Category: Veterans – Patriotism

Is it covid or Lyme Disease? If you’re vaccinated and have a rash, it’s easier to diagnose

Tribune Publishing

Tom Davidson, The Tribune-Review, Greensburg     

 

June 3rd—It’s tick season, and with it comes an increased risk of contracting Lyme disease or another tick-borne illness.

Diagnosing the disease can be trickier this year amid the covid-19 pandemic, as some of the symptoms of the diseases are similar.

“There’s a lot of overlap,” Dr. Amesh Adalja said of the symptoms between Lyme disease and covid-19.

Adalja is a Pittsburgh-based infectious disease expert and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Lyme disease and covid-19 both can cause fever and aches and pains associated with the flu. But each have symptoms that help to distinguish one from the other, Adalja said.

With Lyme disease, a bull’s-eye skin rash develops around the spot of the tick bite.

With covid, the flu-like symptoms are generally accompanied by respiratory problems not associated with Lyme.

“Most tick bites are innocuous and do not transmit an infection,” Adalja said.

But there are a host of bacterial and viral illnesses, including Lyme disease, that are spread by exposure to certain ticks.

In the U.S. there are 16 different diseases transmitted by ticks, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The most common among them in Western Pennsylvania is Lyme disease, transmitted by the deer tick, according to the Allegheny County Health Department.

In 2019, the latest year that data is available, there were 6,763 confirmed and 2,235 probable cases of Lyme disease in Pennsylvania, according to the CDC. Between 2000 and 2018, there have been more than 106,000 cases in the state, according to tickcheck.com, a site managed by Pennsylvania-based tick researchers.

In Allegheny County there were 2,306 cases of Lyme disease reported in 2019, an 11% decrease from the 2,605 cases in 2018, according to the county health department.

Westmoreland County had 435 confirmed cases of Lyme disease in 2019, down from 496 in 2018, according to CDC data. The county had a high of 577 cases in 2017.

To prevent Lyme disease, one needs to use common sense and do things that may be unpopular when spending time outdoors, Adalja said.

They include wearing clothing that covers the arms and legs, using tick repellent, being careful in wooded areas and looking for ticks that may have latched on.

They’re “standard, common-sense recommendations,” Adalja said.

Otherwise, if someone is bitten by a tick, they don’t need to seek immediate medical treatment.

Instead, they should be aware “for the next several weeks” should they develop a rash, fever or muscle aches that are associated with Lyme disease, which is signaled by a “bull’s-eye rash” around the bite.

“Lyme can be treated with an antibiotic,” Adalja said.

Because the symptoms of fever and flu-like symptoms are similar to covid-19, people who may have been exposed to ticks should advise their doctor of it.

He again advised people to get vaccinated for covid. If they are vaccinated against covid and develop symptoms of Lyme disease, they should tell the doctor about their vaccination in order to speed the diagnosis.

For more on Lyme disease, click here for information from the Allegheny County Health Department or click here for information from the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

Tom Davidson is a Tribune-Review staff writer.

A Fatty Heart Puts Your Health at Risk No Matter Your Weight, New Study Suggests

A Fatty Heart Puts Your Health at Risk No Matter Your Weight, New Study Suggests

Arielle Weg                           
Photo credit: Rasi Bhadramani - Getty Images
Photo credit: Rasi Bhadramani – Getty Images

  • Having high pericardial fat volume—fat around your heart—can increase your risk of heart failure regardless of your bodyweight, a new study suggests.
  • More than 6 million people in the U.S. are impacted by heart failure, a condition in which the heart can’t pump enough blood for the body’s needs.
  • To reduce the risk of excess pericardial fat, experts recommend working toward habits that contribute to better heart health overall.

Pericardial fat—the fat that surrounds your heart—may be a strong risk factor for heart failure regardless of your bodyweight, according to new research from Mount Sinai in New York.

For the study, which was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, researchers used CT scans to determine the connection between pericardial fat volume and newly diagnosed heart failure, a condition in which the heart can’t pump the amount of blood the body needs to function. More than 6 million people in the U.S. have heart failure, which a person can develop suddenly or over time.

The CT scans were sourced from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and included scans from 6,785 men and women between the ages of 45 and 84 without pre-existing cardiovascular disease.

