Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
- Trevor Memmot and Christian Weller write about the long road to recovery from the trauma of hurricanes and other climate change-induced environmental disasters. Jack Peat reports on the torrential flooding hitting Bologna, Italy just after it hosted a climate change conference. And Chae Yeon Park et al. find that thousands of people have died from the added pollution caused by climate crisis-related wildfires.
- Kate Dooley et al. examine how existing net-zero emission promises (which are already being discarded at an alarming rate) depend on overreliance on land and forestry plans which aren't likely to produce the assumed level of carbon removal, while Ayesha Tandon points out that the gains from past land use improvements have been effectively wiped out by increased fire activity resulting from hotter and drier conditions.
- Meanwhile, Tim Smedley discusses the false promise of "waste-to-energy" schemes which ultimately amount to little more than a baseless excuse to keep expanding the production of fossil fuel-based products. And Esme Stallard, Matt McGrath, Patrick Clahane and Paul Lynch report on the UK's wholesale adoption of waste burning as a substitute for coal power even when it's no better from an environmental standpoint.
- Finally, Abbas Almulla et al. study the long-term effects of long COVID infections on the liver, and find that it tends to correlate with liver damage. Sabra Gibbens rightly questions how much of the medical community is determinedly ignoring COVID-19 as a continuing risk and health condition. And Canada's expert panel review of the initial COVID response includes plenty of recognition of the need to be better prepared, and more aware of social and cultural factors in addressing a public health emergency.
In a recent comment in TomDispatch, theologian Liz Theoharis wrote of the disaster that looms when climate breakdown intersects with poverty.
ReplyDelete"Storms like Hurricane Helene are a force amplifier of deep societal inequities that will worsen if Trump and Vance are elected in November, but in truth the issue runs deeper than just one political party. Indeed, over the last few years, extreme weather events, pandemics, and other public emergencies have exposed a deep societal disease that has only grown worse after decades of neoliberal policies."