidate Cory Booker of New Jersey, asked Congress to include stricter environmental requirements for industries asking for bailouts from the economic fallout of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Specifically, the senators highlighted the aviation and cruise industries, which are major contributors of greenhouse gas emissions — the former account for 2.5 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions globally, and the latter burns heavy fuel oil (“one of the dirtiest fuels,” the letter points out). The aviation industry has asked Congress for $50 billion in aid, more than three times the amount it received in the aftermath of 9/11.

“If we give the airline and cruise industries assistance without requiring them to be better environmental stewards,” the senators wrote, “we would miss a major opportunity to combat climate change and ocean dumping.” In addition to Booker, the letter’s signatories were Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Tina Smith of Minnesota, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.

On Twitter, Whitehouse made his point more forcefully.

His colleague Markey, co-author of the Green New Deal resolution introduced in the Senate and House last February, agreed.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely these Democrats have the leverage to compel the Republican-controlled Senate and President Trump to enforce stricter environmental regulations in exchange for coronavirus aid. And it’s not clear that their colleagues in the Senate and House have the bandwidth to tackle both coronavirus and climate change at the moment under such a tight deadline. But with airlines and cruise companies desperate for a bailout, there may never be a better time to make them change their polluting ways.

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Democrats want travel industry to reduce emissions in exchange for coronavirus bailout

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The Dream Universe – David Lindley

by Myrna Posted on March 19, 2020

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The Dream Universe

How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way

David Lindley

Genre: History

Price: $13.99

Publish Date: March 17, 2020

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


A vivid and captivating narrative about how modern science broke free of ancient philosophy, and how theoretical physics is returning to its unscientific roots In the early seventeenth century Galileo broke free from the hold of ancient Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. He drastically changed the framework through which we view the natural world when he asserted that we should base our theory of reality on what we can observe rather than pure thought. In the process, he invented what we would come to call science. This set the stage for all the breakthroughs that followed–from Kepler to Newton to Einstein. But in the early twentieth century when quantum physics, with its deeply complex mathematics, entered into the picture, something began to change. Many physicists began looking to the equations first and physical reality second. As we investigate realms further and further from what we can see and what we can test, we must look to elegant, aesthetically pleasing equations to develop our conception of what reality is. As a result, much of theoretical physics today is something more akin to the philosophy of Plato than the science to which the physicists are heirs. In The Dream Universe , Lindley asks what is science when it becomes completely untethered from measurable phenomena?

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The Dream Universe – David Lindley

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Lessons from coronavirus and climate change: Don’t be deceived by small numbers

by TaylahOrdonez Posted on March 19, 2020

Comparing the coronavirus pandemic to climate change is a fraught endeavor. Using one crisis to illustrate the dangers of another typically doesn’t work. For the most part, people only have the mental bandwidth for one life-threatening, world-altering crisis at a time. (Even one’s a stretch, if personal experience is any indication.)

But there is at least one major way in which coronavirus is similar to the climate crisis, and it’s worth talking about now, while the world’s collective missteps in containing COVID-19 are fresh in our minds: Small differences in numbers matter a lot.

When the coronavirus first began to spread beyond Wuhan, China, a misinformed bit of conventional wisdom started getting passed around: COVID-19 is just like the flu, and Americans survive flu epidemics on a regular basis. President Trump regurgitated this tidbit as recently as last week, tweeting, “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” (Trump’s tweet was almost right — the flu killed 34,000 Americans last year.)

The flu has a death rate of around 0.1 percent in the U.S. COVID-19 has put an estimated death rate between 1 and 3.4 percent, although we won’t know the true death rate until the outbreak is over. The difference between 0.1 percent and 2 percent may not sound like much. Indeed, some people on social media have opined that a 97 or 98 percent survival rate sounds pretty good to them.

But a report published Monday by an epidemic modeling group said that, in the absence of federal and individual measures, COVID-19 could kill 2.2 million people in the U.S. Some of that is because COVID-19 is more contagious than the flu — but it’s also because there’s a major difference between a 0.1 percent death rate and a 2 or 3 percent death rate.