The researchers found that, even though women typically had less pericardial fat than men, women who did meet the criteria for high pericardial fat volume (70 cubic centimeters or more) had double the risk of developing heart failure. Men who met the fatty heart criteria (120 cubic centimeters or more) had a 53% increased risk.

What’s more, a higher amount of pericardial fat was dangerous regardless of the participants’ body weight. That means being thin didn’t necessarily prevent harmful fat build-up around the heart.

The researchers also adjusted for other well-known risk factors for heart failure such as age, tobacco use, alcohol consumption, a sedentary lifestyle, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and previous heart attacks. Results were similar across all racial backgrounds.

“The fat around the heart is known to be a predictor of heart disease, largely because it can be associated with other risk factors like obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure,” explains Eugenia Gianos, M.D., associate professor of cardiology at the Zucker School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. “The fact that this association held true even after accounting for all these factors indicates that the fat may have a direct effect on the heart muscle that contributes to the abnormalities associated with heart failure.”

When there is extra fat surrounding your heart, fatty droplets may begin to accumulate within the heart muscle cells, says lead study author Satish Kenchaiah, M.D., associate professor of medicine and cardiology specialist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. These droplets can interfere with how your heart chamber expands and reduce your heart’s ability to pump blood properly, setting the stage for heart failure, he says.

A fatty heart is also related to plaque buildup in the coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart muscles. This is a known risk factor for heart attacks, which could subsequently increase the risk of developing heart failure down the line, he adds.

Dr. Kenchaiah says more research is needed to determine how to reduce and prevent excess pericardial fat, but working toward habits that contribute to better heart health overall is a good place to start. To keep your ticker in tip-top shape, he recommends the following:

  • Eat a Mediterranean-style diet, which is rich in colorful fruits and vegetables, fiber-rich whole grains and legumes, olive oil, nuts and seeds, and lean proteins like seafood and poultry.
  • Aim for 75 minutes of heart-pumping exercise (such as running) or 150 minutes of moderate activity (like brisk walking) throughout the week.
  • Avoid excessive alcohol intake, which is considered no more than one drink per day for women and two for men.
  • Work with your doctor to lower high blood pressure, high blood sugar, or high cholesterol levels—all of which increase your risk of heart disease.

Worst Drought in Decades Escalates Threats Across U.S. West

Worst Drought in Decades Escalates Threats Across U.S. West

Brian K. Sullivan                        

 

(Bloomberg) — Almost three-fourths of the western U.S. is gripped by drought so severe that it’s off the charts of anything recorded in the 20-year history of the U.S. Drought Monitor. Mountains across the West have seen little precipitation, robbing reservoirs of dearly needed snowmelt and rain, said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist and Drought Monitor author with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The parched conditions mean the wildfire threat is high and farmers are struggling to irrigate crops. Meanwhile, dropping water levels in Lake Oroville, one of California’s largest reservoirs, forced authorities to remove more than 100 houseboats, according to the Weather Channel. “Water supply is the big story for the West, and we are getting in trouble with all the interests that try to compete for a slice of that water,” Rippey said by telephone. “There is not a lot to go around this year.”

Unlike the eastern U.S., in the West most water comes in winter months in the form of rain that gushes into reservoirs or snow that piles up on mountainsides. Last year, drought cost the nation $4.5 billion, according to the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information. This year, what little snow that fell soon melted away and seeped into dusty ground rather than rivers, streams and reservoirs.

For a photo essay of California’s worsening drought, click here. “We have never seen a drought at the scale and the intensity that we see right now, and it is possible that this may be the baseline for the future,” Elizabeth Klein, senior counselor for the Department of Interior told a Congressional hearing last week. “California is currently experiencing its third-driest year on record; the second two driest years on record, and the driest year since 1977.”

Through the end of April, 1.7 million acre-feet of water melted off California’s mountains, down from the normal rate of 8 million, Rippey said. In the last two years, there has only been 4 million. “This is, by far, the worst recharge year in modern history,” Rippey said. In addition to the drought figures, officials are concerned about the Colorado River, which powers hydroelectric plants and provides drinking and irrigation water across much of the Southwest and parts of Mexico. So much water is taken out of the Colorado, in fact, that it rarely ever makes it to its historical delta in the Gulf of California. Based on paleohydrology, scientists say the Colorado is experiencing one of its driest periods in 1,200 years, Klein said.

