"This report is a catalogue of weather in 2019 made more extreme by climate change, and the human misery that went with it." That is the statement of Brian Hoskins, chair of Imperial College in London's Grantham Institute for Climate Change, about the recently released State of the Climate in 2019 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the WMO compiles information from scientists all over the world that has been a key driver of international climate law and policymaking. One of the IPCC's reports was similarly dire to that of the WMO's, but not without hope.
Although anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have disrupted the planet's climate system in ways that have already caused and will continue to cause massive harms all over the world, the IPCC warned, we still have time to prevent a level of disruption that would render the planet uninhabitable for humans and most other species that we share it with. The IPCC gave policymakers a roadmap for how to achieve that: do not allow warming of the Earth to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, which in turn requires us to achieve global net zero anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions by mid-century. That roadmap is the basis of the historic Paris Agreement that President Trump declared he would abandon upon his entry into office. Our withdrawal will become effective roughly a week before the presidential election and the next round of key climate negotiations.
In reading the many thought-provoking commentaries on the multiple connections and parallels between the coronavirus crisis and the climate crisis, it has struck me that one way to think about most of the articles and essays I've come across is as a call for adherence to three of the key principles undergirding Paris: the need for science to be the guiding light for policymaking, for global solidarity in taking action, and for prioritizing those who are most vulnerable to the impacts of the crisis. Trump rejected all three when he condemned the Paris Agreement as "draconian," and he has done so again in his response to the coronavirus.
Here are excerpts from three of the most compelling commentaries I've read that describe the rejection of each principle in the case of the coronavirus emergency:
(1) Need for science as guiding light
Many epidemiologists and public health experts have urgently called upon the administration to adhere to basic science in its response to the outbreak. One of the most scathing that I have seen is an editorial penned by the editor-in-chief of Science magazine, H. Holden Thorp:
While scientists are trying to share facts about the epidemic, the administration either blocks those facts or restates them with contradictions. . . . For the past 4 years, President Trump's budgets have made deep cuts to science, including cuts to funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NIH. With this administration's disregard for science of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the stalled naming of a director for the Office of Science and Technology Policy—all to support political goals—the nation has had nearly 4 years of harming and ignoring science.
(2) Need for global solidarity in taking action
Trump finally made a statement to the nation about the coronavirus outbreak on March 11, shortly after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic. Laura McGann, the editorial director of Vox, detailed the astounding level of xenophobia that he spewed from behind his Resolute Desk in the Oval Office:
Trump looked into the camera and warned Americans of an enemy who has infiltrated our borders. We are at war, he said, with a "foreign virus." . . . It's a tactic meant to distract from what his administration has and hasn't done, in this case to combat the coronavirus pandemic. . . . The pandemic, of course, isn't a spy. It's not an infiltrator. It's a health crisis that's been long predicted. The way we'll fight it is through mechanisms like social distancing, a technique that requires clear, direct information so everyone knows it's important to participate and how to do so. It's a shared responsibility. We are in this together.
(3) Need for prioritizing those who are most vulnerable to the impacts of the crisis
Like the climate crisis, the coronavirus has laid bare the myriad structural weaknesses that have long been eating away at the fabric of our society. So, with respect to this principle, Trump is largely representative of U.S. policymakers in his rejection of it. Dr. Alfredo Morabia, an epidemiologist and editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Public Health, made this clear in an interview with Amy Goodman:
And I think that this pandemic shows that the idea that reducing access to welfare to the poor in order to stimulate them to get jobs or to get the immigrants to become self-sufficient, etc., in order to reduce public expenses, these things don't work. [Rather,] they make us more vulnerable, because the problem of access to care, access to hygiene, access to sanitation. . . . But are we going to have access to tests now? And if we have a treatment by the end of the year, access to treatment, and next year, very important, if we have a vaccine, people must have access to the vaccine, too. . . . We are like a single organism, a collective individual. And this is how we have to consider ourselves.
The climate crisis is an exponentially greater threat to our species and the planet than any known virus. But what the failures of governmental response to "smaller" crises such as the coronavirus tell us is that the three principles of Paris can work, but only if we implement them now, and at warp speed.
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Karen Sokol | March 16, 2020
"This report is a catalogue of weather in 2019 made more extreme by climate change, and the human misery that went with it." That is the statement of Brian Hoskins, chair of Imperial College in London's Grantham Institute for Climate Change, about the recently released State of the Climate in 2019 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the WMO compiles information from scientists all over the world that has been a key driver of international climate law and policymaking. One of the IPCC's reports was similarly dire to that of the WMO's, but not without hope.
