Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Terry Gross discusses how COVID has brought some needed attention to other chronic illnesses. But Sarah Trick writes that the reckless elimination of public health protections represents a betrayal of people with disabilities who face especially stark risks from others' callous choices. And Nathaniel Dove reports on the reality that the abdication of responsibility by governments is shifting extra burdens to individuals to try to make up for a lack of social protection, while Gillian Findlay interviews Nili Kaplan-Myrth about the frustration responsible people rightly feel as a result. 

- Laura Meckler reports on the CDC's latest study showing that mask mandates have in fact been essential to reducing COVID-19 transmission in schools. And Armine Yalnizyan writes about the lack of change for the better after two years of pandemic tumult. 

- Raymond Zhong and Nadja Popovich discuss how decades of deliberately racist zoning choices continue to reverberate in the distribution of the consequences of air pollution.  

- Susanna Twidale and Nina Chestney report on the International Energy Agency's recognition that energy-related greenhouse gas emissions continue to reach record highs. Amy Westervelt highlights how dirty energy profiteers have tried to hijack free speech rights to prevent anybody from holding the oil industry accountable for deliberately and fraudulently concealing the damage it's done to our planet, while Emily Leedham discusses how industry-funded climate denialism remains particularly widespread in Alberta and Saskatchewan. And Janet French reports that the oil industry's property taxes left unpaid to Alberta's rural municipalities have ballooned to $253 million even as the sector is rolling in windfall profits. 

- Finally, Andrew Jackson rejects the right-wing argument that we have to choose between averting a climate breakdown and ensuring that people have a reasonable standard of living. Brendan Haley writes that there's no reason to treat temporary inflation as an excuse not to invest in a just transition to clean energy - particularly when the end result would be to eliminate one of the most volatile components of most people's expenses. And Hannah Westwater reports on Jack Monroe's participation in a panel pointing out the need for income supports to deal not only with immediate inflation, but also structural poverty.