Surge in Early Retirements Exposes Inequalities Among U.S. Baby Boomers

Surge in Early Retirements Exposes Inequalities Among U.S. Baby Boomers

Alex Tanzi                                   

(Bloomberg) — The surge in early retirements spurred by the pandemic is increasing inequality among Baby Boomers in the U.S., with older Black workers without a college degree more likely to be forced to exit the labor market prematurely, a study showed.

At least 1.7 million older workers retired early because of the pandemic crisis, according to a report by the New School for Social Research’s Retirement Equity Lab.

The Covid-19 health crisis is creating two classes of early retirees. People who have investments are taking advantage of the unprecedented surge in shares and home values to enjoy their silver years.

Read More: Millennials at 40 Are Falling Behind Their Parents in Every Way

Meanwhile, many low-paid workers without much retirement savings found themselves forced out of their jobs with little prospect of finding employment again. Retiring before the full retirement age will result in a cut in their Social Security benefits, by as much as 30%.

The few years before 65 are crucial to prepare for retirement and unplanned exits can lead to downward mobility and even poverty for these workers, according to Teresa Ghilarducci, economist and director of the Retirement Equity Lab.

“The pandemic is revealing the main fault line in our broken retirement system — inequality,” said Ghilarducci, who’s also a Bloomberg Opinion contributor.

Workers age 55 to 64 without a college degree retired at a 5% faster pace during the pandemic, while retirement for that age group with a college education declined by 4%, according to the Retirement Equity Labreport. At older ages, over 65, college-degree holders were more likely to exit the labor market than pre-Covid, however.

Black workers without a college degree experienced the highest increase in retirement rate before 65, jumping from 16.4% to 17.9% between 2019 and 2021, the data show.

The researchers found that older workers without a college degree had median household retirement savings of only $9,000 in 2019, compared with $167,000 for those with a college degree.

Watch Plastic Waste Become ‘Lumber’ for Adirondack Chairs

Watch Plastic Waste Become ‘Lumber’ for Adirondack Chairs

Daisy Hernandez                    

As the global demand for lumber continues to skyrocket, it’s time to think hard about using alternatives to wood. So, why not plastic?

In the latest episode of the Popular Mechanics series “MADE HERE,” we tour the factory for Polywood, a company that takes recycled plastic (mostly milk jugs), turns it into “lumber,” and uses it to fashion outdoor furniture.

“Recycled plastic is important because the nature of the materials—can be used infinitely,” says Doug Rassi, the founder and CEO of Polywood. “You can remake them and remake them, and you never ever have to throw these materials away.”

Polywood pulls its materials from U.S. recycling centers and “ocean-bound hotbeds throughout the world,” says Bryce Glock, a retail sales manager with Polywood. Then the work begins.

First, machines process, clean, flake, and pelletize the plastic bales. Next, vacuums move the pellets into storage silos until they’re ready to blend with extra materials before becoming Polywood lumber boards. Before workers can cut the boards, though, they have to color them with dye and form them (in a heater) to match the size needed for specific pieces of furniture.

Then, the boards move through cooling tanks, and finally, a CNC machine cuts them. For the last step, Polywood staffers box up the pieces and prep them for shipping.

Rassi hopes Polywood’s products show plastics can always find new lives, and don’t need to end up in landfills or the sea.

“Plastics [have] this disposable connotation to them,” says Rassi. “It’s very ingrained into our culture, and we’re working very much to change that.”

American democracy is about to show if it can save itself

CNN

American democracy is about to show if it can save itself

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN                      June 2, 2021

(CNN)American democracy — under a relentless, multi-front assault from pro-Donald Trump Republicans — is about to show whether it is strong enough to save itself.