Darya Minovi | March 12, 2020
On March 4, I joined community members and advocates from Assateague Coastal Trust, Center for a Livable Future, Environmental Integrity Project, Food and Water Watch, and NAACP to testify in favor of Maryland's House Bill 1312. The bill, introduced by Delegate Vaughn Stewart (D-Montgomery County), would place a moratorium on permits for new or expanding concentrated animal feed operations (CAFOs) in the state. The legislation would apply to "industrial poultry operations," defined as operations that produce 300,000 or more broiler chickens per year. It was introduced with strong support from community members and environmental and public health advocates hoping to pump the brakes on the seemingly unmitigated growth of poultry CAFOs, especially on the Eastern Shore.
Christine Klein, Sandra Zellmer | March 11, 2020
The flood season is upon us once again. Beginning in February, parts of Mississippi and Tennessee were deluged by floods described as "historic," "unprecedented," even "Shakespearean." At the same time, Midwestern farmers are still reeling from the torrential rains of 2019 that destroyed billions of dollars' worth of crops and equipment, while wondering whether their water-ravaged farmland can ever be put back into production. All this while the Houston area continues to recover from three so-called "500-year floods" in as many years, back-to-back in 2015, 2016, and, most notably, Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
Matt Shudtz | March 5, 2020
From the farm fields of California to the low-lying neighborhoods along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, structural racism and legally sanctioned inequities are combining with the effects of the climate crisis to put people in danger. The danger is manifest in heat stroke suffered by migrant farmworkers and failing sewer systems that back up into homes in formerly redlined neighborhoods. Fortunately, public interest attorneys across the country are attuned to these problems and are finding ways to use the law to force employers and polluters to adapt to the realities of the climate crisis.
John Leshy | March 5, 2020
With the help of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) has had a long and proud history of tackling pressing challenges through responsible and inclusive management of America's public lands. One might expect it would continue that tradition as climate change has become a major challenge confronting the nation. Not so. In fact, Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt has been doing more than any of his predecessors to promote fossil fuel development on America's public lands, all the while dancing around the issue of whether he has an obligation, or even the legal authority, to address climate change.
Karen Sokol | March 2, 2020
Earlier this year, on the heels of the Earth's hottest decade on record, a coalition of former government officials, fossil fuel companies, car manufacturers, financial companies, and nonprofit organizations renewed their endorsement of a national carbon tax as "the most effective climate solution" (emphasis added). And by "the," it appears that they mean "the only." The catch is that the coalition's legislative plan also calls for preventing the federal government from regulating carbon emissions and from taking any other protective measures "that are no longer necessary upon the enactment of a rising carbon fee." Given the scale and complexity of the planetary emergency that we face, it would certainly be nice if the solution were that simple. But that, of course, is too good to be true.
David Driesen | February 27, 2020
On March 3, the Supreme Court will hear a plea to invent a new rule of constitutional law with the potential to put an end to the republic the Constitution established, if not under President Trump, then under some despotic successor. This rule would end statutory protections for independent government officials resisting a president’s efforts to use his power to demolish political opposition and protect his party’s supporters. Elected strongmen around the world have put rules in place allowing them to fire government officials for political reasons and used them to destroy constitutional democracy and substitute authoritarianism. But these authoritarians never had the audacity to ask unelected judges to write such rules, securing their enactment instead through parliamentary acts or a referendum.
Noah Sachs | February 26, 2020
Environmental groups faced a skeptical bench during Monday's argument in two consolidated cases, U.S. Forest Service v. Cowpasture River Preservation Association and Atlantic Coast Pipeline LLC v. Cowpasture River Preservation Association, as they fought to preserve a 2018 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit that had halted an $8 billion, 600-mile natural gas pipeline. At the heart of the dispute is a 2017 permit granted by the U.S. Forest Service to allow the Atlantic Coast Pipeline to cross the George Washington National Forest.
Joel A. Mintz | February 24, 2020
In recent months the Trump administration has intensified its assault on federal environmental safeguards on several fronts. It has proposed drastic reductions in the scope of protections against water and air pollution, lagged in the cleanup of hazardous waste contamination, allowed the continued marketing of toxic herbicides, narrowed the scope of needed environmental impact reviews, ignored and undermined legitimate scientific studies and findings, and dismantled government attempts to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis.