‘Human toll was tremendous’: Ida’s death count rises while 600,000 still lack power

‘Human toll was tremendous’: Ida’s death count rises while 600,000 still lack power

Remnants of Ida are seen in New York

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Hurricane Ida’s death toll continued to rise on Sunday, with many in the U.S. Northeast holding out hope for people missing in the floodwaters, while nearly 600,000 customers in Louisiana still lacked power a week after the storm made landfall.

Ida slammed into Louisiana on Aug. 29 as a powerful Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour (240 kph). The latest death toll there rose to at least 13 people on Sunday.

The storm weakened as it moved north but still unleashed flash flooding on the East Coast that killed at least 50 more people, according to updated numbers on Sunday.

Ida’s record-breaking rainfall of 3.1 inches (7.8 cm) per hour on Wednesday, recorded in New York City’s Central Park, sent walls of water cascading through businesses, public transportation systems and 1,200 homes, causing more than $50 million in damage, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said.

“The human toll was tremendous,” said Hochul, recounting a trip to East Elmhurst in the New York City borough of Queens to assess the devastation.

“One woman wept in my arms, an 89-year-old woman. She had nothing left after living in that home for over 40 years,” Hochul said.

The governor previously secured an emergency disaster declaration from President Joe Biden and signed paperwork on Sunday to request related federal money to cover the costs of temporary housing as well as rebuilding homes, possibly in less flood-prone locations.

New York had 17 confirmed deaths, four in suburban Westchester County and the rest in New York City, where nearly all the victims were trapped in illegal basement apartments that are among the last remaining affordable options for low-income residents in the area, the governor’s spokesperson said.

In New Jersey, there were 27 confirmed storm deaths and four people still missing, said a spokesperson for Governor Phil Murphy.

Among the missing were two college students last seen in Passaic, New Jersey, on Wednesday as Ida’s historic deluge was reported to have swept them away in the raging Passaic River.

ROUND-THE-CLOCK OPERATIONS

Twelve boats searched the river on Sunday as part of round-the-clock operations, and rescue teams were anticipating specialized high-resolution sonar to aid their search on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Passaic fire department said.

A Mass was celebrated on Sunday at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, for Nidhi Rana, a first-year commuter student from Passaic who was last seen with her friend Ayush Rana, a Montclair State University student, as the water rushed around his car.

“Join me in keeping Nidhi and Ayush in your prayers for their safe return,” Seton Hall President Joseph Nyre said in a letter to students.

Other storm deaths were reported in Connecticut with at least one dead, Pennsylvania with at least four dead and Maryland with at least one dead.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards increased the number of storm deaths in his Gulf Coast state to 13.

At least four of those people died in Louisiana of carbon monoxide poisoning from power generators, officials said.

Amid stifling heat and humidity, more than 591,000 homes and businesses in the state lacked electricity as of Sunday, according to PowerOutage.com. Some 1.2 million had originally lost power.

Ida also paralyzed U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil production, and 88% of crude oil output and 83% of natural gas production remained suspended as of Sunday.

The Grand Classica, a cruise ship that will house 1,500 workers trying to restore power, departed from the Port of Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday and is due to arrive in New Orleans on Tuesday under a charter agreement with Entergy Corp, the Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line said.

A massive oil slick has emerged near the oil hub of Port Fourchon, Louisiana, with satellite images showing a miles-long brownish-black slick spreading in the coastal waters. A private dive team was attempting to locate the source.

(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg in New York; Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in Washington and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, Calif.; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall and Peter Cooney)

If China’s middle class continues to thrive and grow, what will it mean for the rest of the world?

If China’s middle class continues to thrive and grow, what will it mean for the rest of the world?


<span class="caption">Over the past few decades, hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens have become part of the middle class.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Ng Han Guan</span></span>
Over the past few decades, hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens have become part of the middle class.
 AP Photo/Ng Han Guan

 

China’s large and impressive accomplishments over the past four decades have spurred scholars and politicians to debate whether the decline of the West – including the United States – as the world’s dominant political and economic force is inevitable amid the seemingly inexorable rise of the East.

The COVID-19 virus hit China first and hard, stalling its rapid economic growth for the first time since the Great Recession. But China’s economy grew by a blistering 18.3% in the first quarter of 2021 compared to 2020, keeping it solidly in place as the world’s second-largest economy. Many now believe that China, rather than the U.S., may drive the global recovery from the pandemic.

It’s not yet clear that this current rebound means China has regained its former growth rate. But if it does, I believe it will set off a global contest over which form of government will have a dominant influence over global affairs in coming decades: Western-style democracy or China’s brand of authoritarianism.

My research and that of others examines two questions:

  • Will China solve the biggest challenges to maintaining its four-decade growth rate of 7%-8% annually, which has propelled its rising global power?
  • If China does succeed in sustaining this pace, will this be a benefit to the rest of the world?
The ‘middle-income trap’

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping initiated transformative reforms that opened China up to the international community and foreign investment. In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization and became an enthusiastic participant in global markets and value chains. As a result of these and other economic policies, China has succeeded in rapidly progressing from a low-income to a middle-income nation.

Put another way, globalization has certainly benefited China in many ways up to now. After generations of endemic poverty, hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens have seen wage increases leading to higher disposable income. Now, after paying for basic necessities, they have extra money to save or spend on consumer products such as trendy clothing or tech gadgets.

The gains are now spreading beyond urban centers, with the number of citizens who are both rural and poor in dramatic decline, dropping by 12.89 million between 2016 and 2017 alone. Rural consumer spending is on the rise. As increased agricultural output attenuates fears of famine, daily life in rural communities is improving, while the expansion of nonagricultural rural industries offers them alternative sources of income.

This growing material comfort has led to rising happiness about living in China. Even so, once a country like China achieves middle-income status, it can become trapped: unable to compete with other nations either in the knowledge economy – typically the province of high-income nations – or in the low-wage economy it has left behind.