Such a premise would have been considered absurd through much of history. But since Trump left office after destroying the tradition of peaceful transfers of power in a failed attempt to steal the 2020 election, it has become clear that his insurrectionism was only the first battle in a longer political war as his allies tout ridiculous fantasies about returning him to power to applause and online acclaim.
The mechanisms of American institutions that barely survived Trump’s attempt to illegally stay in power are still being manipulated by Republicans to make the country less democratic. The GOP’s efforts to stack the electoral decks are staggeringly broad. From Georgia to Arizona and Florida and in many other states, Republicans are mobilizing behind efforts to shorten voting hours, crack down on early and mail-in balloting and to throw out legitimate ballots — all under a banner of election security.
While Trump may be banned from Twitter, he sends out daily statements pulsating with lies and incitement that percolate among supporters on social media. The ex-President’s planned resumption of rallies next month will bring that anti-democratic stream of falsehood to a wider audience.
And in the US Senate, Republicans will use filibuster rules — which critics see as the antithesis of democracy — to thwart Democratic legislation that seeks to combat all those efforts.
President Joe Biden, who is in the White House because American democratic guardrails stood firm after his victory last November, raised the alarm on Tuesday after another bout of the GOP flexing its anti-democratic muscles. Just as Republicans are using the institutions to damage democracy, Biden and Democrats are targeting new laws that they believe would preserve it.
Biden tasked Vice President Kamala Harris with leading an effort to protect the right to vote. “This sacred right is under assault with incredible intensity like I’ve never seen … with an intensity of aggressiveness we’ve not seen in a long, long time,” Biden said in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The President was marking the 100th anniversary of a massacre of Black Americans, a scar on US history that he implicitly placed in the wider struggle of generations to perfect US democracy.
But time is short to reverse democratic rollbacks by Republicans that are already causing fears that GOP officials could overturn future elections if their candidates are rejected in a majority vote. Trump tried to do exactly this with his unsuccessful pressure on local officials to steal the 2020 election in Georgia. The GOP capture of the House in 2022 midterm elections could make such a stolen election scenario a real threat in 2024.
“By the time we get to the 2024 election, my fear is that election will be sent to the House of Representatives to decide if there are disputed electors,” Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard professor and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead.”
“You could very well imagine a situation where the 2020 and the 2021 January crisis was a dress rehearsal for what’s to come in 2024.”
Tough path for new laws
As Democrats try to prevent that happening, the Senate will shortly consider sweeping voting rights laws designed to establish national standards on issues like early voting, and to restore protections for Black voters removed by the Supreme Court and GOP legislators.
A preview of that battle in Washington is currently playing out around the nation in the country’s statehouses, most recently in Texas.
Democratic state lawmakers in the Lone Star State walked out of their chamber over the weekend to deprive their Republican colleagues of a quorum needed to pass a restrictive voting bill built on Trump’s Big Lie of election fraud.
But Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, is vowing to call lawmakers back in a special session to pass the legislation and threatening to halt their pay over the walkout. He collected his reward on Tuesday with a reelection endorsement from the former President.
The two voting rights bills in the US Senate face an unpromising future, since Republicans are vowing to halt what they are branding a Democratic power grab. Several Democratic senators, including West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, would have to drop their firm opposition to abolishing or amending supermajority filibuster rules for the bills to pass.
For the second time in a week Tuesday, Biden — who preaches national unity and bipartisanship and has treated Manchin with kid gloves — flashed irritation about the limitations of deadlocked Washington politics. Last week he held up a list of GOP senators who voted against his Covid-19 rescue law but claimed credit for some of its provisions among their constituents. In Tulsa, the President aimed an apparent swipe at Sinema and Manchin.
“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’ Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends,” he said.
‘A hell of a lot of work’
It is not clear, given these apparently cemented political realities, exactly how Harris can turn back the tide of challenges to democracy. She could bring more visibility to the cause and perhaps help to organize popular opposition to restrictive voting bills. And she could be a powerful galvanizing force for Democratic turnout in 2022 that could make an end run around some new laws.
But the entrenched reality of Republican power in many states and the obstructive mechanism of the Senate makes progress difficult. Harris may be able to test whether there is scope for a reworking of bills like the For the People Act to attract the support of more lawmakers. But there is concern even among some Democrats that the legislation is too broad, including as it relates to campaign finance regulations. It is highly unlikely she can persuade Republicans to vote for a measure that would reverse many state-level efforts to fortify their chances against demographic changes that threaten to consign White, conservative, religious Americans to permanent minority status.
The vice president is however promising to devote energy to a task that Biden said on Tuesday would “take a hell of a lot of work.”
In a statement sent first to CNN, Harris said she would “work with voting rights organizations, community organizations, and the private sector to help strengthen and uplift efforts on voting rights nationwide. And we will also work with members of Congress to help advance these bills.”
A second bill — The John Lewis Voting Rights Act, also passed by the House of Representatives — is awaiting Senate action. The measure would restore a requirement for states with a record of racial discrimination in elections to submit changes to electoral laws to the federal government for review. The protections were gutted by a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that opened the way for a raft of current efforts to prejudice the rights of minority voters.
A troubling coup allusion
While the GOP seeks to tilt elections, some of its members are pressing ahead with a whitewash of the 2020 contest.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, adding to the growing blanket of denial around Trump’s Capitol insurrection on January 6, says he’s conducting his own investigation to create an “accurate historical record” after voting against a bipartisan, independent probe into the outrage that would have done just that.
The Republican filibuster blockade against the commission was a transparent attempt to protect Trump from further damaging revelations, after the ex-President all but ordered GOP leaders in the Senate and House to oppose it.
But the attempt to pervert American democratic freedoms is not limited to elected Republicans. Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn indicated over the weekend the US needed a coup like the one in Myanmar.
The Southeast Asian nation has been ruled by a paranoid and brutal military junta for much of the last 60 years. In its most recent coup, it moved to thwart a tentative path towards full democracy and the military has opened fire on hundreds of peaceful protesters and detained many more in inhumane prisons where torture is rife.
Flynn later tried to walk back his comments, but the lack of any condemnation by senior Republican figures of his actions reflects a party wherein extremism is tolerated and therefore grows.
Asked how worried he was about American democracy on a scale of 1-to-10, Ziblatt replied, “Eight,” and pointed out that Trump had never been supported by a majority of Americans. But he also explained to Tapper why the current raft of anti-democratic actions in US institutions by Republicans was so concerning.
“As long as the majority can speak, democracy is safe,” Ziblatt said.
“I think the thing we have to worry about is that the institutions are being manipulated in a way to try to create a much more uneven playing field and that would be very dangerous.”

