‘You’re poisoning us’: Ida brings fresh hell for Cancer Alley residents already battling pollution

The Guardian

Cancer town Louisana

‘You’re poisoning us’: Ida brings fresh hell for Cancer Alley residents already battling pollution

Hurricane hit heavily industrialized region hard shortly after it was revealed a nearby steel plant pumped sulphur gas in atmosphere for six years

Barbara Washington, a local environmental campaigner, with the Nucor steel plant seen behind her.
Barbara Washington, a local environmental campaigner, with the Nucor steel plant seen behind her. Photograph: Oliver Laughland/The Guardian.

 

As Myrtle Felton’s roof took flight from her home, with Hurricane Ida pounding the walls, she thought about the steel plant next door.

Here in St James parish, in the heart of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” – a heavily industrialized region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge with some of the most polluted air in America and highest risk rates of cancer – Ida hit hard.

On Felton’s small street in the small town of Romeville, downed trees crushed trailer homes. A felled electrical pylon still blocks entry four days after the hurricane passed. Many people have no generators, and there is no power. The tarmac is lined with electrical cables.

In an adjacent field, less than a mile away, the hulking Nucor steel plant casts an imposing shadow over the landscape. Just a few months ago it was revealed that the plant had been quietly pumping cancer-causing sulphuric acid mist and hydrogen sulphide into the atmosphere for six years without a permit, contributing to an already dangerous cocktail of emissions.

The Nucor steel plant is seen in Romeville in 2019.
The Nucor steel plant is seen in Romeville in 2019. Photograph: Bryan Tarnowski/The Guardian

 

Felton, 67, had always attributed the rotten-smelling air to the plant, along with the black, sticky speckles on her car and the corrosion on her home. But the recent revelations left her incredulous.

As Ida blew away her already weakened metal roof, leaving brown water seeping in through the seams of her ceiling, she thought to herself: “Well, it needed replacing anyway.”

Black women like Myrtle Felton have been on the frontlines of the climate justice fight in south Louisiana for years. And now many of them find themselves bearing the brunt of a natural disaster the intensity of which is linked to the climate crisis. Down here, it’s a battle on many fronts.

“I’m in the middle of everything by myself,” said Felton. “Nobody comes, nobody calls. Nobody do anything. Whatever you get, you get it on your own.”

Three days after the storm, representatives from Nucor, a $33.7bn company that announced record profits this July, arrived offering Felton some aid: 15 small bottles of water and a pack of Gatorade.

“I’m so frustrated I can hardly talk,” Felton said.

Her neighbour, Barbara Washington, a 70-year-old local environmental campaigner put it bluntly: “Sure, give me my water, give me some Gatorade, but you’re already poisoning us.”

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Nucor said the corporation was offering two food handouts, one on Friday and one next Wednesday and that it was “actively donating supplies and support to help the community”.

The company did not respond to questions over its plant’s emissions or if the facility sustained damage during the storm.

St James parish has yet to provide any residents in Romeville with tarps, Felton and Washington said, an account confirmed by local councilman Mason Bland, who said he had been distributing water but was waiting for federal assistance for tarps.

Bland, the councilman for St James’ district four, estimated that 95% of residents in his jurisdiction had sustained serious damage.

Advocates working with community members in St James pointed to even longer-term concerns. District four of the parish, populated with 64% Black residents and with a child poverty rate of 47%, was marked in a controversial 2014 local land plan as a “residential/future industrial” zone.

The designation, also given to the parish’s fifth district, which is majority Black as well, gives industry greater planning flexibility to expand and, advocates argue, signals the local government’s intent to push the residents out as industry proliferates.

“I worry about elected officials exploiting the disaster to further reduce the populations,” said Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. She argued that the lack of disaster resources in the district was indicative of the parish’s longer-term disinvestment.

“The way it’s characterized is that those are dying districts, ignoring the active role that the parish plays in killing them,” Rolfes said.

Washington, who traces her lineage in Romeville back to emancipation, charted the area’s population decline over decades. Gas stations, restaurants, a post office and a school all have left over the years, along with many younger residents who have uprooted to other locations.

“It’s almost like a ghost town now,” she said, the trauma of the storm still obvious as she spoke. Her home too sustained major damage, and she was living without power until Thursday when the Bucket Brigade provided her with a generator.

Myrtle Felton and Barbara Washington stand in front of damage caused by Hurricane Ida.
Myrtle Felton and Barbara Washington stand in front of damage caused by Hurricane Ida. Photograph: Oliver Laughland/The Guardian.