In an influential study of this “middle-income trap” for a number of countries, the World Bank found that of 101 nations that were middle-income in 1960, only 13 had made it to high-income status by 2008. Partly this was because of what some call a “low productivity equilibrium,” with a relatively small fraction of the overall workforce employed in high-skill jobs such as medical care providers, engineers or managers, rather than low-skill jobs such as farm workers, factory laborers, or retail clerks and cashiers. The remaining 88 countries were either poorer or seemingly stuck in middle-income status.

In addition, many small and large manufacturing companies are responding to China’s rising wages by shifting their operations to countries with lower labor costs, such as India and Vietnam. Forty thousand factories shut down across China every year, eliminating jobs in droves. This means that China has milked low-skilled manufacturing for all its worth, and needs new policies to sustain growth.

China’s education challenge

The world is increasingly divided into two categories: countries that are well-educated and those that aren’t. Since the end of World War II, industrializing nations that have also invested substantially in improving the quality of their high schools, vocational schools and universities have largely avoided the middle-income trap and progressed to high-income status.

In Singapore, for instance, educational system investments of 12%-35% of the annual national budget have given rise to a well-educated, professional, thriving middle class that has anchored ongoing economic growth. Similarly, South Korea has invested heavily in education, spending on average 3.41% of its gross domestic product between 1970 and 2016. This has led to the emergence of a well-educated workforce that has promoted the nation’s economic development for many decades.

Some expert observers believe that China will likely make similar moves successfully, giving it a good chance of escaping the middle-income trap. But for this to happen, the leadership needs to make massive nationwide investments in its educational systems, ranging from improving rural and vocational schools to improving universities and broadening access to urban educational opportunities. These educational investments, which economists term “human capital improvements,” typically take a long time to fully develop.

If China sustained its average annual growth rate of 7% while making this workforce transformation, its per capita income would be about US,000 by 2035, which is almost identical to U.S. per-person income in 2014. That year, about 44% of the U.S. labor force had at least a college education, and 89% a high school diploma. Even optimistic statistical analysis shows that by 2035, China’s education levels will be far lower.

Therefore, the Chinese government will realize its hope of 7% annual growth over the next 20 years only if China manages to produce a numerical relationship between human capital and per capita income that is considerably higher than what the typical global experience thus far has been.

Another challenge is that China is an inequitable country, with the most deeply entrenched rural-urban gap in the world. Under China’s “hukou,” or household registration system, all citizens are assigned at birth to either a rural or an urban hukou. This system, which affects virtually every aspect of one’s life, privileges urban status by providing urban hukou holders with substantially greater and better educational opportunities.

As a result, 260 million Chinese rural hukou holders cannot access the superior education provided in cities. Even when they migrate to urban centers for work, they get left behind because their hukou forces them to live as second-class citizens in their adopted cities. So China must seriously reform the hukou system if it wants to get a secure footing among the “well-educated” nations of the world.

What would a high-income China mean for the rest of the world?

The noted China scholar and Stanford University professor Scott Rozelle has said that “the entire world will be much better off with a thriving China.” He reasons that the world would benefit thanks to continued access to many low-priced goods, while China itself would benefit because increasing personal prosperity would dampen civil political unrest.

But such success might also suggest to developing nations that when it comes to uplifting millions from poverty and delivering broad economic growth and development, socialism with Chinese characteristics is a more desirable model of government than the democracy practiced in the West.

The Chinese Communist Party wishes to remain a firmly authoritarian government. In China, a vast surveillance state tracks people’s faces, scans their phones and is even able to tell when someone has left home.

The government’s persecution of its Muslim-minority Uighur citizens in the Xinjiang region also provides a glimpse of how China might interact with nations and peoples that displease it in a world order that it dominates.

Meanwhile, China is already expanding its international clout through its “Belt and Road Initiative,” which involves investing billions in development projects across Europe, Asia, East Africa and the Western Pacific. In the process China is credibly demanding, and beginning to receive, a dominant political role on the world stage.

It’s too soon to tell whether China will continue to sustain rapid economic growth or make the investments and social reforms it needs to advance most of its citizens into the middle class. But given its determination and progress over the past several decades, it’s plausible that by midcentury, a China equal in wealth and political clout to the U.S. and its coalition of democracies may become a fact. Such a China may well have the power to fracture the current international order into two opposing and incompatible visions about the future of Asia and the world.

I Know Firsthand How Ugly a Wartime Evacuation Really Is

I Know Firsthand How Ugly a Wartime Evacuation Really Is

 

Desperate crowds scrambling after planes on the verge of liftoff; sobbing mothers handing their babies over fences to soldiers; and finally, a gruesome terrorist attack that killed nearly 200 people, including 13 U.S. service members. It’s no surprise that the public thinks President Joe Biden botched the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan, even as polling shows Americans still largely approve of the decision to withdraw.

But from my own personal experience running an evacuation in a war zone, I can attest that it was never going to look good. Ultimately, there was little the U.S. government or military could have done in recent weeks to significantly change the outcome on the ground. These evacuations are always ugly. There is no graceful way to flee a country at war.

I saw this firsthand in December 2013 in Juba, South Sudan. As the U.S. Embassy’s sole consular officer, I led a small interagency team to run evacuation operations at the airport after civil war erupted and violence consumed the capital city and much of the countryside.

The scale was far smaller than what our government just undertook in Kabul. Take the numbers from Afghanistan and knock off two zeroes, and you can approximate the scale in South Sudan. While the U.S. government evacuated about 120,000 people from Kabul, we evacuated around 1,200 from Juba. Even at this smaller scale though, it was an urgent operation, and about a half dozen of us ran 19 evacuation flights in 19 days during South Sudan’s civil war.

The risk profile in Juba differed significantly from Kabul too, but many realities on the ground were similar, and the U.S. government could do little in either case to change them much. Here’s why.

The hardest part of fleeing a war zone is reaching the exit — in these cases, the airport. Because the U.S. government didn’t control Kabul, it had few options to help, all of which put U.S. personnel at greater risk. In South Sudan, we faced this issue too. We fielded hundreds of calls from Americans and others too afraid to cross the city alone amid the violence. We had limited success moving small numbers to the airport, but we didn’t have the resources to do it safely on a large scale.

