Bill McKibben | With the Coronavirus, Hell Is No Other People

13 March 20

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Bill McKibben | With the Coronavirus, Hell Is No Other People

Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "The strangest thing about the coronavirus is that we can't help one another through it."

 We can’t lay on hands, we can only wash them: in fact, the way we’ve been explicitly told to help is to stay away from one another. That makes epidemiological sense, but it also makes us a little crazy: social distancing, quarantine, and isolation go hard against the gregarious instinct that makes us who we are.

Every other time that we face a natural disaster, we come together: that’s the natural, almost inevitable human response to a crisis. Rebecca Solnit, in her soaringly optimistic book from 2009, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” proved that point with example after example: from the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 to Hurricane Katrina, people rallied in the most extraordinary ways. In Louisiana, people with boats just kept arriving and shoving off into the murky and dangerous waters to rescue people stranded on the roofs of their flooded homes. The Cajun Navy, as the group of volunteer boaters was known, saved lives by the score, and they were not an exception.

“In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones,” Solnit writes. Looters are rare—and sometimes what’s called looting is just people trying to get medicine or food for others. She adds, “The image of the selfish, panicky or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it. Decades of meticulous sociological research on behavior in disasters, from the bombings of World War II to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes and storms across the continent and around the world, have demonstrated this.”

I’ve seen it firsthand a dozen times: when Hurricane Irene devastated my state, Vermont, in 2011, people turned out within hours, bringing tools from backhoes to brooms. They mucked out basements and rebuilt driveways, and they kept coming back for weeks, until the job was done. They did it for strangers, mostly—although they didn’t remain strangers for long.

But, with coronavirus, none of that is possible. There’s little way to be of use except to disappear inside your home, so that you can’t infect anyone. Indeed, even the places we gather for solace are increasingly off limits. Churches are closed in Italy and in South Korea (where one particular sect was the epicenter of the growing epidemic). Schools, where people find community during the first two decades of their lives, are increasingly shutting their doors or moving to “remote instruction.” Even the things that take our minds off crises are going to be closed off: with every disaster that I can recall, including unnatural horrors such as 9/11, the resumption of pro sports some days later was a way to ease the feelings of pain and fear and anger. But now ski races in Norway are being held in empty arenas, Italy has cancelled league soccer matches, and there’s talk that the Summer Olympics, scheduled to be held in Tokyo, may need to be postponed.

All of this is wise, of course: the evidence that cutting down on crowds can slow the spread and flatten the curve of eventual infection is clear, dating back to the Spanish flu of 1918. (President Trump’s minimization of the risk will be remembered for the classic foolishness that it is: you can’t spin a microbe.) But isolation comes at a real cost. Loneliness turns out to be a huge factor in diminishing human lives. Everything we can measure, from immune response to the onset of dementia to coronary-artery disease is worsened, often dramatically, in people with fewer friends.

Forget the physical risks, though; it’s the social cost that we should be absorbing, so that we’ll remember it when these days are past. We should use the quiet of these suddenly uncrowded days to think a little about how much we’ve allowed social isolation to grow in our society, even without illness as an excuse. The number of adolescents hanging out with friends dropped precipitously in 2012, when for the first time more than half of Americans owned smartphones (a situation that has been linked to rising rates of depression).

If we pay attention, we may value more fully the moment we’re released from our detention, and we may even make some changes in our lives as a result. It will be a relief, above all, when we’re allowed to get back to caring for one another, which is what socially evolved primates do best.

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi discusses coronavirus legislation during her weekly briefing Thursday on Capitol Hill. (photo: Nicholas Kamm/Getty)

Speaker Pelosi Introduces Coronavirus Relief Bill: Free Testing, Paid Sick Leave and Unemployment Assistance
Deirdre Walsh, NPR
Walsh writes: "Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the House will vote Thursday on a package of measures to address the coronavirus despite pushback from the top House Republican that the bill 'comes up short.'"
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A man runs past the New York Stock Exchange. (photo: Bloomberg)

Nomi Prins | The Fed, the Virus, and Inequality: A Global Dr. Frankenstein at Work
Nomi Prins, TomDispatch
Prins writes: "Whether you're invested in the stock market or not, you've likely noticed that it's been on a roller coaster lately."

EXCERPT:

This Time, Inequality Is Different

The prescription for the last major financial crisis went something like this: The biggest Wall Street banks faced a subprime loan abyss of their own making, but one that would come to hurt everyone else. They had crafted trillions of dollars' worth of toxic assets based on the assumption -- bizarre in retrospect -- that there would be more incoming subprime loan payments than there had been subprime loans to begin with. When the subprime mortgage crisis began and payments became delinquent or morphed into defaults, the toxic assets of those banks went belly-up. Having used other people’s money to gamble on risk and having created complex assets to make their bets, they lost money themselves big time, but it was others who truly paid the price.

Some of those big banks, like two of my former employers Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, had borrowed too much from other big banks. When they couldn’t repay the money they had borrowed to bet on those toxic assets, they went bankrupt.

