It’s not too late for Australia to forestall a dystopian future that alternates between Mad Max and Waterworld

It’s not too late for Australia to forestall a dystopian future that alternates between Mad Max and Waterworld
Catastrophic fires and devastating floods are part of Australia’s harsh new climate reality. The country must do its part to lower carbon emissions
By Michael Mann
Mar 23 2021
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/24/catastrophic-fires-and-devastating-floods-are-part-of-australias-harsh-new-climate-reality

A year ago I lived through the Black Summer. I had arrived in Sydney in mid-December 2019 to collaborate with Australian researchers studying the impacts of climate change on extreme weather events. Instead of studying those events, however, I ended up experiencing them.

Even in the confines of my apartment in Coogee, looking out over the Pacific, I could smell the smoke from the massive bushfires blazing across New South Wales. As I flew to Canberra to participate in a special “bushfires” episode of the ABC show Q+A, I witnessed mountains ablaze with fire. One man I met during my stay lost most of his 180-year-old family farm in the fires that ravaged south-east New South Wales near Milton.

My experiences indelibly coloured the book I was writing on the climate crisis at the time called The New Climate War. 

I returned home to the US last March, my sabbatical stay cut short by coronavirus. But just a year later, with memories of the hellish inferno that was the Black Summer still fresh in my mind, I must painfully watch from afar now as my Aussie mates endure further climate-wrought devastation. This time it’s not fires. It’s floods.

I lectured earlier this week at the Pennsylvania State University, where I’m teaching a course on climate change communication. I started class, as I always do, with a glance at the latest climate-themed stories appearing in my news feed. We watched a video – in stunned disbelief – of a house floating down a river. Let me repeat that. There was a house floating down a river.

Australians are of course familiar with the scene of which I speak. It’s the dwelling that was observed floating down the Manning River in NSW, a few hundred kilometres north of Sydney, as the state suffered massive floods. Emergency responders rescued hundreds of stranded people after record rainfall caused the rivers to swell.

In fact, more than 18,000 people had to be evacuated in Sydney and the mid-north coast, thanks to what amounted to a “100-year flood”. For the unwashed, that’s a deluge so Noachian in character that it shouldn’t, on average, happen more often than once in a hundred years.

But those sorts of statistics are misleading. The statistician in me notes that they make the very tenuous assumption of a “stationary” climate, that is to say, a climate that isn’t changing. But the climate is changing, thanks to human carbon pollution, making episodes that might have once been “100-year events” now more like “10-year events”.

Tragically, many of the same towns that were devastated by the massive bushfires a little more than a year ago found themselves under siege from these historic floods. A climate contrarian would cry foul: “You climate scientists can’t make up your mind. Is climate change making it wetter or drier?” But in fact, that’s a false choice: It’s both.

We know that a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so during the wet season when you get rainfall, you get more of it, in larger downpours and bursts. But hotter temperatures also mean drier soils and worsened droughts in the dry season, conditions conducive to bigger, hotter-burning, faster-spreading bushfires.

In a scientific study I co-authored a year ago, we demonstrated that climate change is causing the wet season to get wetter and the dry season to get drier in many parts of the world. NSW is one of those regions, and we’ve seen the consequence in the whiplash of fires and floods that have plagued the region over the past 14 months.

Australians can’t seem to catch a break. But it’s not too late to forestall a dystopian future that alternates between Mad Max and Waterworld.

Adapting to the harsh new reality Australia now faces will be hard, but it will be possible with sufficient government funding and infrastructure to support climate resilience. If, however, we allow the planet to continue to heat up, many heavily occupied parts of Australia will simply become uninhabitable.

There is still a narrow window of opportunity left. If we can lower carbon emissions by a factor of two over the next decade, we can still prevent a catastrophic 1.5C warming of the planet. If that is to happen, Australia, one of the largest exporters of fossil fuels on the planet, will need to do its part.

Thus far conservative prime minister Scott Morrison and the Coalition government have shown little appetite for making good on these obligations, however. They have instead engaged in the sort of soft denial I describe in The New Climate War that has come to replace the no-longer credible outright denial of the reality of the climate crisis.

Morrison and his allies use soothing but hollow words like “resilience”, “adaptation” and “innovation” to make it sound like they’re actually doing something when they’re not. And they suggest they’re moving towards net zero carbon emissions by mid-century, while meanwhile promoting a “gas-led” economic recovery and shunning policies, such as carbon pricing and subsidies for clean energy, that could actually help decarbonise the economy.

[snip]

The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands

The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands
Rejection of mainstream science and medicine has become a key feature of the political right in the U.S. and increasingly around the world
By Peter J. Hotez
Mar 29 2021
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-antiscience-movement-is-escalating-going-global-and-killing-thousands/

Antiscience has emerged as a dominant and highly lethal force, and one that threatens global security, as much as do terrorism and nuclear proliferation. We must mount a counteroffensive and build new infrastructure to combat antiscience, just as we have for these other more widely recognized and established threats.

Antiscience is the rejection of mainstream scientific views and methods or their replacement with unproven or deliberately misleading theories, often for nefarious and political gains. It targets prominent scientists and attempts to discredit them. The destructive potential of antiscience was fully realized in the U.S.S.R. under Joseph Stalin. Millions of Russian peasants died from starvation and famine during the 1930s and 1940s because Stalin embraced the pseudoscientific views of Trofim Lysenko that promoted catastrophic wheat and other harvest failures. Soviet scientists who did not share Lysenko’s “vernalization” theories lost their positions or, like the plant geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, starved to death in a gulag.

Now antiscience is causing mass deaths once again in this COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning in the spring of 2020, the Trump White House launched a coordinated disinformation campaign that dismissed the severity of the epidemic in the United States, attributed COVID deaths to other causes, claimed hospital admissions were due to a catch-up in elective surgeries, and asserted that ultimately that the epidemic would spontaneously evaporate. It also promoted hydroxychloroquine as a spectacular cure, while downplaying the importance of masks. Other authoritarian or populist regimes in Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Philippines and Tanzania adopted some or all of these elements.   