The challenge was even greater for those outside Juba. I spent days on the phone with Americans sheltering up country, their compounds under fire with battles just outside. As they ran out of food and water, I felt helpless, but we simply weren’t safely able to get them out then.

We learned just how risky those efforts could be when military and State Department colleagues attempted an evacuation flight into the town of Bor. It was aborted when the aircraft came under fire, leaving U.S. service members seriously wounded. Deciding when and how much to put our people at risk is perhaps the hardest question we faced.

Once people reached the airport, someone must decide who gets in. In South Sudan, we didn’t contend with crowds at the gate. The airport had no secure perimeter at all, so the only issue was who we put on planes.

In Kabul, U.S. officials had two decision points and far bigger crowds to deal with. The military decided who could enter the airport, and once inside, consular officers decided who could leave.

But Americans and our Afghan allies — those whose lives were at risk for work on America’s behalf — weren’t the only ones trying to flee in this case. Scores of people were trying to stream in. And without having any law enforcement authority, the U.S. military couldn’t impose greater control outside the gates. That decision point over who to let enter wasn’t only difficult but deadly. Expanding the perimeter would have only pushed the same problem out further.

For every person who made it to and into the airport, hundreds or thousands didn’t, and U.S. officials were responsible for each decision made.

These life-and-death calls were made by real people, about real people, with imperfect information, based on vague and, at times, contradictory guidance from Washington. Who counts as a family member? How do you prove that they are? How do you prioritize among hundreds when no one’s documents are complete? After all, many don’t grab their passport or other documentation when fleeing for their lives.

Answers to these questions are subjective and answering them at volume is hard. In Juba, we couldn’t investigate doubts or verify documents because we were always racing against a clock, usually the airport’s closure at dark. In Kabul, they faced these limitations and more.

I remember these decisions well. I told myself we had limited resources and seats to offer and could only help so many on any given day. But every decision I made to turn someone away still stung.

It’s reasonable to ask why so many people were still left to evacuate after Kabul fell. If more Americans and allies had left sooner, we would have had fewer to get out in the end. The U.S. government had control over one of these categories but not the other.

The government warned American citizens for years not to travel to Afghanistan and repeatedly urged Americans to leave for the past five months. For those who chose to wait, the U.S. government’s hands were tied. And many chose to wait.

I saw this in South Sudan, too. I had urged Americans to leave at their first opportunity, but many didn’t. Americans don’t live in places like South Sudan or Afghanistan casually. They are there for a reason — family, business opportunities or conflict-related work. Most want to be on the last flight out possible and hope things won’t take a turn for the worse. They all had good reasons, but we never know when the last flight out will be; it won’t likely be safe, and it has only so many seats.

Where we could and should have done far better is getting our Afghan allies out sooner. Ramping up evacuations a few weeks earlier might have helped, at least modestly, though there were also reasonable fears the move would destabilize the Afghan government (at the time, we didn’t know how quickly it would fall anyway).

But we never should have been in this situation when Kabul fell. The real culprit is the dysfunctional Special Immigrant Visa program which should have been fixed years ago. The SIV program provides U.S. visas to Afghans whose work for the U.S. government puts them at risk, but its 14-step process is rife with unnecessary, difficult bureaucratic steps. It can take up to three-and-a-half years to complete, and many applicants are unjustly denied. The Trump administration intentionally clogged the SIV program, but it had been broken for years. If this system had worked as intended, many thousands of Afghan allies would already be living in the United States today.

In the final weeks though, most of the challenges on the ground were inevitable. Some things could have gone better, but they also could have gone much worse.

What I hope Americans understand is that our military and civilian officers on the ground were charged with thousands of life-and-death decisions in dangerous circumstances, doing the best they could with limited information and resources. They deserve immense gratitude, but they will live with the weight of these choices forever, and with what their decisions meant for the ones they didn’t choose.

A Decade Of Wind, Solar, & Nuclear In China Shows Clear Scalability Winners

Clean Technica – Clean Power

A Decade Of Wind, Solar, & Nuclear In China Shows Clear Scalability Winners

China’s natural experiment in deploying low-carbon energy generation shows that wind and solar are the clear winners.

By Michael Barnard                    September 5, 2021

China’s largest solar-plus-storage project (PRNewsfoto/Sungrow Power Supply Co., Ltd)

2010–2020 Showed Strong Wins For Wind & Solar In China, Nuclear Lagging

In 2014, I made the strong assertion that China’s track record on wind and nuclear generation deployments showed clearly that wind energy was more scalable. In 2019, I returned to the subject, and assessed wind, solar and nuclear total TWh of generation, asserting that wind and solar were outperforming nuclear substantially in total annual generation, and projected that the two renewable forms of generation would be producing 4 times the total TWh of nuclear by 2030 each year between them. Mea culpa: in the 2019 assessment, I overstated the experienced capacity factor for wind generation in China, which still lags US experiences, but has improved substantially in the past few years.

My thesis on scalability of deployment has remained unchanged: the massive numerical economies of scale for manufacturing and distributing wind and solar components, combined with the massive parallelization of construction that is possible with those technologies, will always make them faster and easier to scale in capacity and generation than the megaprojects of GW-scale nuclear plants. This was obvious in 2014, it was obviously true in 2019, and it remains clearly demonstrable today. Further, my point was that China was the perfect natural experiment for this assessment, as it was treating both deployments as national strategies (an absolute condition of success for nuclear) and had the ability and will to override local regulations and any NIMBYism. No other country could be used to easily assess which technologies could be deployed more quickly.

In March of this year I was giving the WWEA USA+Canada wind energy update as part of WWEA’s regular round-the-world presentation by industry analysts in the different geographies. My report was unsurprising. In 2020’s update, the focus had been on what the impact of COVID-19 would be on wind deployments around the world. My update focused on the much greater focus on the force majeure portions of wind construction contracts, and I expected that Canada and the USA would miss expectations substantially. The story was much the same in other geographies. And that was true for Canada, the USA and most of the rest of the geographies.