 

She prayed as the storm hit: “If everything else is gone, just spare our lives,” she remembered saying.

Now, the lack of these basic local resources will make recovering from Ida even harder. The drive for gas is longer. The quest for food and water more arduous.

Some of the trailer homes in Romeville appear damaged beyond repair, with many people evacuating and concerns some may not return.

Bland, the councilman, declined to comment on allegations that the parish is trying to force residents out in favor of industry.

“I can’t tie the two together right,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s not something I’m willing to make a statement on.”

But Felton and Washington made clear Ida’s destruction only strengthened their resolve to stay put.

“You come here and try to run us out,” Washington said. “But we’ve been here for generations. There’s a legacy. I was born and raised here. I could move, but I’m still here for the fight, because someone has to do it.”

What part of the US is safest from climate change?

What part of the US is safest from climate change?

By Camille Squires, Cities reporter              September 5, 2021

 

A man in a red coat skis down a snowy mountain, with forest and mountain range in the background
REUTERS/MIKE SEGAR

Today’s skiing paradise could be tomorrow’s climate oasis? 
Cities have to accommodate more people, lessen their environmental footprint, and become more equitable.
The stormsfloodsheat, and fires that have ravaged the US in 2021 have made the ongoing climate crisis feel especially acute for citizens across the country.  And the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report indicates the escalating risks the world faces as the climate warms. In such a grim future scenario, where will be as safe and habitable as today?

 

Researchers looked at multiple factors from sea level rise to heat to assess the least risky place to live in the US as the climate warms. Nowhere will escape climate change unscathed. Yet one region emerged well ahead of the rest: the northeastern US.

Of the 10 lowest risk counties, seven were located in Vermont, and most of the remaining were in northeastern states like Maine and New York, according to a study by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine. Data on relative risk for US counties threatened by climate change was compiled from data collected by the Rhodium Group, an independent data-analytics firm, as well as several academic studies.

  • Lamoille County, Vermont
  • Franklin County, Vermont
  • Orange County, Vermont
  • Essex County, Vermont
  • Piscataquis County, Maine
  • Summit County, Colorado
  • Grand County, Colorado
  • Orleans County, Vermont
  • Hamilton County, New York
  • Franklin County, Maine

The study accounted for how six factors—heat, wet bulb temperatures, sea level rise, crop yield, fires, and economic damage—combined to impact people and economies. These safest areas were expected to have the lowest combined impacts by mid-century. Temperatures, fires, and sea-level rise will drive much of the damage. Rising temperatures mean searing heat and humidity will shift the zone of moderate climate and farmable land to the north. Places like Arizona and Texas are expected to sizzle under combined heat and humidity, known as “wet bulb” temperatures, which make it nearly impossible for the human body to cool itself for part of the year.  Sea level rise on the coasts and fires in the US West, mean inland states in the Northeast become prime locations.

Vermont’s natural advantages

Overall, Vermont counties were predicted to have relatively little damage to local economies as a result of climate change. Because of its geographic location, Vermont’s long cold winters and mild summers mean it faces some of the lowest risks from dangerous temperatures and humidity. In fact, colder, wealthier economies like those in Vermont stand to benefit from warming, according to Hannah Hess, who led the Rhodium Group research that this report draws from.

Annual temperatures in the state currently range between 33ºF (0.5º C) and 55ºF (13º C). As the climate warms, fewer cold days in winter can improve health and infrastructure, and lower energy costs, creating a net positive effect on the economy, Hess says. Vermont’s geography also means the state, which is 75% forested (pdf),  is at low risk of wildfire and declining crop yields. While agricultural yields are likely to drop precipitously in the southern US, Vermont is experiencing warmer summers and longer growing seasons benefiting some crops (although some like maple syrup are declining as temperatures rise).

Local leaders are taking action now to adapt to the future

State and local leaders in Vermont are also taking action now to ensure the state can withstand the myriad challenges of climate change. The most immediate threat are extreme weather events. The remnants of Tropical Storm Irene  (downgraded from a hurricane) in 2011 caused massive flooding, six deaths, and $700 million in damages to roads, bridges, and infrastructure.

In response, the state government has take action to make the built environment more resilient by adjusting it to changing climate conditions.  The government has created new construction standards for floodplains, and restored natural wetlands to serve as a natural barrier for overflowing rivers.

“Coming out of the storm really changed our perspective on the importance of resilient infrastructure,” said Julie Moore, the state secretary of natural resources. “The goal is to avoid future conflicts [between people and the river].”