As both a vaccine scientist and a parent of an adult daughter with autism and intellectual disabilities, I have years of experience going up against the antivaccine lobby, which claims vaccines cause autism or other chronic conditions. This prepared me to quickly recognize the outrageous claims made by members of the Trump White House staff, and to connect the dots to label them as antiscience disinformation. Despite my best efforts to sound the alarm and call it out, the antiscience disinformation created mass havoc in the red states. During the summer of 2020, COVID-19 accelerated in states of the South as governors prematurely lifted restrictions to create a second and unnecessary wave of COVID-19 cases and deaths. Then following a large motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.Dak., a third surge unfolded in the fall in the Upper Midwest.  A hallmark of both waves were thousands of individuals who tied their identity and political allegiance on the right to defying masks and social distancing. A nadir was a highly publicized ICU nurse who wept as she recounted the dying words of one of her patients who insisted COVID-19 was a hoax.

Now, a new test of defiance and simultaneous allegiance to the Republican Party has emerged in the form of resisting COVID-19 vaccines. At least three surveys from the Kaiser Family Foundation, our study published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, and the PBS News Hour/NPR/Marist poll each point to Republicans or white Republicans as a top vaccine-resistant group in America. At least one in four Republican House members will refuse COVID-19 vaccines. Once again, we should anticipate that many of these individuals could lose their lives from COVID-19 in the coming months.

Historically, antiscience was not a major element of the Republican Party. The National Academy of Sciences was founded in the Lincoln administration; NASA in the Eisenhower administration, and PEPFAR (U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), PMI (President’s Malaria Initiative) and the NTDs (neglected tropical diseases) program were launched in the George W. Bush Administration. I was a professor and chair of microbiology at George Washington University, based in Washington, D.C., during the 2000s and worked closely with members of the Bush White House to shape these programs.

I trace the adoption of antiscience as a major platform of the GOP to the year 2015 when the antivaccine movement pivoted to political extremism on the right. It first began in Southern California when a measles epidemic erupted following widespread vaccine exemptions. The California legislature shut down these exemptions to protect the public health, but this ignited a “health freedom” rallying cry. Health freedom then gained strength and accelerated in Texas where it formed a political action committee linked to the Tea Party. Protests against vaccines became a major platform of the Tea Party; this then generalized in 2020 to defy masks and social distancing. Further accelerating these trends were right wing think tanks such as the American Institute of Economic Researchthat sponsored the Great Barrington Declaration, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the home of physician Scott Atlas, who became a senior advisor to the Trump White House coronavirus task force.

The full antiscience agenda of the Republican Party has now gone beyond our national borders. In the summer of 2020, the language of the antiscience political right in America was front and center at antimask and antivaccine rallies in Berlin, London and Paris. In the Berlin rally, news outlets reported ties to QAnon and extremist groups. Adding to this toxic mix are emerging reports from U.S. and British intelligence that the Putin-led Russian government is working to destabilize democracies through elaborate programs of COVID-19 antivaccine and antiscience disinformation. Public refusal of COVID-19 vaccines now extends to India, Brazil, South Africa and many low- and middle-income countries.

We are approaching three million deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is increasingly apparent that the SARS CoV2 alone is not responsible. Facilitating the spread of COVID-19 is an expanded and globalizing antiscience movement that began modestly under a health freedom banner adopted by the Republican Tea Party in Texas. Thousands of deaths have so far resulted from antiscience, and this may only be the beginning as we are now seeing the impact on vaccine refusal across the U.S., Europe and the low- and middle-income countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

[snip]

What Can We Learn from a Big Boat Stuck in a Canal?

What Can We Learn from a Big Boat Stuck in a Canal?
Financiers thinned out our supply chains. That was a risky bet.
By Matt Stoller
Mar 28 2021
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/what-we-can-learn-from-a-big-boat

Hi,

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly and finance. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on…

Today I’ll be writing about the big boat stuck in the Suez Canal. This situation is a very simple and dumb disruption to global trade, and it is precisely the simplicity and stupidity at work that lets us peak beneath the glossy sheen of trade happy talk that has fooled us for so long.

First, some house-keeping. A few years ago I wrote a piece in the American Conservative with national security expert Lucas Kunce on private equity and monopolies in the military defense base. Kunce is now running for Senate on an anti-monopoly platform. I don’t tend to mention political candidates in this newsletter, but I’ll put a caveat in there for people who have a bylined article with me about monopoly power. Also, this week I was on the podcast Useful Idiots with Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper to talk about why changing the business model behind big tech is better than censorship. 

Finally, my organization is doing an event on health care monopolies this coming Tuesday at 2pm ET. If you are interested, you can RSVP here.

And now…

The Empire State Building Falls into the Suez Canal

In this newsletter, I do a lot of explaining about complicated problems caused by big dumb corporate institutions. I don’t have to do that this time, because the story of the mess in the Suez is so simple. “After years of bitcoin and reddit short selling and credit default swaps and a million other things I don’t understand,” one random person put in a tweet that went viral, “it’s so refreshing to hear that global commerce is in peril because a big boat got stuck in a canal.” 

That’s basically the story right there, it’s a big boat and it got stuck in a canal. The ship blocking the Suez, called the Ever Given, weights 220,000 tons, and is as long as the Empire State Building is high. Despite the hilarious nature of the problem, the disruption to world trade is large and serious, costing tens of billions of dollars. And if the ship can’t be dislodged soon, some consumers will once again experience shortages of basic staples like toilet paper. 

That said, the reason this disruption to global commerce seems so dumb is because it is. It starts with the ship size itself. Over the last few decades, ships have gotten really really big, four times the size of what they were 25 years ago, what the FT calls “too big to sail.’ The argument behind making such massive boats was efficiency, since you can carry more at a lower cost. The downside of such mega-ships should have been obvious. Ships like this, which are in effect floating islands, are really hard to steer in tight spaces like ports and canals, and if they get stuck, they are difficult to unstick. In other words, the super smart wizard financiers who run global trade made ships that don’t fit in the canals they need to fit into. 