But China surprised the world in 2020, deploying not only 72 GW of wind energy, vastly more than expected, but also 48 GW of solar capacity. The wind deployment was a Chinese and global record for a single country, and the solar deployment was over 50% more than the previous year. Meanwhile, exactly zero nuclear reactors were commissioned in 2020.

And so, I return to my analysis of Chinese low-carbon energy deployment, looking at installed capacity and annual added extra generation.

Grid-connections of nameplate capacity of wind, solar and nuclear in China 2010-2020

Grid-connections of nameplate capacity of wind, solar and nuclear in China 2010-2020 chart by author

I’ve aggregated this added additional capacity from multiple sources, including the World Nuclear Association, the Global Wind Energy Council, and the International Energy Agency’s photovoltaic material. In three of the 11 years from 2010 to 2020, China attached no nuclear generation to the grid at all. It’s adding more this year, but the year is not complete.

The solar and wind programs had been started in the mid-2000s, and wind energy initially saw much greater deployments. Having paid much more attention to wind energy than solar for the past decade, I was surprised that solar capacity deployments exceeded wind energy in 2017 and 2018, undoubtedly part of why solar was on track to double China’s 2020 target for the technology, while wind energy was only expected to reach 125% of targets. Nuclear was lagging targets substantially, and there was no expectation of achieving them. In 2019, the clear indication was that China would make substantially higher targets for wind and solar, and downgrade their expectations for nuclear, which has been borne out.

But nameplate capacity doesn’t matter as much as actual generation. As stated in the mea culpa, wind energy in China has underperformed. This was assessed in a Letter in the journal Environmental Research by European and North American researchers in 2018.

“Our findings underscore that the larger gap between actual performance and technical potential in China compared to the United States is significantly driven by delays in grid connection (14% of the gap) and curtailment due to constraints in grid management (10% of the gap), two challenges of China’s wind power expansion covered extensively in the literature. However, our findings show that China’s underperformance is also driven by suboptimal turbine model selection (31% of the gap), wind farm siting (23% of the gap), and turbine hub heights (6% of the gap)—factors that have received less attention in the literature and, crucially, are locked-in for the lifetime of wind farms.”

Some of the capacity factor issues are locked in, and some aren’t, but overall wind energy in China’s capacity is well below that of the US fleet still. I’ve adjusted capacity factors for wind energy to be 21% at the beginning of the decade, and up to 26% for 2020 deployments, still well below US experience. Solar, on the other hand, is less susceptible to some of the challenges of that impede wind energy’s generation, and the Chinese experienced median of 20% is used throughout the decade. China’s nuclear fleet has had much better ability to connect to the grid, and as the reactors are new, they aren’t being taken offline for substantial maintenance yet. The average capacity factor for the fleet of 91.1% for the decade is used.

Generation in TWh added each year by wind, solar and nuclear in China 2010-2020

Generation in TWh added each year by wind, solar and nuclear in China 2010-2020

And this tells the tale. Even adjusted for the poor capacity factor’s wind experienced and the above global average capacity factor for nuclear, in no year did the nuclear fleet add more actual generation than wind energy. The story is more mixed in the solar vs nuclear story, but only once in the past five years was more annual generation in TWh added by the nuclear program than by solar. And as a reminder, the Chinese wind and solar deployment programs started well over a decade after the nuclear program which saw its first grid connections in 1994.

What is also interesting to see is that the reversal in wind and solar deployments in China in the past two years. 2019 and 2020 saw double or more than double the actual generation in TWh added by wind than solar. To be clear, some of this is uptick is due to an expected and subsequently announced elimination of federal subsidies for utility-scale solar, commercial solar and onshore wind projects in 2021.

“The new rule, effective from Aug. 1, follows a drastic fall in manufacturing costs for solar and wind devices amid booming renewable capacity in China.”

This appears to have driven Chinese 2020 wind energy deployments to ensure that they would receive the compensation, just as US deployments have seen significant surges and lulls due to changes in the production tax credit. As a result, there is speculation that the announced wind generation capacity is not as fully completed as announced. However, that should not change the expected capacity factors for the coming years, and so I’ve left the 120 TWh projected delivery from the wind farms deployed in 2020 as is.

It’s worth noting that as of today, 7 of the 10 largest wind turbine manufacturers, and 9 of the 10 largest solar component manufacturers are Chinese companies. China remains, as I pointed out a couple of years ago, the only scaled manufacturer of many of the technologies necessary for decarbonization. Further, it’s expanding its market share in those technologies rapidly.

My 2014 thesis continues to be supported by the natural experiment being played out in China. In my recent published assessment of small modular nuclear reactors (tl’dr: bad idea, not going to work), it became clear to me that China has fallen into one of the many failure conditions of rapid deployment of nuclear, which is to say an expanding set of technologies instead of a standardized single technology, something that is one of the many reasons why SMRs won’t be deployed in any great numbers.

Wind and solar are going to be the primary providers of low-carbon energy for the coming century, and as we electrify everything, the electrons will be coming mostly from the wind and sun, in an efficient, effective and low-cost energy model that doesn’t pollute or cause global warming. Good news indeed that these technologies are so clearly delivering on their promise to help us deal with the climate crisis.

As COVID Surges, We’re Not in the Endgame, We’re Mired in Uncertainty

Mother Jones – Coronavirus Updates

As COVID Surges, We’re Not in the Endgame, We’re Mired in Uncertainty

“People are pretty burned out 18 months into this thing.”

Medical staff move COVID-19 patient who died onto a gurney to hand off to a funeral home van, at the Willis-Knighton Medical Center in Shreveport, La., Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. Gerald Herbert/AP

Just three months ago, the United States averaged fewer than 25,000 COVID infections a day, with an average of 627 COVID deaths over a seven-day period. It was the end of May and it seemed as if the light at the end of the proverbial COVID tunnel was near just as the “hot vax summer” was about to begin.

Then, as more and more Americans became vaccinated, too many—to the tune of 47 percent of Americans as of Sunday—have refused. And among that group of people, the more transmissible Delta variant spread like wildfire. Now, at summer’s end, as the nation averages more than 160,000 infections per day, more than 100,000 daily hospitalizations, and more than 1,500 deaths, the highest rates since March, epidemiologists, public health officials, and, frankly, many Americans are asking: When will this end?