And there’s a major difference between 1.5 degrees C and 2 degrees C. Experts agree that, in order to avert mass casualties, serious upticks in extreme weather events, and unending heatwaves, global warming needs to stay below 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) over preindustrial levels. We’re currently on track to surpass 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) of warming. Some studies show the world is on course for more than 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F) of warming. So what’s in a half-degree? A whole lot, even if it doesn’t seem like it.

At 1.5 degrees C of warming, heat waves will affect 14 percent of the world’s population once every five years. At 2 degrees C, 37 percent of the world will be exposed to heat waves — 420 million more people. At 2 degrees C of warming, 61 million people more will be exposed to severe drought than if we kept warming to 1.5 degrees C. That half a degree could expose between 180 and 270 million more people to be exposed to water scarcity. At 1.5 degrees C of warming, coral reefs will decline 70 to 90 percent. At 2 degrees C, they become nonexistent. These are just a fraction of the findings in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2019 special report on global warming, but you get the idea. Small changes in climate equal huge impacts.

Maybe if people started thinking about 1.5 degrees C like it’s the flu, and 2 degrees C like it’s a life-altering pandemic, politicians will be compelled to take action. Right now, we’re moving too slowly to avoid a worst-case scenario.

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Lessons from coronavirus and climate change: Don’t be deceived by small numbers

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One more way the world wasn’t prepared for coronavirus: Air pollution

by DegaLockyer Posted on March 19, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic is changing everything — including the quality of the air we breathe.

In three coronavirus hotspots, satellite imagery revealed a dramatic decline in air pollution in recent weeks as China, Italy, and Iran were brought to a standstill. One Stanford scientist estimated that China’s coronavirus lockdown could have saved 77,000 lives by curbing emissions from factories and vehicles — nearly 10 times the number of deaths worldwide from the virus so far.

But the blue skies are unlikely to last. Just as the temporary dip in global carbon dioxide emissions could be reversed when companies eventually increase production to make up for lost time, air pollution could rebound with a vengeance when factories and traffic spring back to life. On Tuesday, the Chinese government said it plans to relax environmental standards so factories can speed up production.

Air pollution and the virus have a close relationship. Breathing unclean air is linked to high blood pressure, diabetes, and respiratory disease, conditions that doctors are starting to associate with higher death rates for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Physicians say that people with these chronic conditions may be less able to fight off infections and more likely to die of the disease.

“The air may be clearing in Italy, but the damage has already been done to human health and people’s ability to fight off infection,” said Sascha Marschang, acting secretary general of the European Public Health Alliance, in a statement.

Evidence suggests that bad air quality may have increased the death toll of a previous coronavirus outbreak, the SARS pandemic of 2003. One study of SARS patients found that people living in regions with a moderate amount of air pollution were 84 percent more likely to die than those in regions with cleaner air.

And now, health officials are warning that people who live in polluted places anywhere may be at greater risk again. “I can’t help but think of the many communities where residents breathe polluted air that can lead to chronic respiratory problems, cancer, and disease, which could make them more vulnerable to the worst impacts of COVID-19,” wrote Gina McCarthy, the president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a post this week about how the organization is responding to the coronavirus.

Clearing the air could help vulnerable people fight off the threat of deadly disease — during this pandemic as well as any future ones — and save millions of lives in the meantime. Governments already have a pretty good idea of how to clean up air pollution, and it doesn’t involve a global pandemic.

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One more way the world wasn’t prepared for coronavirus: Air pollution

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Here are the top ways the world could take on climate change in 2020

by BernieSeidel Posted on March 19, 2020

The climate think tank Project Drawdown first took on the question “what’s really the best way to stop climate change” in 2017 — and came up with a hundred answers, from cutting food waste to implementing alternative refrigerants. Now, Project Drawdown has updated its original list to incorporate the latest findings.

The name references the day when humanity switches from emitting carbon dioxide to storing it and begins drawing down the carbon we’ve dumped into the atmosphere. The team compiled its recommendations, which were first published as a bestselling coffee table book, based on rigorous scientific analysis of the costs and carbon savings of every solution available at scale today.

Jonathan Foley, an environmental scientist and the executive director of Project Drawdown, chatted with us about the changes — and explained why we don’t need technological breakthroughs or political miracles to bring the world to net-zero carbon emissions. Our interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q. To start off, can you tell me a little bit about what stayed the same? 