Work is being done in the agriculture sector,  to prepare farmers for “a full range of conditions” Moore says. This has research to help farmers improve soil health and its ability to hold water, and also an initiative to study the potential impacts of soil carbon sequestration. Local groups are also working to fortify the state’s maple sugaring industry against climate change by encouraging producers to protect forest diversity.

Like many other states and localities, Vermont has developed a climate action plan, which includes efforts to reduce carbon emissions and change energy sources away from fossil fuels. The plan also includes these adaptive measures like wetland restoration and informing residents about tick-borne illness to ready residents for climactic changes that are already here.

“There will always be a bigger flood, there will always be a more intense storm, so none of these solutions are perfect,” Moore says. “But we’re trying to take advantage of opportunities to limit future damage.”

Taliban special forces bring abrupt end to women’s protest

Taliban special forces bring abrupt end to women’s protest

Afghanistan Women Fighting On     1-6

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban special forces in camouflage fired their weapons into the air Saturday, bringing an abrupt and frightening end to the latest protest march in the capital by Afghan women demanding equal rights from the new rulers.

Also on Saturday, the chief of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, which has an outsized influence on the Taliban, made a surprise visit to Kabul.

Taliban fighters quickly captured most of Afghanistan last month and celebrated the departure of the last U.S. forces after 20 years of war. The insurgent group must now govern a war-ravaged country that is heavily reliant on international aid.

The women’s march — the second in as many days in Kabul — began peacefully. Demonstrators laid a wreath outside Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry to honor Afghan soldiers who died fighting the Taliban before marching on to the presidential palace.

“We are here to gain human rights in Afghanistan,” said 20-year-old protester Maryam Naiby. “I love my country. I will always be here.”

As the protesters’ shouts grew louder, several Taliban officials waded into the crowd to ask what they wanted to say.

Flanked by fellow demonstrators, Sudaba Kabiri, a 24-year-old university student, told her Taliban interlocutor that Islam’s Prophet gave women rights and they wanted theirs. The Taliban official promised women would be given their rights but the women, all in their early 20s, were skeptical.

As the demonstrators reached the presidential palace, a dozen Taliban special forces ran into the crowd, firing in the air and sending demonstrators fleeing. Kabiri, who spoke to The Associated Press, said they also fired tear gas.

The Taliban have promised an inclusive government and a more moderate form of Islamic rule than when they last ruled the country from 1996 to 2001. But many Afghans, especially women, are deeply skeptical and fear a roll back of rights gained over the last two decades.

For much of the past two weeks, Taliban officials have been holding meetings among themselves, amid reports of differences among them emerging. Early on Saturday, neighboring Pakistan’s powerful intelligence chief Gen. Faiez Hameed made a surprise visit to Kabul. It wasn’t immediately clear what he had to say to the Taliban leadership but the Pakistani intelligence service has a strong influence on the Taliban.

The Taliban leadership had its headquarters in Pakistan and were often said to be in direct contact with the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Although Pakistan routinely denied providing the Taliban military aid, the accusation was often made by the Afghan government and Washington.

Faiez’ visit comes as the world waits to see what kind of government the Taliban will eventually announce, seeking one that is inclusive and ensures protection of women’s rights and the country’s minorities.

The Taliban have promised a broad-based government and have held talks with former president Hamid Karzai and the former government’s negotiation chief Abdullah Abdullah. But the makeup of the new government is uncertain and it was unclear whether hard-line ideologues among the Taliban will win the day — and whether the rollbacks feared by the demonstrating women will occur.

Taliban members whitewashed murals Saturday that promoted health care, warned of the dangers of HIV and even paid homage to some of Afghanistan’s iconic foreign contributors, like anthropologist Nancy Dupree, who singlehandedly chronicled Afghanistan’s rich cultural legacy. It was a worrying sign of attempts to erase reminders of the past 20 years.

The murals were replaced with slogans congratulating Afghans on their victory.

A Taliban cultural commission spokesman, Ahmadullah Muttaqi, tweeted that the murals were painted over “because they are against our values. They were spoiling the minds of the mujahedeen and instead we wrote slogans that will be useful to everyone.”

Meanwhile, the young women demonstrators said they have had to defy worried families to press ahead with their protests, even sneaking out of their homes to take their demands for equal rights to the new rulers.

Farhat Popalzai, another 24-year-old university student, said she wanted to be the voice of Afghanistan’s voiceless women, those too afraid to come out on the street.