In places where vaccinations are low, the wave of infections has pushed hospitals to the brink of a crisis. In Mississippi, just 38 percent of residents are fully vaccinated, and the surge in cases and hospitalizations, particularly among children, have strained hospitals. At the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the state’s only level one trauma center, the emergency room and ICU are beyond capacity, with exhausted hospital workers treating patients in a “logjam” of beds scattered in the hallways and in triage rooms. During a recent news conference, Dr. LouAnn Woodward, the head of that medical center, said, “We, as a state, as a collective, have failed to respond in a unified way to a common threat.”

In Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has been aggressively antagonistic toward mask mandates and measures that would curtail COVID’s spread, the state is seeing its deadliest period in the pandemic, averaging 244 deaths per day, higher than its peak last summer. Just 44 percent of residents are vaccinated in nearby South Carolina where the state is averaging 5,400 new COVID cases per day, the highest infection rate in the country. Steve Benjamin, Democratic mayor of Columbia, the state’s capital, announced he planned essentially to defy the Republican governor’s ban of mask mandates by imposing a local state of emergency and order students to wear masks if COVID cases keep rising.

What’s more, the CDC recently found that unvaccinated people are 29 times more likely to be hospitalized from COVID than those who are vaccinated, further burdening hospital resources. Part of the issue, of course, is that only kids 12 years and older can currently get vaccinated, and the reopening of schools for in-person learning has amplified concerns over the spread among children, teachers, and their families. CDC research found that between mid-June and late August, COVID hospitalizations rose fivefold among children and teenagers.

But the story of unvaccinated versus vaccinated children could be considered a microcosm of the unfolding of the pandemic generally. Even though children under age 12 cannot be vaccinated, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, recently said that they likely won’t begin to be until “hopefully by the mid, late fall and early winter.” But for those who can get vaccinated, it’s clear that the shots work to curtail hospitalizations. The rate of COVID hospitalizations was 10 times higher among unvaccinated children compared to vaccinated ones. And tellingly, pediatric hospitalizations were roughly four times higher in states with the lowest vaccination rates than in those with the highest, further showing that vaccines curtail severe disease even among children.

What does this all mean? It means we’re in the midst of yet another period of uncertainty that’s likely to continue if we fail to vaccinate enough people and take actions such as mask mandates to curb the virus spread. A Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that 52 percent of Americans supported vaccine mandates from businesses and two-thirds of those polled supported school districts requiring mask wearing for students, teachers, and staff. Even so, that same poll found that even though they are more concerned than in June, more than 60 percent of unvaccinated Americans saw “low” to “no” risk of contracting COVID.

“People are pretty burned out 18 months into this thing,” Ezekiel Emanuel, professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Washington Post. “And the exhaustion has been made worse by the rapid seesaw we’re having—take your masks off, put them back on. It’s all very confusing, but we have to be honest: We don’t know when, we don’t know how. We don’t know.”

MSNBC’s Joy Reid Busts A Big Myth Republicans Tell Themselves About Their Party

MSNBC’s Joy Reid Busts A Big Myth Republicans Tell Themselves About Their Party

 

MSNBC’s Joy Reid dedicated her “Absolute Worst” segment on Friday to explaining why the GOP is anything but the pro-life party, despite its claims.

“The ReidOut” anchor referenced Texas’ extreme new anti-abortion law, Republican opposition to COVID-19 mask mandates, GOP voter resistance to receiving the coronavirus vaccine, and the party’s anti-environment policies to make her point.

“You can’t call yourself a pro-life party if your policy goals are to allow the maximum number of people to die of COVID, including children, by banning mask mandates in businesses and schools and raising doubts about vaccines,” she said.

“You can’t call yourself the pro-life, pro-family party if your policy goals are to put bounties on pregnant women and to force teenage girls to give birth after getting pregnant as a result of incest and rape,” Reid added.

“The Republican Party is a lot of things; anti-democracy, anti-voting, anti-history, anti-facts, deeply opposed to anti-racism. What they are not is pro-life,” she concluded, saying it’s now “loudly and proudly the pro-death party.”

Watch Reid’s monologue here:

Amid criticism, one veterans’ organization calls Biden administration ‘least culpable’ on Afghanistan

Amid criticism, one veterans’ organization calls Biden administration ‘least culpable’ on Afghanistan

VoteVets.org
VoteVets.org Alex Wong/Getty Images

 

Many veterans of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are frustrated with the execution of President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Politico reports. For some, it has reportedly led to an increase in PTSD symptoms.

“I haven’t talked to anybody who isn’t angry or disappointed in how this was carried out,” Tom Porter, the executive vice president of government affairs with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (which consists of more than 425,000 members who served in Iraq and Afghanistan), told Politico. “Nobody thinks there was a plan.”

But Jon Soltz, an Iraq veteran and the chair of the Democrat-aligned advocacy group VoteVets, thinks Biden doesn’t deserve the brunt of the criticism about the U.S. departure. “Let’s investigate,” he told Politico. “Right, let’s talk about the Trump deal with the Taliban that was only a deal between the United States and not a deal with the Afghan government. If we want to do investigations on Afghanistan, there’s 19 years of administrations to look at, and there’s about three months of [the Biden] administration. So let’s open this thing up and let’s talk about it, because the person who is least culpable is this administration.” Read more at Politico.

It’s Time to Put the Right-Wing Zombie Death Cult on Trial

It’s Time to Put the Right-Wing Zombie Death Cult on Trial

Jena Ardell/Getty
Jena Ardell/Getty

 

What will the Biden Administration do to save our children from the disease-spreading, right-wing zombie death cult?

This week, we started to find out.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Education opened civil-rights investigations into five states—Iowa, South Carolina, Utah, Oklahoma, and Tennessee—that are banning local school districts from imposing mask mandates. They are relying on two federal laws: the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which protects students with a disability from discrimination and guarantees them a right to a free education, and Title II of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which prohibits disability discrimination by public education systems. The states could be found in violation of federal law if the investigation finds that “students with disabilities who are at heightened risk for severe illness from COVID-19 are prevented from safely returning to in-person education.”