The rise of mega-ships is paralleled by the consolidation of the shipping industry itself. In 2000, the ten biggest shipping companies had a 12% market share, by 2019 that share had increased to 82%. This understates the consolidation, because there are alliances among these shippers. The stuck ship is being run by the Taiwanese shipping conglomerate Evergreen, which bought Italian shipping firm Italia Marittima in 1998 and London-based Hatsu in 2002, and is itself part of the OCEAN alliance, which has more than a third of global shipping. 

Making ships massive, and combining such massive ships into massive shipping monopolies, is a bad way to run global commerce. We’ve already seen significant problems from big shipping lines helping to transmit financial shocks into trade shocks, such as when Korean shipper Hanjin went under and stranded $14 billion of cargo on the ocean while in bankruptcy. It’s also much harder for small producers and retailers to get shipping space, because large shippers want to deal with large clients. And fewer ports can handle these mega-ships, so such ships induce geographical inequality. Increasingly, we’re not moving ships between cities, we’re moving cities to where the small number of giant shipping lines find it efficient to ship.

Dumb big ships owned by monopolies are the result of dumb big ideas, the physical manifestation of what Thomas Friedman was pushing in the 1990s and 2000s with books such as The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat, the idea that “taking fat out of the system at every joint” was leading towards a more prosperous, peaceful and competitive world. Friedman’s was a finance-friendly perspective, a belief that making us all interdependent with a very thin margin of error would force global cooperation. 

Just make ships bigger, went the thinking, until a big boat got stuck in a canal, taking down global supply chains with it. It seems so dumb. And it is. But it’s also reality, because for whatever reason, a lot of powerful people at one point thought Thomas Friedman was a genius. And frankly, we should have seen this coming, because a lot of people have been noticing supply chain fragility, even if Thomas Friedman didn’t.

Industrial Crashes

I had been paying attention to supply chains and shortages for about a decade, when I noticed that Hollywood was freaking out over a lack of video tapes. People who made TV were frantically working to get tapes they could use to make shows. The NBA scrambled to get enough tape to broadcast the NBA finals, with one executive saying, “It’s like a bank run.” 

Who needed video tapes in 2010? And why would there be shortages?

It turns out that this situation was far weirder and more serious that I expected. Specific kinds of specialized video tapes were necessary, not to watch shows, but to film them. And the Fukushima earthquake halfway around the world had knocked offline a Sony factory that was the major source of supply. What I was seeing is what is known an industrial supply chain crash, like a bank run, only with actual inputs and outputs of real world stuff.

This wasn’t the first industrial supply chain crash in the era of globalization created in the 1990s. The first recorded one was in 1999, when an earthquake in Taiwan hit semiconductor production, causing factories all over the U.S. to shut down and firms like Dell and Hewlett-Packard to stop selling computers. Other industrial crashes or near-crashes soon followed, happening for an array of reasons. In 2004, England shut down a single flu vaccine factory, and the U.S. lost half its flu vaccine supply. The Chinese government cut off rare earth mineral exports to Japan, with rare earth minerals being a pivotal input into electronics. Hurricane Maria caused an IV bag shortage, as Puerto Rico shut production. 

Then came Covid, which showed just how vulnerable the 1990s thinned out supply chain model of globalization had made us. Nurses and doctors wore garbage bags and got Covid because we didn’t have enough personal protection equipment and our producers couldn’t ramp up production quickly. Sometimes the shortages were comical; we lacked enough nasal swabs because the monopoly producer was a Maine-based family-owned company whose owners were cousins who hated each other so much they refused to speak. 

Then there’s the current semiconductor crisis. Taiwan Semiconductor is effectively a global monopoly in contract production for high end chips, and its capacity is outstripped by demand. Meanwhile, other forms of chip manufacturing and petrochemical refining shut down in Texas due to the arctic blast, which is amplifying problems on top of already brittle supply chains. The net effect is that there are now shortages of popular consumer electronics, and auto manufacturers, who depend on microchips, are now shutting production as they lack necessary chip inputs.

Semiconductors and Suez are the most prominent supply chain disruptors, but there are shortages wherever you look. We are still in shortage of hundreds of pharmaceutical products, including salt water in a bag. Bedding makers are having trouble getting access to foam, ammunition makers can’t get enough metal and primers, RVs are in short supply, as are fridges, air conditioners and furniture, and there’s still a basic lack of shipping containers. 

And these shortages are often in critical components that can shut down whole industries. For instance, flat steel form ties, a small piece of metal that ties together aluminum panels to make basement walls, are a critical part in short supply in the construction industry. These cost about a dollar, but without them, you can’t build a home with a basement or crawl space. Tom Woods, a 55-year industry veteran building homes in Missouri, called this shortage “catastrophic,” noting that “If you don’t pour any basements or walls, then you’re not going to build any houses.”

(And those are just the reported shortages. I hear about other shortages all the time. A friend has been waiting months for a steel mounting plate for a winch on his jeep, which is a part that a year ago he could have gotten same day. I’m told big farm equipment manufacturers are having trouble sourcing steel for bailers and tractors.)

Industrial crashes, in other words, are happening in unpredictable ways throughout the economy, shutting down important production systems in semi-random fashion. Such collapses were relatively rare prior to the 1990s. But industrial crashes were built into the nature of our post-1990s production system, which prioritizes efficiency over resiliency. Just as ships like the Ever Given are bigger and more efficient, they are also far riskier. And this tolerance for risk is a pattern reproducing itself far beyond the shipping industry; we’ve off shored production and then consolidated that production in lots of industries, like semiconductors, pharmaceutical precursors, vitamin C, and even book printing. 

What is new isn’t the vulnerability of the Suez Canal as a chokepoint, it’s that we’ve intentionally created lots of other artificial chokepoints. And since our production systems have little fat, these systems are tightly coupled, meaning a shortage in one area cascades throughout the global economy, costing us time, money, and lives.

It’s a dumb way to organize a global supply chain system, just as it was dumb to build ships that are too big to fit into canals. And that’s why the “big boat stuck in canal” is such a great illustration of the problem, it shows our policymakers and corporate leaders couldn’t even think through what would happen if Really Big Thing Got Stuck In Important Canal.