“I am the voice of the women who are unable to speak.” she said. “They think this is a man’s country but it is not, it is a woman’s country too.”

Popalzai and her fellow demonstrators are too young to remember the Taliban rule that ended in 2001 with the U.S.-led invasion. The say their fear is based on the stories they have heard of women not being allowed to go to school and work.

Naiby, the 20-year-old, has already operated a women’s organization and is a spokesperson for Afghanistan’s Paralympics. She reflected on the tens of thousands of Afghans who rushed to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport to escape Afghanistan after the Taliban overran the capital on Aug. 15.

“They were afraid,” but for her she said, the fight is in Afghanistan.

Climate change is not going to wait for America to get its act together

Climate change is not going to wait for America to get its act together

An hourglass.
An hourglass. Illustrated | iStock

 

There has been a recent change in verb tense with respect to climate change: What was once the future is now the present. Louisiana just got hammered by a hurricane that — in what is becoming a signature characteristic of a warming climate — strengthened very rapidly thanks to super-hot temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, giving residents barely enough time to evacuate. The remnants of that hurricane then caused flooding all the way from Louisiana to Maine. Philadelphia saw the worst flooding since 1869. The National Weather Service issued the first flash flood warning for New York City in its history. At time of writing, at least 45 people were confirmed dead across the Northeast.

I find it hard to grapple with this reality. Following the science, I have been predicting this kind of thing for many years. But now that climate change is truly undeniably here, and highly unusual if not totally unprecedented weather disasters are hitting on a weekly basis, it is still somehow shocking. I suppose arid scientific predictions will always feel a lot different than one’s own city being heavily flooded. It’s a reaction that Americans — in particular Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), who recently launched a broadside against Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, which contains a great deal of climate policy — need to get over soon.

It is tempting to read some kind of cosmic justice into these events. America spewed forth greenhouse gas emissions with reckless abandon for two centuries, 50 years of which were after the basics of climate science were well-understood and widely publicized, and now a vengeful nature is inflicting retribution.

The truth, of course, is even scarier. An angry nature god would imply that something powerful cared about humanity enough to punish us. In reality every human being could die tomorrow and the world would go on spinning without interruption in an inconceivable vast universe. It would be a drop of water in the Atlantic Ocean. In the colossal expanse of cosmic time, humanity’s entire lifespan is barely an eyeblink.

Our only significant accomplishment is how rapidly we are changing the climate, which is in the same league as a major asteroid strike or continent-scale volcanic eruptions. But even that is nothing new. Planet Earth has seen worse than us before and it’ll see worse after we are gone. Nobody is coming to teach us lessons about our hubris, and there is no appealing the laws of physics.

Some form of denial must be part of the reason why Manchin is now raising questions about the reconciliation bill, not to mention the giant corporate lobbying campaign that undoubtedly explains his sudden change of heart. The reconciliation bill would — in large part because Manchin himself insisted that it can’t raise the deficit — raise taxes on corporations, people making high incomes, and especially wealthy heirs. Obviously corporate interests and the oligarch class don’t want that, because no amount of money is ever enough for them.

Very few people are so evil that they can willfully consign their own society to catastrophe for the sake of avoiding a fairly modest tax increase. It’s just the common behavior of ultra-privileged humans: When faced with a situation requiring any sacrifice, they make up excuses why it shouldn’t have to happen. And they’ll keep denying they could be hit by disaster — like a wildly unusual tornado ripping up a wealthy New Jersey suburb — until the rising seas close over their heads.

That said, Manchin’s op-ed is still blatantly dishonest. He complains about inflation that is happening almost entirely because of temporary bottlenecks in a handful of industries. He complains about deficits that a.) are not a problem and b.) will not increase anyway because of the tax increases. He complains that “I can’t explain why my Democratic colleagues are rushing to spend $3.5 trillion,” regarding a bill that has been discussed in minute detail for months in negotiations that have revolved around him personally.

It’s obvious what is happening here. Manchin is throwing up chaff to try to trim down the bill, if not destroy it completely. It is a duplicitous public relations campaign to protect the bottom lines of his rich friends. It’s of a piece with ex-senators Heidi Heitkamp and Max Baucus’s maudlin lies that ending the stepped-up basis loophole — which allows ultra-wealthy people to collect inheritance tax-free — will exterminate America’s family farms and ranches.

More blinkered, self-defeating selfishness would be hard to imagine. As the dire flooding across the eastern U.S. showed this week, American infrastructure is already desperately in need of upgrades just to deal with the weather disasters happening now, let alone those that will happen if we continue to procrastinate.