The penalties include loss of federal funding—or the school can simply agree to change its policies, which in this case would be choosing life by requiring masking and vaccination for school employees.

These students with heightened risk of illness include my 5-year-old daughter Nusayba, a Stage 4 cancer survivor who is immuno-suppressed due to her liver transplant. I recently wrote about how we were desperately trying to get her into virtual school, along with her brother, Ibrahim, who just turned 7. Thankfully, they were both admitted, and now I’m at home doing tech support until 3:30 p.m., but at least I know they are safe.

Meanwhile, there’s already been one COVID case on the second day of school. And their school is far from the worst of it. Thanks to the GOP’s multi-pronged and coordinated attack on masks, social distancing, and vaccines at schools, Delta is still thriving and there have been massive outbreaks at schools across the country.

This isn’t a “both sides” problem. Of the 10 states with the most COVID-19 cases per capita, as of Wednesday, nine of them were led by Republican governors—surprise!—and voted for Trump in 2020, as The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, 16 Democratic states have statewide mask requirements for schools. Tennessee, one of the five states being sued, just set a new record for COVID hospitalizations, and previously moved to cut off all vaccine outreach to students and young adults.

Now, thousands of its school-aged kids have COVID-19 with no end in sight. Some school districts in the United States are even leaving it up to parents to decide if they will quarantine their exposed child or send the child to school to spread the disease to other unvaccinated children.

Meanwhile, conservative radio hosts and influencers who peddled anti-vax misinformation are winning Darwin Awards and dying weekly from the coronavirus.

However, this doesn’t stop the right-wing hate machine. Onward they persist with their nihilistic, counter-majoritarian death march.

Republicans, such as those in Texas, believe they have the freedom to infect their kid and your kids with coronavirus, but women shouldn’t have the freedom to control their own bodies. Other conservative activists believe “freedom” means harassing and threatening school boards, intimidating health care workers, and spreading the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory, which is now a domestic terror threat. Among other things, some suggest that anyone who believes in vaccines and mask mandates in schools is actually a “demonic entity” and bears “the mark of the beast.” That’s what Melissa, an alleged nurse from Lee County, Florida, recently said at a school-board meeting where she said that Christians around America will “take them all out,” referring to anyone who opposed her pro-death initiatives to spread COVID-19.

<div class="inline-image__caption"><p>People protest the North Allegheny School District’s mask mandate.</p></div> <div class="inline-image__credit">Alexandra Wimley/AP</div>People protest the North Allegheny School District’s mask mandate. Alexandra Wimley/AP

You’d think she’s a kooky outlier, a walking punchline. But she’s an ordinary rank-and-file soldier in this death movement that is holding our children’s safety hostage to advance their culture war. They aren’t the “American Taliban” or “enforcing Sharia,” and we should stop using Islam and Muslims as the benchmark for extremism. They are agents of White Christian Supremacy hellbent on ensuring minority rule for white men by any violent means necessary.

Our kids are simply the bait and collateral damage.

Steve Lynch, a Republican running for Northampton County executive in Pennsylvania, is an anti-masker encouraging violence against school boards unwilling to submit to his anti-masking belligerence. On Aug. 29, he said, “You go in and you remove ’em. I’m going in there with 20 strong men… They can leave or be removed.”

In Buncombe County, North Carolina, anti-maskers tried to “overthrow” the school board, encouraged in part by Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who fought a tree and lost, and continued rehabilitating the imprisoned violent insurrectionists of Jan. 6 at a recent rally by referring to them as “political hostages.” He said he’s working on “busting them out,” and he also seemed to call for another riot, despite this past one effectively killing five people, including a police officer, and being followed by law-enforcement suicides. He urged the Macon County Republicans to “defend their children” from harmful vaccines.

One of my lovely fans emailed me this week to warn me that violence will “spill out into the streets” and “there [are] 100 million Americans waiting for the day. I don’t foresee any Army coming to the rescue of the voices such as yourself who spin a web of lies and hateful rhetoric.”

He used his full name and email address. There’s no need to hide in the shadows and wear the hoods when your elected officials and your God-King, Trump, openly incite potential violence and criminality.

<div class="inline-image__caption"><p>A teacher holds up a sign protesting Florida’s decision to open schools last summer.</p></div> <div class="inline-image__credit">Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty</div>A teacher holds up a sign protesting Florida’s decision to open schools last summer. Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty

They are deliberately using threats of violence to terrorize the majority and have us cede ground. It seems to be working, as school-board members are stepping down across the country, unwilling to tolerate the “toxic and impossible” environment.

We’re dealing with a potential criminal element, and might need to flex with more than the Education Department and broad vaccine mandates to save our kids. I asked former career federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner if the Department of Justice could step in with a criminal investigation if there’s evidence that these GOP-led state governments are actually harming children.

“I happen to believe that, because education is primarily a local issue, that local and state prosecutorial authorities should be evaluating whether the state governors and governments are recklessly and criminally endangering our children,” Kirschner told me, holding Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “a prime example.”

He believes DeSantis’ mask bans in Florida school districts might give prosecutors enough evidence to initiate a criminal investigation. He cited the recent Florida judge who overturned the recent mask ban and sided with parents whose lawsuit alleges, in part, that the policy violates the state constitution that requires providing a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality system” of public schools.

“I cannot understand why our prosecutorial authorities—federal, state, and local—seem to have concluded that we shouldn’t try to hold elected politicians accountable for killing the citizenry,” Kirschner added.

It is still possible that the Department of Education is introducing the carrot before the Department of Justice unleashes the stick. From my eyes, these GOP leaders are helping to actively kill people and harm children with their pro-death policies. That should immediately warrant criminal investigations and liability for causing avoidable COVID deaths.

The rest of us, the majority, need to stand our ground against this belligerent minority for the sake of our children’s safety and public health.

We can’t “both sides” or seek a bipartisan solution with a pro-death movement. Enough.