[snip]

India’s second Covid wave undermines herd immunity theory

India’s second Covid wave undermines herd immunity theory
Easing of lockdown restrictions, new variants and reinfections are cited as potential driving factors
By Benjamin Parkin, John Burn-Murdoch, Donato Paolo Mancini and Anna Gross
Mar 24 2021
https://www.ft.com/content/38f5398a-8588-48a1-86db-3e8050bace51

India is experiencing a sharp rise in coronavirus infections, increasing pressure on New Delhi to accelerate its vaccine rollout and puzzling scientists after a retreat of the pandemic had buoyed hopes that parts of the country had reached herd immunity.

The nation has reported more than 40,000 daily Covid-19 infections since Friday, up from lows of about 11,000 last month. On Thursday, India reported 53,000 new infections in the past 24 hours, the highest since October.

Cases are rising in 23 of the 30 states or union territories for which figures are available, according to a Financial Times analysis, with the percentage of positive tests rising in 21 of those.

Test positivity rates are now doubling every five days in several states, the FT analysis shows. That is faster than the growth rate seen in the UK when the B.1.1.7 variant took off at the end of 2020 and is suggestive of rapid community spread. At the height of the winter surge in London, doubling time was only nine days by comparison.

The resurgence is led by Maharashtra, home to India’s financial capital and economic powerhouse Mumbai, which is registering record daily infections of more than 30,000. Twenty per cent of its tests are coming back positive.

Scientists are unclear what is driving the increase, particularly after widespread infection last year prompted speculation about whether parts of India were enjoying a degree of herd immunity.

One factor being considered was the lifting of most lockdown restrictions, which sent people flocking back to restaurants, weddings and even cricket stadiums. But health experts said new Covid-19 variants could be fuelling the spread, and possibly reinfection.

They said India had to employ more robust monitoring to search for new variants. “We need to know exactly what is happening. Are these variants, and if they are, are the vaccines going to be effective? Are there reinfections?” asked Lancelot Pinto, a respirologist and epidemiologist at Mumbai’s Hinduja Hospital.

Nimalan Arinaminpathy, reader in mathematical epidemiology at Imperial College London, said it was possible that immunity had been waning and that the rise in cases involved a substantial amount of people being reinfected, or that a new, more transmissible variant was driving the surge.

“Perhaps we are seeing an epidemic that is merely shifting to parts of the states that were less affected in earlier waves,” he said. “There might be some combination of all three of these going on at the moment, but it’s hard to say which of them is playing the strongest role.”

India’s health ministry said on Wednesday that it had found 771 instances of “variants of concern” including those first found overseas as well as a “new double mutant variant”.

“These have not been detected in numbers sufficient to either establish [a] direct relationship or explain the rapid increase in cases in some states,” it said.

At its September peak, India was recording nearly 100,000 new infections a day. A nationwide seroprevalence survey conducted in December and January showed that a fifth of Indians had antibodies, with other studies showing exposure to be far higher in metropolises such as Pune or Bangalore.

Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist at the WHO, told the FT that claims of widespread immunity were probably exaggerated. “India never reached herd immunity at the population level,” she said. “The first wave was focused in the big cities which probably got some level of herd immunity but now it’s more widespread.

“This virus, once in the community, constantly looks for new hosts. Emerging viral variants with specific mutations make it more transmissible, hence the need for stricter public health measures.”

More than half of Maharashtra’s districts now have case rates higher than they did at the September peak. Nagpur, which has gone back into lockdown, is recording 67 new cases per 100,000 people every day — more than three times the rate statewide. Cases there are doubling every 10 days.

[snip]

A Collapse Foretold: How Brazil’s Covid-19 Outbreak Overwhelmed Hospitals

A Collapse Foretold: How Brazil’s Covid-19 Outbreak Overwhelmed Hospitals
The virus has killed more than 300,000 people in Brazil, its spread aided by a highly contagious variant, political infighting and distrust of science.
By Ernesto Londoño and Letícia Casado
Mar 27 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/world/americas/virus-brazil-bolsonaro.html

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil — The patients began arriving at hospitals in Porto Alegre far sicker and younger than before. Funeral homes were experiencing a steady uptick in business, while exhausted doctors and nurses pleaded in February for a lockdown to save lives.

But Sebastião Melo, Porto Alegre’s mayor, argued there was a greater imperative.

“Put your life on the line so that we can save the economy,” Mr. Melo appealed to his constituents in late February.

Now Porto Alegre, a prosperous city in southern Brazil, is at the heart of a stunning breakdown of the country’s health care system — a crisis foretold.

More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are at their peak and highly contagious variants of the coronavirus are sweeping the nation, enabled by political dysfunction, widespread complacency and conspiracy theories. The country, whose leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has played down the threat of the virus, is now reporting more new cases and deaths per day than any other country in the world.

“We have never seen a failure of the health system of this magnitude,” said Ana de Lemos, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders in Brazil. “And we don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

On Wednesday, the country surpassed 300,000 Covid-19 deaths, with roughly 125 Brazilians succumbing to the disease every hour. Health officials in public and private hospitals were scrambling to expand critical care units, stock up on dwindling supplies of oxygen and procure scarce intubation sedatives that are being sold at an exponential markup.

Intensive care units in Brasília, the capital, and 16 of Brazil’s 26 states report dire shortages of available beds, with capacity below 10 percent, and many are experiencing rising contagion (when 90 percent of such beds are full the situation is considered dire).

In Rio Grande do Sul, the state that includes Porto Alegre, the waiting list for intensive care unit beds doubled over the past two weeks, to 240 critically ill patients.

At Hospital Restinga e Extremo Sul, one of the main medical facilities in Porto Alegre, the emergency room has become a crammed Covid ward where many patients received care in chairs, for lack of a free bed. Last week, the military built a tent field hospital outside the main entrance, but hospital officials said the additional bed space is of little use for a medical staff stretched beyond its limit.

“The entire system is on the verge of collapse,” said Paulo Fernando Scolari, the hospital’s director. “People are coming in with more serious symptoms, lower oxygen levels, in desperate need of treatment.”

The breakdown is a stark failure for a country that, in past decades, was a model for other developing nations, with a reputation for advancing agile and creative solutions to medical crises, including a surge in H.I.V. infections and the outbreak of Zika.