Study blames climate change for 37% of global heat deaths

Study blames climate change for 37% of global heat deaths

More than one-third of the world’s heat deaths each year are due directly to global warming, according to the latest study to calculate the human cost of climate change.

 

But scientists say that’s only a sliver of climate’s overall toll — even more people die from other extreme weather amplified by global warming such as storms, flooding and drought — and the heat death numbers will grow exponentially with rising temperatures.

Dozens of researchers who looked at heat deaths in 732 cities around the globe from 1991 to 2018 calculated that 37% were caused by higher temperatures from human-caused warming, according to a study Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

That amounts to about 9,700 people a year from just those cities, but it is much more worldwide, the study’s lead author said.

“These are deaths related to heat that actually can be prevented. It is something we directly cause,” said Ana Vicedo-Cabrera, an epidemiologist at the Institute of Social and Preventative Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

The highest percentages of heat deaths caused by climate change were in cities in South America. Vicedo-Cabrera pointed to southern Europe and southern Asia as other hot spots for climate change-related heat deaths.

Sao Paulo, Brazil, has the most climate-related heat deaths, averaging 239 a year, researchers found.

About 35% of heat deaths in the United States can be blamed on climate change, the study found. That’s a total of more than 1,100 deaths a year in about 200 U.S. cities, topped by 141 in New York. Honolulu had the highest portion of heat deaths attributable to climate change, 82%.

Scientists used decades of mortality data in the 732 cities to plot curves detailing how each city’s death rate changes with temperature and how the heat-death curves vary from city to city. Some cities adapt to heat better than others because of air conditioning, cultural factors and environmental conditions, Vicedo-Cabrera said.

Then researchers took observed temperatures and compared them with 10 computer models simulating a world without climate change. The difference is warming humans caused. By applying that scientifically accepted technique to the individualized heat-death curves for the 732 cities, the scientists calculated extra heat deaths from climate change.

“People continue to ask for proof that climate change is already affecting our health. This attribution study directly answers that question using state-of-the-science epidemiological methods, and the amount of data the authors have amassed for analysis is impressive,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin.

Patz, who wasn’t part of the study, said it was one of the first to detail climate change-related heat deaths now, rather than in the future.

‘Big risk’: California farmers hit by drought change planting plans

‘Big risk’: California farmers hit by drought change planting plans

Norma Galeana and Christopher Walljasper         June 1, 2021

 

FIREBAUGH, Calif. (Reuters) – Joe Del Bosque is leaving a third of his 2,000-acre farm near Firebaugh, California, unseeded this year due to extreme drought. Yet, he hopes to access enough water to produce a marketable melon crop.