A blazing inferno threatens my paradise on Earth: Lake Tahoe

A blazing inferno threatens my paradise on Earth: Lake Tahoe

<span>Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP</span>
Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

 

It’s not the Ritz-Carlton. The remote cabin my family has rented in South Lake Tahoe for the past 10 years is small, buggy, mouse-infested and surrounded by dirt. There’s no turndown service – there’s not even cellphone or internet service. Amenities include a river, beavers that emerge at sundown and an overwhelming sense of peace.

Now our little piece of paradise is threatened by the massive Caldor fire as the entire Tahoe region becomes the latest flashpoint in the global climate crisis. Years of drought and rising temperatures have created California’s worst fire season on record. The images are horrific: giant walls of flames descending mountain sides. Orange skies. Homes scorched to ash. The entire town of South Lake Tahoe, which includes 22,000 year-round residents and many more summer visitors, has been evacuated.

Lake Tahoe – a 22-mile (35km), sapphire-blue lake nested in an emerald-green forest and ringed by soaring granite mountains – has been a favorite vacation spot for generations of American families, among them my own.

Our daughters were just three and five when we first brought them to Tahoe. They are city girls, and I wanted them to experience nature first-hand as I had during my Indiana childhood. Our house was perched on the edge of a woods, and my brother and I would disappear into this interstitial space of freedom to look for box turtles or build forts. I’ve returned to the solace of nature throughout my adulthood, and I wanted to introduce my children to this wellspring as well.

The former fishing cabin, built in the 1920s along the Upper Truckee River, fit the bill. It was the perfect inexpensive vacation spot for our family – which is important when you’re a teacher and a writer living in the Bay Area. When we started renting it, it cost $80 a night.

The house is a place out of time, still furnished with the original Wedgewood stove and cooking utensils. Without the constant blare of the internet and social media, the days move slowly. Entertainment includes playing in the river, reading in a hammock, identifying flora using a field guide. We alternate between lazy beach days at Lake Tahoe and hiking days, following trails up mountains to snowpacks, flowering meadows or alpine lakes. Along the way, conversations happen. Connections happen.

It was on a beach day last year that we witnessed the arrival of what was – until then – California’s worst fire season on record. As we sat in an isolated cove at the south end of Lake Tahoe – our girls floating on their inflatable rafts in the famously clear water, my husband and I paging through magazines – I noticed what looked like a fog bank forming at the north end of the lake. Over the next hour it rolled toward us, growing taller and darker and obscuring the casinos in Stateline, Nevada, on the lake’s eastern side and billowing over the 9,000ft peaks on the western side. Then we caught a whiff of smoke. By the time we packed up our car, the world was sepia-toned.

The smoke was from the Loyalton fire, sparked by lightning in the Sierra backcountry – one of nearly 10,000 wildfires reported in California in 2020 which burned an unprecedented 4.2m acres. We cut our vacation short and drove home through a fire-ravaged landscape, at one point passing vegetation still burning in the highway’s median strip. Our relief at coming home to clean air was short-lived, however; a few weeks later we woke to an eerie, blood-orange sky and ash falling on the trampoline as the smoke from multiple conflagrations raging across the state converged over the Bay Area. Crickets chirped in the noon darkness; it felt like the end of the world.

This year, I didn’t hesitate to book the cabin again. I assumed 2020’s wildfires were an exception. I was wrong. On 4 July, lightning sparked a fire just 24 miles away from South Lake Tahoe and as nearby towns evacuated, I reluctantly cancelled our reservation and planned a last-minute road trip to southern California instead.

That fire, the Tamarack fire, is still burning today, two months later. But now there’s an even worse peril: the Caldor fire, which, for the first time in reported history, jumped over the high granite peaks of the Sierra Nevada and entered the Tahoe Basin.

Back home, smoke has once again reached the Bay Area, elevating pollution levels. I’ve retrieved our air purifiers from the garage. I’ve obsessively tracked the fire’s voracious progress online, anxiety burning my stomach as I find photos of familiar mountainsides and cabins devoured in orange flames. This year’s conflagrations have already burned more acreage than last year’s fires. On Wednesday, for the first time in history, the US Forest Service closed all national forests in the state to try to thwart more infernos.

As I scroll through the hundreds of photos we’ve taken in Tahoe over the past 10 years, my throat wells with sorrow. My phone’s screensaver is a clip of my daughters chatting as they hike down our favorite trail on a blue-sky day. I worry that those blue-sky days are numbered.

The thing I love most about the buggy little cabin – its off-the-grid, deep-forest isolation – is now a dangerous liability. Without cellphone service or internet, how will we know if a fire is racing in our direction? After an emotional discussion, my husband and I decided it’s just too risky to spend more summers there. I feel the loss viscerally, like Eve being cast out of Eden. Although it’s just a rental, the cabin is an integral part of our family history.

I’ve made one last reservation, for a weekend in mid-October, to say goodbye. At that time of year, the quaking aspens alongside the river normally turn a buttery yellow and I like to sit under them with my morning coffee, mesmerized by their cheery shimmer.

“Normal” is now a relative term, of course. I don’t know whether the 100-year-old cabin will still be standing next month, or if it, too, will be reduced to ash – a grim warning of an apocalyptic future.

  • Julia Scheeres is a writer and the COO of Sustainabar, which makes zero-waste beauty and cleaning products
  • This article was amended on 4 September 2021 to clarify that the writer rents the cabin and does not own it

How Lake Tahoe was spared devastation from the Caldor fire

How Lake Tahoe was spared devastation from the Caldor fire

Lake Tahoe, CA. September 1, 2021: Mist from from snowmakers sprays water next to a chairlift as the Caldor fire approaches near the ski resort of Kirkwood Wednesday. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)
Snowmaking machines spray water as the Caldor fire neared the Kirkwood ski resort on Sept. 1. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

 

Things looked grim for South Lake Tahoe as the Caldor fire barreled toward the treasured resort community this week.

The fire spotted over a granite ridge that officials had hoped would keep flames from spreading into the Tahoe Basin. Forecasters warned of gusty winds and bone-dry conditions that could push it further toward populated areas, raising fears of an urban conflagration. Tens of thousands of residents and visitors fled, gridlocking traffic along Highway 50.