Mr. Melo, who campaigned last year on a promise to lift all pandemic restrictions in the city, said a lockdown would cause people to starve.

“Forty percent of our economy, our labor force, is informal,” he said in an interview. “They’re people who need to go out and work in order to have something to eat at night.”

President Bolsonaro, who continues to promote ineffective and potentially dangerous drugs to treat the disease, has also said lockdowns are untenable in a country where so many people live in poverty. While several Brazilian states have ordered business shutdowns in recent weeks, there have been no strict lockdowns.

Some of the president’s supporters in Porto Alegre have protested business shutdowns in recent days, organizing caravans that stop outside of hospitals and blast their horns while inside Covid wards overflow.

Epidemiologists say Brazil could have avoided additional lockdowns if the government had promoted the use of masks and social distancing and aggressively negotiated access to the vaccines being developed last year.

Instead, Mr. Bolsonaro, a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, called Covid-19 a “measly flu,” often encouraged large crowds and created a false sense of security among supporters by endorsing anti-malaria and anti-parasite drugs — contradicting leading health officials who warned that they were ineffective.

Last year, Mr. Bolsonaro’s government took a pass on Pfizer’s offer of tens of millions of doses of its Covid-19 vaccine. Later, the president celebrated setbacks in clinical trials for CoronaVac, the Chinese-made vaccine that Brazil came to largely rely on, and joked that pharmaceutical companies would not be held responsible if people who got newly developed vaccines turned into alligators.

“The government initially dismissed the threat of the pandemic, then the need for preventive measures, and then goes against science by promoting miracle cures,” said Natália Pasternak, a microbiologist in São Paulo. “That confuses the population, which means people felt safe going out in the street.”

Terezinha Backes, a 63-year-old retired shoemaker living in a municipality on the outskirts of Porto Alegre, had been exceedingly careful over the past year, venturing out only when necessary, said her nephew, Henrique Machado.

But her 44-year-old son, a security guard tasked with taking the temperature of people entering a medical facility, appears to have brought the virus home early this month.

Ms. Backes, who had been in good health, was taken to a hospital on March 13 after she began having trouble breathing. With no beds to spare, she was treated with oxygen and an IV in the hallway of an overflowing wing. She died three days later.

“My aunt was not given the right to fight for her life,” said Mr. Machado, 29, a pharmacist. “She was left in a hallway.”

[snip]

Yes, experts will lie to you sometimes

Yes, experts will lie to you sometimes
Econ gives us an example of when and why this happens.
By Noah Smith
Mar 28 2021
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/yes-experts-will-lie-to-you-sometimes

The other day I saw Yascha Mounk tweet something about experts lying to the public:

From the initial hesitance to admit that masks work to the current hesitance to admit that the first dose of the vaccine gives you very strong protection against Covid, the whole pandemic has been a year-long demonstration of why the Noble Lie never works in practice.
Now, this might seem like a wild accusation. Did experts really lie, or is this an exaggeration — a moral panic by people who are inclined to distrust experts in the first place? 

Well, no, actually they really did lie:

According to Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert and a key member of the White House coronavirus task force, masks weren’t advised to the public from the start because of the anticipated PPE shortages…

Fauci discusses how effective face masks are at preventing COVID-19 infection and why they weren’t recommended from the start…He…acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE.

He explained that public health experts “were concerned…that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.” 

By early April, the Strategic National Stockpile [of masks] had been depleted…

Fauci continued to say that they wanted to give as many masks as possible to front line workers and emergency personnel.

“We wanted to make sure that the people, namely the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected,” Fauci concluded.

In other words, according to Fauci, public health experts knew that even cloth masks helped prevent the spread of COVID-19, but they were worried that if they admitted that cloth masks work, people would conclude that N95 masks work even better (which is true), and hoard N95s, thus depriving medical workers who needed the supplies more. 

Nor was this lie the impulsive decision of a few rogue experts. It was systematic and came from the highest levels: Both the CDC and the WHO discouraged people from wearing masks. 

Does this mean that experts, as a group, are liars who shouldn’t be trusted? No. But it’s important to know that experts aren’t always honest with the public, and to realize why they are sometimes dishonest. And here I think economics can provide a useful historical example.

For many many years, economists were quite gung-ho in their support of free trade. Surveys showed that almost everyone in the profession supported the idea:

In fact, economists glowingly touted free trade as one of the only things — perhaps the only thing — they could agree on. Here’s Greg Mankiw in the New York Times in 2015:

Among economists, the issue is a no-brainer…Economists are famous for disagreeing with one another…But economists reach near unanimity on some topics, including international trade. 

The economic argument for free trade dates back to Adam Smith, the 18th-century author of “The Wealth of Nations” and the grandfather of modern economics. Smith recognized that the case for trading with other nations was no different from the case for trading with other individuals within a society… 

Politicians and pundits often recoil at imports because they destroy domestic jobs, while they applaud exports because they create jobs. 

Economists respond that full employment is possible with any pattern of trade. The main issue is not the number of jobs, but which jobs. Americans should work in those industries in which we have an advantage compared with other nations, and we should import from abroad those goods that can be produced more cheaply there.

Now, there was nothing dishonest about this agreement itself; economists really did think free trade was good (and most probably still do). What was dishonest — and knowingly dishonest — was the justification given for why it’s good.

In his article, Mankiw claims that letting countries trade with each other is no different than letting individuals trade with each other. But it’s clearly not the same. A country is made up of many individuals. And even the classical economists recognized that trade can hurt some of the people in a country. When America opens up trade with China, for example, workers in occupations that compete directly with China may lose out. 

This is not a controversial proposition in economics. It follows very clearly from the simplest models of trade. If you ask economists about it, they will frankly admit that liberalizing trade creates “winners” and “losers”. They will then typically go on to tell you that free trade creates enough benefits that the winners can compensate the losers. For example, here’s an excerpt from some class notes by Fatih Guvenen:

In practice, trade will affect each person differently…In short, there can be losers. What the theory says, however, is that the winners win a lot more than the losers…In principle, you might want to take some of the winners’ gains and give them to the losers, but in practice this isn’t that easy to do….[T]he winners should be able to compensate the losers and still be better off, but in practice it rarely happens. More than that: people lose jobs all the time for lots of reasons, and trade is unlikely to be a major factor in most cases. 