The surviving big lenders and politically well-connected banks like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs played it differently. They extracted an epic level of support from the Obama administration (read: us taxpayers) and the Federal Reserve and so survived before, of course, going on to thrive. Other major central banks followed the Fed’s lead in lowering rates, while purchasing assets from troubled banks in return for cash.

By December 2008, federal funds rates (the interest rates by which banks lend money to each other based on what they have on reserve at the Fed) had been pushed down to zero and they’ve remained at historically low levels ever since. According to a 2011 Government Accountability Office report, the Fed extended $16 trillion in loans in the wake of the financial crisis, most of which went to the financial industry. Over time, it also created more than $4.5 trillion to purchase Treasury and mortgage bonds from Wall Street firms, most of which it now houses on its own books.

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (photo: Getty)

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez Says Sanders Should Continue Primary Fight
Cristina Marcos, The Hill
Marcos writes: "Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday said that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) should carry on in the Democratic presidential primary to push the party toward adopting more progressive policies, despite his series of losses to former Vice President Joe Biden."
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Megan Rapinoe celebrates her goal off a free kick in the seventh minute against Japan in Frisco, Texas. (photo: Jeffrey McWhorter/AP)

Megan Rapinoe Decries 'Blatant Misogyny and Sexism' in US Soccer Legal Filings
Steven Goff, The Washington Post
Goff writes: "Megan Rapinoe saved her best for first (on the field) and last (in her postgame TV interview)."
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The Supreme Court building in Ottawa, Canada. (photo: Chris Wattie/Reuters)

Canadian Supreme Court Allows Corporate Liability for International Law Violations
Preston Lim, Lawfare
Lim writes: "On Feb. 28, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered a landmark judgment in the case of Nevsun Resources Ltd. v. Araya. This case raised a largely unexplored question in Canadian law: whether plaintiffs can bring civil claims in Canada for human rights violations committed abroad."
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Workers install solar panels. (photo: Unsplash)

Wind and Solar Power Will Soon Be Cheaper Than Coal Globally, New Research Shows
Jordan Davidson, EcoWatch
Davidson writes: "A new report shows that investments in coal plants may be a waste of money as renewables are cheaper than new coal plants, according to new research from the financial think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative."

new report shows that investments in coal plants may be a waste of money as renewables are cheaper than new coal plants, according to new research from the financial think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative.

The new research, released today, shows that nearly $640 billion of investment in coal power capacity worldwide is at risk because it is less expensive to generate electricity from wind and solar power, as Reuters reported. 

The report also found that more than 60 percent of global coal power plants are generating electricity at a higher cost than it could be produced by building new renewables. The researchers found that by 2030, at the latest, it will be cheaper to build new wind or solar capacity than continue operating with coal, according to a statement from the Carbon Tracker Initiative.

Right now, in all major markets, including the U.S., Europe, China, India and Australia it is cheaper to invest in renewables, according to The Independent. The report casts doubt on the future of the many countries who have investments in coal, including Australia's $26 billion thermal coal export industry, as The Guardian reported.

The authors of the report suggested the report should be a signal to policy makers to shift their priorities toward investments in renewables. 

"Renewables are outcompeting coal around the world and proposed coal investments risk becoming stranded assets which could lock in high-cost coal power for decades," Matt Gray, Carbon Tracker co-head of power and utilities and co-author of the report, said in a statement. "The market is driving the low-carbon energy transition but governments aren't listening. It makes economic sense for governments to cancel new coal projects immediately and progressively phase out existing plants."

Despite the economic reality and the environmental impact of coal, many governments around the world are artificially propping up coal power with incentives and underwriting new plants. Governments are either giving subsidies to the industry or passing the cost down to consumers, as The Guardian reported.

The report found that a country like Japan, which invests heavily in coal power, is wasting its money. As The Guardian reported, in Japan, wind power costs less than new coal plants and is expected to be cheaper than existing coal by 2028. Solar power in Japan is forecast to outperform new coal plants by 2023 and existing coal by 2026.

The story was the same for China, which relies on a tremendous amount of coal power, and for South Korea. The report found that wind power is already cheaper than coal in China, and solar power will be cheaper by the end of this year. In South Korea, renewables will be cheaper than coal in two years, according to The Guardian.

Institutional investors have started to run away from coal since it is not returning the profits it once did. Furthermore, the capital recovery period for new investments in coal plants is usually 15 to 20 years, making it a risky investment when cleaner, cheaper and more efficient power generation is starting to flood the market, as Reuters reported.

Reuters also noted that ditching coal is a mandatory step to putting a stop to global heating. According to a major UN report in 2018, the share of coal power in electricity generation needs to fall to under 2 percent by 2050 for global warming to stay within a 1.5 degree Celsius limit.

The new report echoed the UN's findings, noting that keeping global warming within a 1.5 degree Celsius limit, to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis, means coal use to generate electricity will have to fall by 80 percent from 2010 to 2030 around the world. Essentially, one coal plant has to shut down every day until 2040, the report said, as The Independent reported.

The Carbon Tracker report found that if the coal market were deregulated, market forces would drive it out of existence, as renewable energy developers would capitalize on the growing price gap.

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