Farmers across California say they expect to receive little water from state and federal agencies that regulate the state’s reservoirs and canals, leading many to leave fields barren, plant more drought-tolerant crops or seek new income sources all-together.

“We’re taking a big risk in planting crops and hoping the water gets here in time,” said Del Bosque, 72.

Agriculture is an important part of California’s economy and the state is a top producer of vegetables, berries, nuts and dairy products. The last major drought from 2012 to 2017 reduced irrigation supplies to farmers, forced strict household conservation measures and stoked deadly wildfires.

California farmers are allocated water from the state based on seniority and need, but farmers say water needs of cities and environmental restrictions reduce agricultural access.

Nearly 40% of California’s 24.6 million acres of farmland are irrigated, with crops like almonds and grapes in some regions needing more water to thrive.

“I’m going to be reducing some of our almond acreage. I may be increasing some of our row crops, like tomatoes,” said Stuart Woolf, who operates 30,000 acres, most of it in Western Fresno County. He may fallow 30% of his land.

Del Bosque, who grows melons, asparagus, sweet corn, almonds and cherries, said his operation could lose more than half a million dollars in income, and put many of his 700 workers out of work. He and other farmers say drought has been exacerbated by California’s lack of investment in water storage infrastructure over the last 40 years.

“Fundamentally, a storage project is paid for by the people who want the water,” said Jeanine Jones, drought manager for California’s Department of Water Resources. “All we can do is deliver what mother nature provides.”

New dams face environmental restrictions meant to protect endangered fish and other wildlife, and don’t solve near-term water needs, said Ernest Conant, regional director of the Bureau of Reclamation, California-Great Basin region, the federal agency that overseas dams, canals and water allocations in the Western United States.

“We simply don’t have enough water to supply our agricultural users,” said Conant. “We’re hopeful some water can be moved sooner than October, but there’s no guarantees.”

Water scarcity threatens Del Bosque’s watermelon crop, which is due to be harvested in August. But it also has dire consequences for those planting it.

“If there is no water, there is no work. And for us farm workers, how are we going to support the family?” said 57-year-old Pablo Barrera, who was planting watermelons for Del Bosque.

Woolf said as the state continues to restrict water access, he’s exploring ways to generate income off the land he can no longer irrigate, including installing solar arrays and planting Agave, normally grown in Mexico to make tequila.

“You’ve got to absorb all of your farming costs on the few acres that you’re farming,” he said. “How do we maximize the value of the land that we are not farming?”

(Reporting by Norma Galeana in Firebaugh, California and Christopher Walljasper; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Diane Craft)

If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake

If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake

Thomas Fra                            

 

<span>Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters</span>
Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

 

There was a time when the Covid pandemic seemed to confirm so many of our assumptions. It cast down the people we regarded as villains. It raised up those we thought were heroes. It prospered people who could shift easily to working from home even as it problematized the lives of those Trump voters living in the old economy.

Like all plagues, Covid often felt like the hand of God on earth, scourging the people for their sins against higher learning and visibly sorting the righteous from the unmasked wicked. “Respect science,” admonished our yard signs. And lo!, Covid came and forced us to do so, elevating our scientists to the highest seats of social authority, from where they banned assembly, commerce, and all the rest.

We cast blame so innocently in those days. We scolded at will. We knew who was right and we shook our heads to behold those in the wrong playing in their swimming pools and on the beach. It made perfect sense to us that Donald Trump, a politician we despised, could not grasp the situation, that he suggested people inject bleach, and that he was personally responsible for more than one super-spreading event. Reality itself punished leaders like him who refused to bow to expertise. The prestige news media even figured out a way to blame the worst death tolls on a system of organized ignorance they called “populism.”

In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a cult out of the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general

But these days the consensus doesn’t consense quite as well as it used to. Now the media is filled with disturbing stories suggesting that Covid might have come — not from “populism” at all, but from a laboratory screw-up in Wuhan, China. You can feel the moral convulsions beginning as the question sets in: What if science itself is in some way culpable for all this?