Note that Guvenen (who by the way is an excellent economist whom I know and highly respect!) believes that it will be politically hard, perhaps impossible, to compensate the people who lose out from free trade. And so it has proven. In a famous 2016 paper, David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson find that workers displaced by competition with China after its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 tended to be permanently hurt by the shock. Some went on welfare, some found jobs for half what they used to make. There was no program of government transfers to take money from people who benefitted from trade with China and pay it to people who were hurt; that kind of thing generally exists only in econ textbooks.

Now, when dismissing the worry about job loss from trade, Guvenen predicts that it’ll be small compared to job loss from other reasons. That prediction isn’t based on any classical theory — it’s a guess. And Autor et al.’s paper shows that in the case of trade with China, it was an incorrect guess; lots of people lost their jobs from that one. Meanwhile, Mankiw’s editorial — and many other arguments like it — aren’t up front and honest about the fact that trade is going to make some people permanently worse off. Leaving out that key point, which every economist knows about, and which many readers might want to know before deciding who to vote for or which policies to support, is a form of deception.

Nor was this the only form of deception that economists employed in defense of free trade. Economists have known for many decades that some countries as a whole can be hurt by free trade. If a multilateral trade agreement — like the WTO, for example — admits new member countries, existing countries who compete directly with the newcomer nations can become poorer. This is called “trade diversion”, and it follows directly from the same simple classical economic theories of comparative advantage that economists typically use to justify free trade. 

In other words, America as whole — not just some workers inside America — might actually be hurt by allowing a country like China into the WTO! Maybe economists didn’t mention this possibility because they thought it was unlikely. Or maybe they decided that making the world better off as a whole — i.e., lifting hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty — is more important than Americans’ parochial concerns for their own country’s welfare. But that was their own judgement call and moral opinion; by not telling Americans that multilateral trade agreements might be worse off, economists were deceptive.

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Britain thinks it has won the gender equality war. That’s a bad sign

Britain thinks it has won the gender equality war. That’s a bad sign
Nesrine Malik
Mar 28 2021
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/28/britain-gender-equality-war-complacency-women-pandemic

Progress can often be its own worst enemy. After a month in which the nation’s attention was diverted towards the inadequate understanding of the dangers women face from sexual predators, a new survey by King’s College London on perceptions of inequality reveals that the UK is exceptional among similar nations in its attitudes towards gender inequality.

In short, the British seem to have relegated gender inequality to the consigned-to-the-past category, with only 23% of those surveyed considering it a top concern. In this the British are an anomaly, diverging clearly from other European countries and sitting closer to nations such as China, where respondents posted similarly low levels of concern about female inequality. In fact, among the 28 countries surveyed, Britain and Hungary were the lowest-ranking western countries.

A general profile of the UK emerges through the rest of the attitudes it registers about inequality overall. Britain is highly concerned about disparities in income and wealth, and especially when they fall along geographical lines. Britain also posts relatively high anxiety about racial and ethnic inequality – much higher than the European average – which seems to be at odds with the generally hostile environment towards racial justice campaigners since the Black Lives Matter protests last summer.

The picture seems to be of a country where there is a robust desire for social justice and a good grasp of its current contours of inequality – except when it comes to gender, which is only a few points above Britain’s lowest concern of all: inequalities between generations.

The low ranking may be down to a cultural bias that overemphasises technical progress, such as legislation. It is common, when groups secure landmark rights – marriage for gay people, for example – for perceptions of the legitimacy of their remaining grievances to harden. “The struggle for gay rights is over,” wrote James Kirchick in the Atlantic in 2019. “For those born into a form of adversity, sometimes the hardest thing to do is admitting that they’ve won.” In the same breath he goes on to say that “for many gays and lesbians” coming out comes with risks of banishment, violence and elevated rates of suicide. These things are less significant for him, though, than the fact that “trends are moving in the right direction”.

This direction-of-travel analysis is one that women run into often. The landmark fights have been won in the UK, from equal pay to statutory maternity leave. Indeed, some would argue that diversity initiatives have enabled women to overtake men. And Britain does indeed rank highly in the gender equality index. But here is where some progress, or even a lot of progress, breeds complacency.

After a year in which a pandemic has thrown more women than men out of the labour market, hit non-university-educated women’s jobs harder, pushed women to take on more unpaid care and domestic duties, and in many cases “retraditionalised” work, such low levels of concern suggest a country that is heading into a post-pandemic gender inequality crisis. We may come to realise how our progress is in fact fragile and erected on subterranean inequalities that surface quickly under stress. In sport, for example, women’s activities were shut down first under a government designation of “non-elite”. Sportswomen then suffered sharp drops in income because, unlike men, they are paid on a match-fee basis and had to pay for their own fitness equipment during lockdown.

The unusual laxity on gender inequality may also be a feature of Britain’s tendency to view itself in terms of relative status. I am reminded of a moment that precipitated an embarrassing national display of defensiveness. In 2014, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women, Rashida Manjoo, made the (not unreasonable) observation that Britain has an in-your-face “boys’ club sexist culture” that led to negative perceptions about women and girls. She added that in the UK there was “a more visible presence of sexist portrayals of women and girls” and a “marketisation’” of their bodies.

Instead of listening and reflecting, there was indignation that Britain could be called out and insulted on such a global scale. The debate immediately veered into whether Britain was “the most sexist country in the world”, something Manjoo never asserted, and the inevitable comparisons with other countries where things were clearly worse began. The former Tory minister Edwina Currie asked: “Why can’t she go to a country where women can’t drive cars, or have maternity leave?” It seemed that we could only engage with Britain’s gender issues insofar as they were relevant to some international pecking order that Britain was, naturally, at the top of.

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Stranding of Ever Given in Suez canal was foreseen by many

Stranding of Ever Given in Suez canal was foreseen by many
Analysis: As ships ballooned in size, worst-case scenario was flagged up by organisations such as OECD
By Michael Safi
Mar 28 2021
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/28/analysis-ever-given-suez-canal-foreseen-by-many

Authorities have blamed strong winds, possible technical faults or human error for the stranding of the Ever Given in the Suez canal.

