linking climate change to inflation?

This book review in the Guardian tries to link climate change to inflation. It talks about the costs of storms, fires, and insurance, and impacts of heat on worker productivity. I’m not convinced it is exactly on the mark. Cleaning up from storms can actually stimulate the economy, if they have only local impacts and don’t happen too often. One area’s cost of cleanup creates business and jobs for another area of the economy. The larger economy should be able to absorb these costs if it is healthy. Maybe this is the issue – are the impacts of storms, fires, and floods become geographically widespread and frequent enough that they are taking up a significant amount of our economy’s productive capacity that could be better spent elsewhere? Maybe that is the case, but this article doesn’t address it. I can certainly imagine this being the case if and when major population centers (and economic drivers of our economy) start to be impacted on a regular basis by a combination of severe storms and sea level rise. A major earthquake or volcano could have similar impacts, and while it would have nothing to do with climate change directly, it would happen on top of climate change and we need to be ready for the known risks let alone the unknown ones.

The article doesn’t talk much about food, but along with impacts on coastal cities, a tightening of the food supply relative to population seems like the most obvious and immediate impact of climate change on people. While climate change didn’t cause the Russia-Ukraine war, removing food exports from those two countries from the system has taught us something about how tight the food supply is. Climate change could add up to a similar tightening over a period of time, and remove that slack that we currently have in the system. And then shocks can and will happen on top of the long term trend. It really does not seem like the world is ready.

zoonotic diseases

This article in France24 draws a link between habitat loss, climate change, and zoonotic diseases.

“Deforestation reduces biodiversity: we lose animals that naturally regulate viruses, which allows them to spread more easily,” he told AFP…

As animals flee their warming natural habitats they will meet other species for the first time — potentially infecting them with some of the 10,000 zoonotic viruses believed to be “circulating silently” among wild mammals, mostly in tropical forests, the study said.

Greg Albery, a disease ecologist at Georgetown University who co-authored the study, told AFP that “the host-pathogen network is about to change substantially”.

France24

I don’t quite get the logic of the first sentence – how do animals “naturally regulate viruses”? I can see the logic that some animals would limit the spread of viruses they are infected with based on their behavior. If they start moving around more, whether because their habitats are becoming smaller and more fragmented, because their ranges are shifting as the climate changes (although this seems like a much slower process to me), they will potentially interact more with other wild animals, with domestic animals, and with humans.

So solutions could be to protect natural habitats and keep cities from sprawling into them, shift more to vegetarian diets for people and/or keep livestock indoors (maybe not so great for the livestock).

Ticks – they suck!

Yes, I know that was quite possibly the worst pun ever. But they really are disgusting, even for those of us who basically like bugs.

Particularly disgusting are types that can form such large clusters that they can bleed a large mammal to death, like a cow or even a moose. They cause many more cases of disease in the U.S. than mosquitoes. The lone star tick can cause a person to develop an allergy to red meat, which is just bizarre. We’ve become kind of desensitized to Lyme disease, but it can be quite dangerous – on a personal note, a cousin of mine who lives in western Pennsylvania was hospitalized with a serious heart condition in the summer of 2020, and it turned out to be Lyme disease – quickly and correctly diagnosed and treated by the way, and he is now fine. I guess that is one up side of it being so common and widespread – even during the height of Covid-19 in 2020 when someone came into an emergency room with Covid-like symptoms, it was correctly tested for, diagnosed, and treated.

My cousin thinks he acquired Lyme disease in his yard, and according to Vox, this is a more common way to acquire it than hiking in the woods. So you can’t avoid it by just staying out of the woods.

The Vox article says scientists are pretty sure habitat fragmentation plays a role – deer and mice love lots of fragments and edge habitat, and meanwhile their predators do not, and people generally do not want the predators among them.

And finally, the article says the jury is out on how climate change is affecting ticks, but their ranges are generally expanding and milder winters are probably playing a role.

Ticks have made nature less fun, and that is what sucks most of all, if you ask me.

mass shootings and suicide

Mass shooters are often motivated by essentially suicidal fantasies. They just sometimes decide to take an elementary school class with them. It’s hard to be sympathetic, but then again it highlights how the lack of access to quality health care and mental health care in particular is part of what is rotting our society from the inside out. t seems to me we are lumping unrelated phenomena from a few categories:

  • disputes, fights, drug and gang-related activity – like the street shootings in Philadelphia’s South Street recently, but depressingly this happens every day in many cities
  • suicidal depression coupled with violence – like most school shootings
  • foreign religious/ideological/geopolitical extremism, such as 9/11
  • domestic anti-government, sometimes racist extremism, such as the Oklahoma City bombing

The latter two you could maybe lump together, although ironically these groups would consider each other enemies. The first two are completely different though. There are several different problems here with several different solutions.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still too many guns in too many hands and too many people who think more violence is the answer to our violence problem.