I am no expert on epidemics. Like everyone else I know, I spent the pandemic doing as I was told. A few months ago I even tried to talk a Fox News viewer out of believing in the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins. The reason I did that is because the newspapers I read and the TV shows I watched had assured me on many occasions that the lab-leak theory wasn’t true, that it was a racist conspiracy theory, that only deluded Trumpists believed it, that it got infinite pants-on-fire ratings from the fact-checkers, and because (despite all my cynicism) I am the sort who has always trusted the mainstream news media.

My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month; a few weeks later everyone from Doctor Fauci to President Biden is acknowledging that the lab-accident hypothesis might have some merit. We don’t know the real answer yet, and we probably will never know, but this is the moment to anticipate what such a finding might ultimately mean. What if this crazy story turns out to be true?

The answer is that this is the kind of thing that could obliterate the faith of millions. The last global disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, smashed people’s trust in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the New Economy, and eventually in the elites who ran both American political parties.

In the years since (and for complicated reasons), liberal leaders have labored to remake themselves into defenders of professional rectitude and established legitimacy in nearly every field. In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a sort of cult out of science, expertise, the university system, executive-branch “norms,” the “intelligence community,” the State Department, NGOs, the legacy news media, and the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general.

Now here we are in the waning days of Disastrous Global Crisis #2. Covid is of course worse by many orders of magnitude than the mortgage meltdown — it has killed millions and ruined lives and disrupted the world economy far more extensively. Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger.

Consider the details of the story as we have learned them in the last few weeks:

• Lab leaks happen. They aren’t the result of conspiracies: “a lab accident is an accident,” as Nathan Robinson points out; they happen all the time, in this country and in others, and people die from them.

• There is evidence that the lab in question, which studies bat coronaviruses, may have been conducting what is called “gain of function” research, a dangerous innovation in which diseases are deliberately made more virulent. By the way, right-wingers didn’t dream up “gain of function”: all the cool virologists have been doing it (in this country and in others) even as the squares have been warning against it for years.

• There are strong hints that some of the bat-virus research at the Wuhan lab was funded in part by the American national-medical establishment — which is to say, the lab-leak hypothesis doesn’t implicate China alone.

• There seem to have been astonishing conflicts of interest among the people assigned to get to the bottom of it all, and (as we know from Enron and the housing bubble) conflicts of interest are always what trip up the well-credentialed professionals whom liberals insist we must all heed, honor, and obey.

• The news media, in its zealous policing of the boundaries of the permissible, insisted that Russiagate was ever so true but that the lab-leak hypothesis was false false false, and woe unto anyone who dared disagree. Reporters gulped down whatever line was most flattering to the experts they were quoting and then insisted that it was 100% right and absolutely incontrovertible — that anything else was only unhinged Trumpist folly, that democracy dies when unbelievers get to speak, and so on.

• The social media monopolies actually censored posts about the lab-leak hypothesis. Of course they did! Because we’re at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to be brought back to the true and correct faith — as agreed upon by experts.

“Let us pray, now, for science,” intoned a New York Times columnist back at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. The title of his article laid down the foundational faith of Trump-era liberalism: “Coronavirus is What You Get When You Ignore Science.”

Ten months later, at the end of a scary article about the history of “gain of function” research and its possible role in the still ongoing Covid pandemic, Nicholson Baker wrote as follows: “This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.”

Except there was. If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way.

Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail,” mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 — all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.

Then again, maybe I am wrong to roll out all this speculation. Maybe the lab-leak hypothesis will be convincingly disproven. I certainly hope it is.

But even if it inches closer to being confirmed, we can guess what the next turn of the narrative will be. It was a “perfect storm,” the experts will say. Who coulda known? And besides (they will say), the origins of the pandemic don’t matter any more. Go back to sleep.

  • Thomas Frank is a Guardian US columnist. He is the author, most recently, of The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism

Pulling power: the green lure of Sweden’s industrial far north

Pulling power: the green lure of Sweden’s industrial far north

Simon Johnson                      

 

* Far north has lowest unemployment rate in Sweden

* Renewable power used from 1950’s onwards to cut costs

* Region to attract $120 bln investment in coming 10 years

STOCKHOLM, May 31 (Reuters) – Long home to polluting industries, the hydro and wind power of Sweden’s far north is set to reduce the country’s carbon footprint as it lures low-emission manufacturers and creates thousands of jobs for those willing to brave the dark and cold.

Known internationally for reindeer and spectacular views of the Northern Lights, the region also has a surplus of cheap, renewable electricity needed by energy-intensive industries under pressure from shareholders and regulators to help curb global warming.