But the danger appeared to have largely abated Saturday, as authorities said the fight against the 214,112-acre blaze seemed to have turned a corner. The fire is now 43% contained.

Crews made a stand in Christmas Valley and held the fire south of Meyers in the northern Sierra Nevada. No structures burned in South Lake Tahoe, and crews were also able to save homes in Christmas Valley and Meyers.

Firefighters had carved containment lines around more than a third of the blaze. They credited a combination of aggressive firefighting tactics, improved weather conditions and past efforts to prepare the landscape for wildfire.

“If we would have had the same weather and fire behavior continue for two more days, we would have had a real problem,” said Dominic Polito, a public information officer on the fire. “So there was a little bit of divine mercy.”

“It’s no longer burning miles upon miles in a single 12-hour period, and that just had to do with the change in weather,” he said.

Although it was too soon to say South Lake Tahoe was completely out of the woods, authorities were cautiously optimistic, said Capt. Parker Wilbourn, another public information officer on the fire.

There were still some areas of concern where crews were working to ensure flames would not slop over containment lines, including the Christmas Valley and Kirkwood areas, as well as portions of the Heavenly area, he said.

He ticked off the factors that played into the improved prognosis. Some of it was terrain: a portion of the fire’s northern flank reached granite around Pyramid Peak in the Desolation Wilderness, depriving it of fuel to burn, he said. Some of it was luck, as it always is.

Some of it, he said, was the weather: the winds were not quite as fierce as initially forecast and subsided further midweek.

“A decrease in wind, decrease in temperatures and increase in humidity have all played to our advantage over the past two to three days,” Wilbourn said. “We’ve used that time to bolster our containment lines and start putting crews directly on the front lines for a firefight.”

Officials also noted the return of an inversion layer that helps to keep the sun from heating vegetation and the fire from sending up a plume of heat and smoke, effectively putting a lid on its activity: “Because if the smoke can’t leave, it means the fire can’t breathe,” Polito said.

But ultimately, Wilbourn credited three key factors with helping to save South Lake Tahoe: extensive firefighting operations, residents maintaining defensible space around their homes and past forest management projects.

“They’ve had a forest clearing initiative for the last nine to 10 years that really cleared out that fuel load,” he said, crediting the U.S. Forest Service with completing both prescribed burns and vegetation thinning operations.

The Forest Service partnered with the Sierra Nevada Conservancy on a project that called for 8,800 acres to be burned in the Caples Creek drainage over 10 to 15 years starting in 2017. The project included the 3,435-acre Caples prescribed burn in 2019, which was declared a wildfire after winds picked up and it burned at a higher intensity than intended, requiring suppression resources to be called in.

Like many Western U.S. forests, the watershed once benefited from frequent, low-intensity fires caused by lightning and Indigenous burning practices, experts say. But after colonization and aggressive fire suppression tactics upended that cycle, with the imbalance compounded by drought and climate change, the forest there was infilled with smaller trees and understory vegetation that increased drought stress on larger trees, according to the Forest Service. These so-called ladder fuels can also carry fire up into the canopy, helping it burn hotter and spread more quickly.

By thinning tree density and reducing the amount of smaller trees and vegetation, authorities had hoped to lessen the intensity of future wildfires that moved through the area.

The Caldor fire served as the project’s first real test, and experts have been closely monitoring the outcome.

Wilbourn said it appears to have played a role in significantly slowing the fire’s spread in some areas, helping crews to catch it. He pointed on the perimeter map to a pocket of green in the southern finger of the fire that overlapped with part of that prescribed burn, as well as other treatments he said had been performed in the Kirkwood area.

“The reason it’s kind of fingering out is you’ll see where some of that forest mitigation has happened,” he said.

Susie Kocher, forestry and natural resources advisor at the University of California Cooperative Extension, agreed.

“If you look at any of the fire maps, there’s a big gap between Kirkwood and Tahoe,” said Kocher, who was forced to evacuate her Meyers, Calif., home Monday. “That’s Caples.”

She said that due in part to its allure, the Tahoe area has been more successful than many parts of the Sierra in attracting resources for such projects.

The Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team, a multiagency coalition formed after the damaging Angora fire in 2007, said it has performed 65,000 acres of fuel reduction work in the Tahoe Basin over the past 13 years. The group also helps neighborhoods prepare for fire.

In a recent community briefing, Rocky Oplinger, an incident commander, described how such work can assist firefighters. When the fire spotted above Meyers, it reached a fuels treatment that helped reduce flame lengths from 150 to 15 feet, enabling firefighters to mount a direct attack and protect homes, he said.

“It takes both fuels reduction and active suppression in an environment like this to help the community and the forest survive,” Kocher said.

There’s not yet word on the cause of the Caldor fire, which started Aug. 14 about four miles south of Grizzly Flats and eventually decimated the town. About 55,000 people had been forced from their homes as of Friday, but that number had dropped by Saturday as some were able to return, authorities said. The fire had destroyed 687 homes and 18 commercial properties, with damage assessments 75% complete, Wilbourn said.

Firefighters were able to save homes in Christmas Valley and Meyers using a combination of tactics Polito described as fairly typical. First, authorities estimated where the fire was likely to travel based on the weather and topography. Then, crews went out to those areas and prepared structures by removing log piles, lawn furniture and brush to give embers fewer opportunities to take hold.

Once the fire arrived, they did what’s called a “fire front following,” Polito said.

“It’s impossible to stop a big fire from coming through, but what we can do is position ourselves on the roads in vehicles and in what we call safety zones,” he said. “Then as the fire comes through and starts to ignite all the fuels, we will follow it from behind and put out the different fuels that are near the structures.”

They also lit backburns to eliminate fuel between the communities and the fire, he said.

Firefighters were further helped by the fact that residents evacuated quickly, allowing crews to focus on saving homes rather than people, Polito said.

“Because that fire came so fast, if people would have been dragging their feet and blocking the roads, we couldn’t have saved all those homes,” he said.