It is time to bend the curves! ─ The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Bulletin Science and Security Board, in their April 15, 2020 article, said that just 90 days ago, on 23 Jan 2020, the need for emergency action was urgent because of the worldwide governmental trend toward dysfunction in dealing with global threats.
Now SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 disease it causes has shown governmental dysfunction costs lives. The Bulletin presciently said then “...[...]… leaders had undermined cooperative, science- and law-based approaches to managing the most urgent threats to humanity, helping to create a situation that will, if unaddressed, ‘lead to catastrophe, sooner rather than later’.”
SARS-CoV-2 is one novel environmental and biotic circumstance foreseen in 1999 by Walker, et al. Subsequently, in 2009, Walker’s team posited in “Looming Global-Scale Failures and Missing Institutions” that:
...[...]… “Nations gain by cooperating to address global-scale problems. The challenge is to design international institutions that overcome free-riding by creating incentives to reward cooperation and to sanction violations. ...[...]… The major powers must be willing to enforce agreements, but legitimacy will depend on acceptance by numerous and diverse countries and by nongovernmental actors, such as civil society and business.”
Such 2020 multi-lateral (and even intra-state) cooperation is anathema to POTUS and his minions like those who carry around weapons, Trump-Pence campaign banners, yellow Tea Party flags, and wear red MAGA hats.
POTUS had 4 months to 21 Jan 2020 to heed the 19 Sep 2019 World Health Organization (WHO)’s Global Preparedness Monitoring Board annual report, A World At Risk, about the lack of preparedness for a lethal respiratory virus. Now he wants to cut funding for WHO despite its admonishments of novel threats for which “Countries, donors and multilateral institutions must be prepared for the worst” :
A rapidly spreading pandemic due to a lethal respiratory pathogen (whether naturally emergent or accidentally or deliberately released) poses additional preparedness requirements. Donors and multilateral institutions must ensure adequate investment in developing innovative vaccines and therapeutics, surge manufacturing capacity, broad-spectrum antivirals and appropriate non-pharmaceutical interventions. ─ WHO, 2019 ( EXECUTIVE SUMMARY p. VI )
POTUS is instead using this pandemic to gut the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). He’s psychotically all-in during this time of Covid-19 severe economic disruption with record unemployment as his ideal opportunity for himself and some other politicos to try to do once-thought-impossible things—such as un-do what remains of most previous U.S. attempts to deal with climate change. ── POTUS’ re-election run is abdicating the EPA mission to protect our well-being as Gina McCarthy, former EPA Director, said in her New York Times article, “EPA, Citing Coronavirus, Drastically Relaxes Rules for Polluters”.
Yale Environment 360 online magazine just noted that the case may be that resurgent government action during our pandemic offers a way forward for fighting climate change … But, too,
EPA announced that to help industry in troubled times it is suspending most of its enforcement activities. The $2.2-trillion stimulus package agreed by Congress may have avoided sinking taxpayers’ dollars into a rescue plan for the country’s already beleaguered coal industry, but it also failed to make any environmental requirements on those industries that were bailed out. That included aviation, whose lobbyists succeeded in removing from the draft package a requirement for airlines to halve emissions by 2050 — even though this was a target the industry had previously committed to achieving.
Since her very first 6-2012 blog “Get into the Doughnut…” British economist Kate Raworth (now of Oxford Univ.’s Environmental Change Institute, @KateRaworth) has been building on the work of Johan Rockström who reminded us on 9 Sep 2009 of our strain on Earth’s resources and our advances that give us the science to recognize this and change our behavior. Rockström’s research team found nine "planetary boundaries" that can guide us in protecting our planet's many overlapping ecosystems.
.
↓ ↓ 22 Apr 2020 Earth Day 2020 ↓ ↓
↓ ↓ 31 Aug 2010, Johan Rockström ── “It is time to bend the curves!” ↓ ↓
.