Planned investments, including the production of fossil-free steel and electric vehicle (EV) batteries, will exceed 1,000 billion crowns ($120 billion) in the next decade, Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson estimates.

“Job creation from the green transformation is not something that will happen in the future, it is happening in Sweden now,” she said in a presentation in May.

EVs are a major part of the European Union’s roadmap to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

The bloc aims to have at least 30 million zero-emission vehicles on its roads by 2030 as it tackles the quarter of EU greenhouse gas emissions that come from the transport sector.

The need for the industry to meet legally-binding EU environmental standards, made Sweden’s far north and its green energy an obvious choice for battery maker Northvolt, partly-owned by auto giant Volkswagen.

It is initially investing around 4 billion euros ($4.88 billion) in a gigafactory in Skelleftea, some 800 km (500 miles) due north of the capital Stockholm, to produce batteries with 40 gigawatt-hours of energy storage by 2024 – enough to power between 700,000-800,000 electric vehicles.

“Access to the hydropower infrastructure … in Skelleftea was really essential,” Northvolt CEO Peter Carlsson said, citing local electricity costs of around one third of those in Germany and one fifth of those in China.

The jobs created are an opportunity for the relatively small local population and are also drawing in newcomers.

“Of course, I wish it were a little warmer,” said Senior Director Of Commissioning at Northvolt Christopher Gorelczenko, a U.S. citizen who arrived late last year to set up the gigafactory.

CHEAP AND CLEAN

Sweden invested heavily in hydro power in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, with the aim of containing costs for its industry and being globally competitive. Many of the power plants are in the far north.

Over the last decade, the focus has been wind power, which provides around 20% of Sweden’s electricity.

Carlsson, a former executive at Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. , estimated the overall carbon footprint for Northvolt’s batteries would be around a quarter of that of an equivalent power pack from China.

Cheap renewable energy was a also major draw for Hybrit, a joint venture between ore miner LKAB, state-owned energy company Vattenfall and steel-maker SSAB, which aims to produce fossil-free steel in Gallivare, above the Arctic Circle.

Rival H2 Green Steel aims to produce five million tons of fossil-free steel by 2030 in Boden, just south of the Arctic zone and not far from Lulea, where Hybrit has a small-scale, pilot fossil-free steel plant.

Facebook’s first data center entirely powered by renewable energy is in Lulea, where it has invested more than 8.7 billion crowns.

SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

“I think it is a bit of window into the future, of what industrial development is going to look even in other countries,” Mikael Nordlander, state-owned utility Vattenfall’s Head of R&D portfolio, Industry Decarbonisation, said.

Norrbotten county – which includes Lulea – and where LKAB’s and Boliden’s giant Kiruna and Aitik mines are located – accounted for around 11% of Sweden’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2016, the local authority said.

“Previously, it was industry that was dragging down our climate work,” Carina Sammeli, mayor of Lulea, a city of around 80,000, said. “But now it’s industry that is driving the change.”

Sweden emitted 4.26 tons of carbon dioxide per capita in 2017 compared to a global average of 4.8 tons per person, the Our World In Data website shows. Fossil-free steel production alone could reduce Sweden’s emissions by around 10%, Hybrit says.

The boom has created thousands of jobs, both direct and indirect.

“If you are looking for a job, it might be time to look at moving to the North,” Employment Minister Eva Nordmark said in April.

Unemployment in Norbotten and Vasterbotten – the top third of Sweden geographically – was the lowest in the country at 6.7% and 6.4% respectively, in 2020 against a national average of 8.5%, Sweden’s Public Employment Service said, partly because of the transition to green industry.

H2 Green Steel reckons its plant in Boden – around 40 kilometers from Lulea – will create 10,000 new direct and indirect jobs.

Sammeli says Lulea – where daylight can be as short as 3-1/2 hours in winter but where in summer, it does not really get dark – will need an extra 25,000 new residents to fill the demand for labour over the next 20 years.

“We haven’t grown much for years and haven’t really needed to build much until recently,” she said. “Now we have big challenges in terms of planning, water and sewage capacity in order to build new residential areas.” ($1 = 0.8198 euros) ($1 = 8.2999 Swedish crowns)

(Reporting by Simon Johnson; Editing by Mark John and Barbara Lewis)