Unearthed today: Health and the environment

Morning!

I’m going to run out of time again this morning thanks to spending too long reading Articles in The Atlantic about the pandemic rather than focusing on the matter in hand. As I’ve done that though; Ed Yong has chronicled how the pandemic defeated America which has also prompted interest in a slightly older piece by Zeynep Tufekci on how we may be dealing with it all wrong. TLDR on the latter, the UK government’s workplace advise still seems way behind the times. Anyway…

“The coronavirus found, exploited, and widened every inequity that the U.S. had to offer. Elderly people, already pushed to the fringes of society, were treated as acceptable losses. Women were more likely to lose jobs than men, and also shouldered extra burdens of child care and domestic work, while facing rising rates of domestic violence,” writes Ed Young and the parallels with the slower-burn but equally dramatic impacts of climate change are stark.

“Your future risk of dying from heat will be determined more than anything else by where you live and the local consequences of today’s economic inequality. That’s the conclusion of a major paper released today by the Climate Impact Lab, a research consortium that spent years mapping the relationship between temperature, income, and mortality,” reports radical left-wing journal Bloomberg.

In fact, far more people seem likely to die than previously thought. Pretty much the same number of people per 100,000 as New York State has seen from COVID 19 since January; over 70 per 100,000. “The mortality risks from climate change are about an order of magnitude larger than previously understood,” says Michael Greenstone, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and a co-director of the Climate Impact Lab. “I really think that shouldn’t be missed.”

The impacts will not be even. Less developed hot countries will suffer the most, more developed and cooler countries the least. The study imagines future scenarios but this is not something that you really need to imagine. Just look at Baghdad last week sweltering in record temperatures above 50 degrees C; “The near breakdown of Iraq’s electricity grid has made matters far worse, as regular blackouts cut off air conditioning. Those who can afford them use diesel generators to power cooling equipment, but these pump out small particulate matter and create unhealthy levels of air pollution,” Bloomberg reports.

Whilst a dash for growth has sometimes been blamed for engendering the emissions which drive climate change and rising temperatures the study points to the important of growth and – equal – economic development in allowing people to adapt to it’s impacts, cutting mortality by 60% over what would happen if the world’s economy just stood still from now on (which looks uncannily possible right now). “The engine of development that unleashed dangerous emissions over the past two centuries has also lifted billions out of poverty and poor health. Its biggest job yet will be climate adaptation,” notes Bloomberg, now returning to a more familiar tune.

The article goes on to try to quantify the cost of all these extra early deaths and turn them into a price of carbon. It’s one way or arguing for that, I suppose. Elsewhere on the site the big boss Michael Bloomberg, has another idea of a type that is rapidly gaining traction. He proposes re-hiring all the 100,000 recently laid off oil and gas workers to tackle climate change by sealing abandoned wells. I’m aware it doesn’t really meet the scale of what I’ve just written about, but nothing around today does.

Three things you need to know

As nations fight COVID other diseases run rampent: Tuberculosis kills 1.5 million people each year. Lockdowns and supply-chain disruptions threaten progress against the disease as well as H.I.V. and malaria.“Nobody is testing for TB at any facility,” said one leading doctor. “TB is the biggest monster of them all. If we’re talking about deaths and pandemics, 10 million cases a year,” he said, Covid doesn’t compare yet to that toll. Why is this in an environmental newsletter? Because novel pandemics arise – significantly – as a result of environmental destruction and their knock-on effects are important to understanding their wider significance. In fact, just generally, from pandemics to air pollution and deaths we probably need to talk much more about the environment in terms of human health and well being.

Adverts for large polluting cars ‘should be banned’: A new campaign called “Badvertising” is demanding an immediate end to adverts for large polluting cars. SUVs now make up more than 4-in-10 new cars sold in UK, while fully electric vehicles account for fewer than two in a hundred. The authors of the report point out that even electric engines won’t solve all the problems with SUVs. That’s because they will still pollute the air through particles rubbing off brakes and tyres, and use up carbon-emitting resources to make their heavy batteries, reports the BBC.

New Zealand’s melting glaciers show the human fingerprints of climate change: New research has found extreme melting of the country’s glaciers in 2018 was at least ten times more likely due to human-caused global heating. The Guardian reports.