A. The top-line message remains the same essentially, which is that with solutions that exist now — not ones that are in the lab, not ones that are just science fiction or wishful thinking — but with solutions that actually exist today, we can stabilize our climate at 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees C. It wouldn’t be easy. It requires a lot of political will, a lot of leadership, and a lot of mobilization. But it’s all stuff that exists right now. That’s pretty amazing.

The other thing that stayed the same was the message that we have to do a lot of different things to get there. There are no silver bullets when it comes to climate change. We may have silver buckshot, but that’s about it.

Q. And what have been the most substantial changes to the recommendations from the original Project Drawdown?

A. The numbers are actually pretty different, especially on the cost. Things got cheaper and with better returns on investments compared to the original analysis. And a lot of that is because things have gotten cheaper in renewables in the last few years. So I think we’re seeing a stronger economic case for climate solutions every year.

A lot of people remember the rankings of solutions from the first book, and we did provide new rankings in this one. We presented two sets of rankings — one for a scenario that gets us 2 degrees C and one for a scenario that could get us to 1.5 degrees C.

I think the message is that we still have to do all of these solutions. It doesn’t matter to me much that a solution was ranked No. 3 and that it’s now No. 6. The same kinds of things still appear near the top: The food system, like food waste and diets, is up there are pretty high, and things like refrigerants, which people kind of forget about — these potent greenhouse gases called hydrofluorocarbons. And of course, sprinkled throughout all the rankings are items that address the fossil fuel problem from many different angles. Whether it’s energy efficiency or renewable electricity or different ways of transportation, fossil fuels are found everywhere on that list from top to bottom.

Q. Even though the Project Drawdown guide is backed by a lot of rigorous science, it isn’t meant for scientists or policymakers — it’s for regular people. How do you accurately and succinctly explain issues that often have a lot of complex science behind them to the general public?

A. Usually when somebody does a study, the first thing they do is write it up for a scientific journal or a white paper, where it’s written basically in almost incomprehensible language, for maybe a hundred people in the world who could read it. Then later they’ll say, “OK, now we’re going to make the more public version of this.”

We’re flipping the model. People find it inspiring that there are solutions to climate change, and that when you do the math, they seem to work. So we systematically go through all the different solutions, and use the same technique to look at them — we’re comparing an apple to an apple to an apple when we compare our forestry solutions to a nuclear energy solution to a different type of car, and that’s what had never been done before. I think universities are very good at what they do, and we need the real in-depth experts on every single one of those solutions. But we’re not a university. None of us are working on getting tenure.

Q. It seems extremely likely that in November, we’re either going to have either a President Trump, a President Biden, or a President Sanders for the next four years. Which of the Drawdown solutions are you the most hopeful about regardless of the election outcome, and which ones do you think require more political willpower to make happen?

A. We have to remember that this is a 30-year effort we’re talking about. One four-year term can make a big difference, but it’s not game over, regardless of who wins in November. The world will not be fried if Trump gets reelected. It just won’t help much. And the world will not be saved if Bernie wins with the Green New Deal. So I don’t really think it’s wise to clip all our hopes on one election outcome — or all our fears.

There are so many levers of power to pull: at the local level, states, banks, Wall Street, businesses, our own behavior and communities. This is an international problem, from our neighborhoods to the international markets.

What we need now is time. Saying, “That’s who’s going to save us: the U.S. House of Representatives, or the U.S. federal government, or the United Nations,” is how we managed to waste the last three decades. I think we need to start leading elsewhere and hope that Washington and the U.N. will follow.

Q. Coronavirus is something that’s changing a lot of personal behaviors right now. Do you think there’s a potential for a ripple effect after the pandemic crisis is resolved that might shift around things on the list for dealing with the climate crisis?

A. Recessions suck for everybody. No one in the environmental community should be celebrating this virus — this is a tragedy and there’s no other way to say it. But it does, at least in the short run, mean a drop in emissions. And hopefully, there’ll be some lasting lessons from this. Hey, there are other ways to do things besides flying all the time and driving all the time. Working from home and telecommuting might be really viable options now, so let’s learn how to do those really well. That might help reduce some of the emissions long term after this crisis if people stick to those habits a bit more.

People also learn how to be more resilient as a society to these kinds of shocks. Whether it’s a virus next time, or a big storm, or a hurricane, or fires, people are going to be a little bit better on the resiliency side of the equation. If there is any silver lining about this incredibly dark cloud, that might be it.