May 2022 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The lab leak hypothesis is back, baby! Whether Covid-19 was or was not a lab accident, the technology for accidental or intentional release of engineered plagues has clearly arrived. And also, the world is waking up to a serious food crisis.

Most hopeful story: I came up with (but I am sure I didn’t think of it first) the idea of a 21st century bill of rights. This seems to me like a political big idea somebody could run with. I’ll expand on it at some point, but quick ideas would be to clarify that the right to completely free political speech applies to human beings only and put some bounds on what it means for corporations and other legal entities, and update the 18th century idea of “unlawful search and seizure” to address the privacy/security tradeoffs of our modern world. And there’s that weird “right to bear arms” thing. Instead of arguing about what those words meant in the 18th century, we could figure out what we want them to mean now and then say it clearly. For example, we might decide that people have a right to be free of violence and protected from violence, in return for giving up any right to perpetrate violence. We could figure out if we think people have a right to a minimum standard of living, or housing, or health care, or education. And maybe clean up the voting mess?

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I found one easily accessible and understandable source of Covid-19 wastewater surveillance data.

VMT, traffic, and density

This post provides evidence that increasing density (households per acre) does indeed reduce vehicle miles traveled per household. The thing is that what people experience is not vehicle miles per household, it is “traffic” and the inconvenience of parking. So even if driving per person or household decreases, the inconvenience of daily life will still increase until you get to a point where cars are unnecessary for most daily work, school, shopping, and leisure trips. I picture a curve where convenience decreases with density up to a certain point, and then increases again. People who have experienced only the decreasing side of the curve have trouble understanding what it would be like to get over the hump and up the other side. And this plays right into the hands of the highway-oil-auto industrial complex.

Shot Spotter

Shot Spotter is a set of microphones installed on telephone poles around a city that is supposed to allow police to respond rapidly to gun shots. It actually came to mind when I read recently about people in violence-impacted Philadelphia neighborhoods asking the police for more cameras. This article is about Chicago, and is generally critical of the technology on racial justice grounds. It sounds like the system there is perceived as yet another way for the police to harass people. That sounds bad, but I can imagine this being one more piece of evidence useful for prosecuting a violent crime after the fact. I can imagine a combination of video, audio, and eyewitness testimony being pretty persuasive.

food crisis moves off the business page

I’ve been thinking that when the food shortage headlines move off the (proverbial at this point) business pages and on to the (equally proverbial) front page, the situation may be coming to a head. Well, here is an Associated Press article on the subject (link is to the Philadelphia Inquirer but you can probably find the article elsewhere).

The Treasury Department announced that several global development banks are “working swiftly to bring to bear their financing, policy engagement, technical assistance” to prevent starvation prompted by the war, rising food costs and climate damage to crops.

Tens of billions will be spent on supporting farmers, addressing the fertilizer supply crisis, and developing land for food production, among other issues. The Asian Development Bank will contribute funds to feeding Afghanistan and Sri Lanka and the African Development Bank will use $1.5 billion to assist 20 million African farmers, according to Treasury…

As part of the effort to address the crisis, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will convene meetings in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. over the next two days focusing on food insecurity.

Philadelphia Inquirer

So the issue has not just moved from the business pages to news pages, it has moved from the Treasury Department to the State Department. You could say this situation has developed among a perfect storm of pandemic, climate change-driven droughts and storms, and now an unexpected war. But we live in a world where apparently supply was tight enough that the food system was not ready to absorb these shocks. Now the question becomes are we approaching physical/environmental limits for how much food the world can support, or can we boost production by opening up more land and dumping more fertilizer on it? And even if the latter is true, what is the lag time to make that happen compared to the time scale of the current crisis? And even if we solve these short term issues, are we preparing for the risks in the future? Is the current situation truly something so extreme we could not reasonably have prepared for it, or is it a magnitude of risk we should be expecting in an compromised biosphere and we need to be preparing for next time?