But the running aground of the “megaship” – which salvage teams continued to try to free on Sunday as preparations were made for the possible removal of some of its containers – and the disruption of more than 10% of global trade, has been in the making for years longer according to analysts, who say an accident of this magnitude was foreseeable and warnings were ignored.

Over the past decade, out of the sight of most consumers, the world’s container ships have been quietly ballooning in size. A class of vessels that carried a maximum of about 5,000 shipping containers in 2000 has doubled in capacity every few years since, with dozens of megaships now traversing the ocean laden with upwards of 20,000 boxes.

Container ships have become huge fast, especially over the past decade. Other than the result of technological advances, analysts say the trend is a hangover from the high oil prices of the 2000s – which led shipping outfits to seek to maximise economies of scale – and the low-interest rates that followed the 2009 financial crash, which allowed companies to borrow the vast sums required to build vessels as long as skyscrapers are high.

When the trend of ever-growing ships received popular attention, it was often through colourful press releases and awestruck news stories lauding the size of the vessels, the many Eiffel Towers’ worth of steel they required and the profits they promised the world’s shipping giants.

Comparatively less attention was granted to warnings of the risks such gigantic ships entailed, says Rory Hopcraft, a researcher at Plymouth University’s maritime cyberthreat research group.

“The ships are not just larger, they’re carrying more goods,” he said. “So rather than spreading the risks over three or four smaller ships, all your eggs are in one basket – it’s all tied up in one big ship.”

The ships’ rapid growth has outstripped the capacity of marine infrastructure to follow. The Panama canal was expanded at a cost of more than $5bn (£3.6bn) more than a decade ago to meet the size of new container ships – only to be left behind as even larger vessels rolled out of Asian shipyards.

“Half the world’s ports can’t even deal with ships this size,” Hopcraft said, describing a trend that leaves the overall supply chain more exposed to a range of threats including piracy and cyberattack. “If those terminals that can [accommodate megaships], aren’t able to service them for whatever reason – local power cuts or military action – then these ships can’t be serviced at all.”

The Suez canal has been in the process of expansion to allow for larger ships and two-way traffic at its northern end. But its southern side was still one-way and narrower: vulnerable when one of the largest container ships in the world tried to pass through on a windy morning.

Megaships have been described as a “bet on globalisation” made in the heady days of the mid-2000s, as a rising China and a US apparently at ease with outsourcing helped to drive a boom in global trade. Shipping companies expected the era would last and invested in new, vastly larger ships to accommodate it.

Then came a financial crash, a populist western backlash against free trade and a lingering coronavirus pandemic that has put millions out of work.

Yet shippers have increased their bet, continuing to order giant new vessels that allow them to move more stuff with less fuel and crew, even as organisations such as the OECD have questioned the rationality of the trend.

There was a “complete disconnect of ship size development from developments in the actual economy”, the organisation said in a 2015 report, pointing out that ships were growing larger in “an economic climate that is generally depressed and at best stagnating”.

“The trade growth to absorb ship developments is currently absent,” the OECD paper said. “Shipping lines are building up overcapacity that will most likely be fatal to at least some of them.”

It also warned of what is becoming clear on the banks of the Suez: that bigger ships are harder to salvage, requiring more time and more tugboats and dredgers than what has been required in the past with small vessels.

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If you’re worried that journalists have learned nothing from the Trump years.

If you’re worried that journalists have learned nothing from the Trump years. 
This post is for you. But instead of confirming your impressions, I bring news of a contrary kind.
By Jay Rosen
Mar 12 2021
https://pressthink.org/2021/03/if-youre-worried-that-journalists-have-learned-nothing-from-the-trump-years/

Even after all that has happened from the escalator to the insurrection, you’re worried that the American press has learned nothing from the Trump years. You’re seeing it fall into old patterns. Your frustration is rising, your patience thinning.

This post is for you. But instead of confirming these impressions — for which, I admit, there is ample evidence — I bring news of a contrary kind: Four or five developments that are… encouraging, in that they suggest that some journalists understand what has to be different: after the Trump presidency, after the Stop the Steal movement, after the riot at the U.S. Capitol, after the Republican Party committed to making it harder to vote.

We can lose this thing

Thirteen days after the 2020 election I published, “Two paths forward for the American press.” One path, I said, was “a restoration of order as a more normal president takes office.” This was (and it remains) the most likely course. The other possible path was to extend what I called “a democratic breakthrough in journalism.”

The breakthrough happened during the tense days after November 3, when an autocratic leader, Donald Trump, tried to reverse the results of a free and fair election. His attempt was defeated, in part by journalists who made it clear that he had no case. His claims of election fraud were themselves fraudulent.

In my view this was a shattering experience for the American press— shattering in a good way. No refuge in false equivalence, no retreat into “both sides” reasoning, no fantasies of remaining neutral in the fight could withstand the experience of reporting on Trump’s furious battle to retain power after losing the 2020 election. Journalists came face to face with an attempt to subvert democracy, led by the president of the United States. Instantly every bromide they had ever uttered about the role of a free press in a healthy democracy turned frighteningly real.

What lasting effects there will be on journalism’s political imaginary we do not yet know. But I know what they should be: We can lose this thing if we don’t learn how to defend it. That’s the attitude the press ought to have toward American democracy. Since the election, I have tried to keep watch for any sign that journalists understand this. Here and there I find them. And that’s what this post is about. Signs of a shift in thinking that could spread to more people in journalism. Ready to hear about them?

WITF says it will not forget those votes to overturn a free and fair election.