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Here are the top ways the world could take on climate change in 2020

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Some Assembly Required – Neil Shubin

by Myrna Posted on March 17, 2020

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Some Assembly Required

Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

Neil Shubin

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $13.99

Publish Date: March 17, 2020

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


The author of the best-selling Your Inner Fish gives us a lively and accessible account of the great transformations in the history of life on Earth–a new view of the evolution of human and animal life that explains how the incredible diversity of life on our planet came to be. Over billions of years, ancient fish evolved to walk on land, reptiles transformed into birds that fly, and apelike primates evolved into humans that walk on two legs, talk, and write. For more than a century, paleontologists have traveled the globe to find fossils that show how such changes have happened. We have now arrived at a remarkable moment—prehistoric fossils coupled with new DNA technology have given us the tools to answer some of the basic questions of our existence: How do big changes in evolution happen? Is our presence on Earth the product of mere chance? This new science reveals a multibillion-year evolutionary history filled with twists and turns, trial and error, accident and invention. In Some Assembly Required, Neil Shubin takes readers on a journey of discovery spanning centuries, as explorers and scientists seek to understand the origins of life's immense diversity.

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Some Assembly Required – Neil Shubin

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Spillover – David Quammen

by Myrna Posted on March 17, 2020

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Spillover

Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

David Quammen

Genre: Biology

Price: $8.99

Publish Date: September 9, 2013

Publisher: Delaviere Edition

Seller: Delaviere Edition


“Science writing as detective story at its best.” —Jennifer Ouellette,  Scientific American A  New York Times  Notable Book of the Year, a  Scientific American  Best Book of the Year, and a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ebola, SARS, Hendra, AIDS, and countless other deadly viruses all have one thing in common: the bugs that transmit these diseases all originate in wild animals and pass to humans by a process called spillover. In this gripping account, David Quammen takes the reader along on this astonishing quest to learn how, where from, and why these diseases emerge and asks the terrifying question: What might the next big one be?

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Spillover – David Quammen

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Coronavirus postpones major climate plan in Congress

by JaniceNeustadt Posted on March 16, 2020

The House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, a bipartisan group formed at the direction of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after the 2018 midterm election, has been working on a plan to tackle rising emissions — the committee calls it a “climate action framework” — for the past year. It planned to release the framework at the end of this month. On Monday, committee chair Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat, said the release is being postponed due to COVID-19.

“As Congress focuses on the important mission of protecting Americans from the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have decided today to postpone the release of our climate action plan,” Castor wrote in a press release. “We will continue to work on clean energy solutions and a more resilient America — and look forward to releasing our plan when appropriate.”

The decision to delay the release of the framework, one of the only concerted efforts to mitigate the looming climate crisis in the House right now, is the clearest example yet of how COVID-19 has pushed climate policy to the backburner. Castor said she and her fellow committee members met with more than 1,000 stakeholders (community members, scientists, government officials, etc.) and reviewed more than 700 detailed comments before forming their climate policy recommendations.

One of those comments was authored by Washington Governor Jay Inslee, the former presidential candidate and longtime climate hawk. In a December 16 letter to the committee, obtained by Grist, Inslee called climate change one of the greatest threats Americans have ever faced. “Confronting this challenge and realizing this opportunity must be our nation’s foremost priority,” he wrote. But Inslee has little time for climate action now; he’s busy battling the coronavirus in his state, which is ground zero for COVID-19 in the United States.

Some climate policy wonks have made the case that now is the time for ambitious climate legislation that creates jobs while decarbonizing the economy —a Green New Deal, if you will. But as Congress struggles to pass even a baseline coronavirus relief bill, it’s clear that climate policy has tumbled down lawmakers’ list of priorities for the time being.

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Coronavirus postpones major climate plan in Congress

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Green Preparations for the Coronavirus

by aleisha55f Posted on March 16, 2020

At Earth911, we’ve created a community that helps people find their own shade of green, match their values to their purchase behaviors, adopt environmentally sound practices and drive impactful environmental changes. We are dedicated to increasing recycling rates and helping you choose sustainable options to live a happier, healthier lifestyle; one that protects this wonderful planet we call Earth.

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Green Preparations for the Coronavirus

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