And as Greg Sargent argues at The Washington Post, Manchin would not only core out most of Biden’s climate policy, but also risk blowing up global climate negotiations, which are set to resume soon. If the worst historical emitter can’t show that it is at least making some effort, other nations could easily conclude that doing their part would be pointless.

The wealthy aristocrats of Ancien Régime France behaved as Manchin and his rich friends are doing now — furiously preventing reforms that would preserve society because they would require the rich to make small sacrifices. Faced with this despicable betrayal of President Biden and the Democratic Party, it is therefore critical for the party left in the House and Senate to continue to demand that there be no bipartisan infrastructure bill unless reconciliation gets through as well. Even the climate policy in there is seriously inadequate compared to the scale of the problem — and this package is very likely the only reform that is getting passed until 2030 at the earliest.

If it’s blocked, Washington should consider what usually happens when political elites are unable to fix disintegrating conditions around them: revolution.

‘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 everyone on Earth sat in the ocean at once, how much would sea level rise?

If everyone on Earth sat in the ocean at once, how much would sea level rise?


<span class="caption">There are a lot of people, but the oceans are very big.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="link rapid-noclick-resp" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/rear-view-of-boy-in-sea-against-sky-royalty-free-image/947393052" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" data-ylk="slk:Rosley Majid/EyeEm via Getty Images">Rosley Majid/EyeEm via Getty Images</a></span>
There are a lot of people, but the oceans are very big. Rosley Majid/EyeEm via Getty Images
 

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

If everyone on Earth sat down in the ocean, how far would the water rise? – Zahkaev and Viktor

Hypothetical questions, like what would happen if everyone on Earth went for an ocean swim at once, are fun to think about. And using math, you can get pretty close to a real answer. Let’s start by considering a smaller version of the same question.

Bathtub math

If you fill a bathtub all the way to the top and hop in, you know you’re in for a soggy cleanup. The water overflows because your body pushes it out of the way – something called displacement. Since the tub has a solid bottom and sides, the only direction the water can go is up and out.

The amount of space an object – in this case, you – takes up is called volume. The volume of water that overflows the tub is equal to the volume of your body.

Now think about a situation where the bathtub is only half full. As you hop in, the volume of your body still pushes the water up. You can calculate how much the water level in the tub will rise with a few simple math equations.

Suppose the bathtub is a rectangular box. You can figure out how much the water level will rise when you sit down in the tub by considering how much volume you are adding to the tub and what size area you are spreading this volume over. The amount the water level rises is equal to the added volume divided by the area.

For a bathtub that is 5 feet long and 2 feet wide, the area is 10 square feet.

Now, let’s figure out your volume. To make the math easier, let’s suppose that you, like the bathtub, are also a rectangular box. Let’s say you are about 4 feet tall and 2 feet wide (from left to right) and 1 foot deep (from front to back). The volume of your body would be 4 feet x 2 feet x 1 foot, or 8 cubic feet.

When you sit down, you are adding the volume of approximately half your body to the tub. This means the height of the water level rise is equal to the volume of half your body, divided by the area of the tub. Using the estimates above, this leads to a water level rise of 4 cubic feet divided by 10 square feet, which equals about 5 inches. You would certainly notice that!

High altitude view of the Earth in space.
High altitude view of the Earth in space.
Scaling up

You can think about the oceans as a gigantic bathtub. More than 70% of the Earth’s surface is ocean, giving this bathtub an area of about 140 million square miles. To figure out how much the water will rise, we need to know the volume of people sitting in it and divide it by this ocean area.

Currently, there are almost 8 billion people on Earth. Human beings come in all sizes, from tiny babies to large adults. Let’s assume the average size is 5 feet tall – a bit bigger than a child – with an average volume of 10 cubic feet. Only half of each person’s body would be submerged when they sit down, so only 5 cubic feet adds to the water level. With 8 billion people total, you can calculate 5 x 8 billion which gives a whopping 40 billion cubic feet that would be added to the oceans.

But remember, this volume would be spread over the vast area of the oceans. Using the same bathtub math as before, we divide the 40 billion cubic feet of volume over the 140 million square miles of ocean.

The answer? The total rise in sea level would be about 0.00012 of an inch, or less than 1/1000th of an inch. If everyone completely submerged themselves, this would double the answer to 0.00024 inches, which is still only about the width of a human hair.

It turns out the oceans are enormous – and humans are just a drop in the bucket.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Tony E. WongRochester Institute of Technology.

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.”