WITF.org is the public broadcaster in the Harrisburg region of central Pennsylvania. On January 28 the company explained its policy toward those in public office who spread the election fraud lie and encouraged the January 6 insurrection. WITF’s policy is not to forget these facts:

Eight Pennsylvania congressmen supported Trump’s lies about election fraud and irregularities as he attempted to illegally retain power. Those lies led many to believe the election was stolen from Trump. After the insurrection at the Capitol to try to overthrow the U.S. electoral system, those eight lawmakers voted to nullify Pennsylvania’s election results.
The journalists at WITF further declared that they intended to contextualize future actions by these officals with reminders about their fateful moves in the period between the 2020 election and the inauguration of Joe Biden. They gave this example of what they had in mind:

“Sen. (name), who signed a letter asking members of Congress to delay certifying Pennsylvania’s electoral votes despite no evidence that would call those results into question, today introduced a bill…”
They didn’t use the phrase, “never forget!” but that is what their decision amounts to. In explaining it, they made these points:

• They expressed their shock that “elected leaders, who took an oath to uphold the laws of the United States, would actively work to overturn an election that county, state and federal judges and public officials of both political parties, and election experts, concluded was free and fair.”
• “The constant drumbeat of falsehoods that the election was stolen came to a head on Jan. 6 with a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol… The attack’s purpose was to ignore the will of the people, throw out their votes and allow former President Trump to remain in power. If it had succeeded, democracy would have failed.”
• “All the false claims about Pennsylvania’s results were attacks on the truth. On democracy. On the work of dozens of journalists at WITF and across the state, who were doing on-the-ground reporting and talking with the county-level leaders who ran elections.”
• “We understand this may be an unusual decision for a news organization to make. But, these are not normal times. As disinformation and misinformation take more and more of a foothold in our social media feeds and dinner-table discussions, it is important for our journalists to adapt, as transparently as possible, to bring you the facts and not memory-hole the damage done to our democracy in the last three months.”
Events like Stop the Steal and the January 6 insurrection were different, they said. Not normal politics, but an “unprecedented assault.”

Our approach is based in fact and provides the proper context to the decisions made by Republican elected officials in the commonwealth.

This wasn’t a policy disagreement over taxes, abortion, or government spending.

This wasn’t lawmakers spinning an issue in their favor.

This was either knowingly spreading disinformation or outright lying by elected officials to overturn an election in an attempt to keep former President Trump in office.

This was an unprecedented assault on the fabric of American democracy.
Confronted with a novel situation — a attempt to “overthrow the U.S. electoral system” — they decided to do what they could within the existing code of conduct for public service journalism, which includes holding elected officials accountable, contextualizing current events, insisting on the primacy of verifiable facts, and serving as one of the guardrails of democracy.

“Within the existing code” is important, because it means that any other newsroom sharing these values could make a similar call without rewriting the playbook. Their message: rather than new commitments, we need to intensify the ones we already have. (For more detail on WITF’s efforts at countering the Big Lie, see this second post I published today.)

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COVID-19 recovery: science isn’t enough to save us

COVID-19 recovery: science isn’t enough to save us
Policymakers need insight from humanities and social sciences to tackle the pandemic.
By Hetan Shah
Mar 23 2021
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00731-7

Policymakers sometimes talk about science as if it has superhero powers. When it comes to COVID-19, they often sound as though they hope vaccines will bring life back to how things were before. There will be no such luxury.

One key issue is who is being called on to aid recovery. Governments have sought expert advice from the beginning of the pandemic, but that expertise tended to come from people in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) — despite it being clear from the start that human behaviour, motivations and culture were key to an effective response. There are more than 80 people who have sat on the UK Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies — yet only a narrow range of social scientists, and a single person representing the humanities, are included.

This approach needs to change. Science gave us vaccines, but SHAPE (social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy) disciplines help us get to social realities, such as vaccine hesitancy. Humanity’s insight is more robust when STEM and SHAPE come together. In January last year, without knowing how 2020 would play out, I wrote, “Epidemics are social as well as biological phenomena.” Once COVID-19 hit, governments were slow to advocate for face masks — even as many social scientists, doctors and public-health researchers made the case for them. Part of the reason was that policymakers were overly focused on evidence from randomized control trials, rather than the observational, qualitative evidence that social sciences are steeped in. And had governments been set up to listen to the advice of historians, they could have helped us to think about what worked in past pandemics.

The good news: many governments are getting the message. Think-tanks and civil-society organizations from Bangladesh to Kenya are pulling together social-data insights. US President Joe Biden has appointed sociologist Alondra Nelson as deputy director for science and society at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In September 2020, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser asked the British Academy, which I head, to draw on SHAPE disciplines to review the pandemic’s social impacts.

The academy spent 6 months synthesizing evidence; we mapped more than 550 relevant research projects and used workshops and written submissions to draw on the views of leading SHAPE scholars, early-career researchers and representatives of national academies and learned societies. We traced the contours of COVID-19’s long shadow and framed findings not just so decision makers understand the losses, but so they can act to reverse them.

We structured our review (see go.nature.com/3lyc) to align with policy workflows in three areas: (1) knowledge, skills and employment; (2) communities, culture and empowerment; and (3) health and well-being. In each area, we explored governance, trust, cohesion, inequalities and sustainability in the United Kingdom. However, these issues are global. For example, years of progress in alleviating global poverty have been reversed.

One clear conclusion of the review is that the online life that so many of us now live means governments need to consider digital infrastructure as a crucial public service, and to focus on reducing or eliminating ‘digital divides’. Losing access to education exacerbates existing socioeconomic inequality, limiting access to digital skills and impeding progress towards a prosperous, high-skilled economy. The UK lockdown has highlighted the growing value of public spaces, as well as their scarcity — especially where lower-income communities and ethnic minority groups live. This is true in many nations around the world.

The importance of community resilience stood out, too. Charities, places of worship and community groups stepped in to meet basic needs — such as food, sanitation, rent payments and combatting loneliness. Governments tend to focus on physical infrastructure, such as roads, energy systems and shopping centres, as a means of ‘community development’. But social infrastructure also needs investment to support communities. UK-charity leaders have rightly criticized politicians for spending billions on pandemic response but earmarking only a tiny fraction for social change.

In the United Kingdom, we have seen declining trust in the national government, weakening its ability to influence public behaviour to stall future public-health crises. Solutions should integrate across all levels of government. Policies that are only national or only local will not be enough to ease inequalities: they must work work across levels and support each other. For example, town centres that are based on retail are suffering; stronger, more-responsive local governments might repurpose surplus commercial space for affordable housing and community-led projects.

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