Are You Ready for Lockdown?

According to Foreign Policy, the Covid-19 pandemic is heading only one way - toward lockdown.

Politicians won’t admit it yet, but it’s time to prepare—physically and psychologically—for a sudden stop to all life outside your home.

Whether you are reading this in your living room in Vancouver, office in London, or on a subway in New York City, you need to think hard, and fast, about two crucial questions: Where, and with whom, do you want to spend the next six to 12 weeks of your life, hunkered down for the epidemic duration? And what can you do to make that place as safe as possible for yourself and those around you? 

Your time to answer those questions is very short—a few days, at most. Airports will close, trains will shut down, gasoline supplies may dwindle, and roadblocks may be set up. Nations are closing their borders, and as the numbers of sick rise, towns, suburbs, even entire counties will try to shut the virus out by blocking travel. Wherever you decide to settle down this week is likely to be the place in which you will be stuck for the duration of your epidemic. 

To appreciate what lies ahead for the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, pay heed to Italy, France, and Germany. The United States, for example, is currently tracking exactly where Italy was about 10 days ago. France and Germany, which track two to five days ahead of the United States, are now revving up measures akin to those taken by Italy, including lockdowns on movement and social activity. In a matter of days, the United States will follow suit. 

If you live alone, have no family members or close friends who require your special attention, and have no alternative living space, you have no decision to make. You are where you will be for coming weeks.

...

It’s also important to prepare psychologically. Every family or couple has its issues, and tensions can amplify during long confinement. Common sense can ease the shared suffering. 

If children are undergoing remote schooling, and parents are simultaneously working remotely, everybody needs headphones, plenty of computer bandwidth, and a designated workspace. Before stores close, make sure every user has proper cables, headphones, batteries, adapters, and other tools of the computer trade. 

Printers, if they will be used, require paper and ink: Have plenty on hand. 

Everybody needs routines, including exercise and recreation. Shared burdens of cooking and cleaning should be offset by shared play and fun. 

Boredom and stress can suck the lifeblood out of a person. Before your home goes on lockdown, make sure your download accounts for movies and television are paid. There are plenty of good books around the house, and games and decks of cards are handy.  

Perspective

This Speaks Volumes But the Message is Dire

India, the second most populous nation, has 137 confirmed cases of Covid-19. Pakistan is reporting just 236 cases. Those low, low numbers spell trouble for the Indian subcontinent, South Asia, and the rest of that overpopulated region.

If community spread of the coronavirus is already underway across South Asia, the region’s health care system will come under unprecedented stress. Consider hospital beds, for example. According to data from the OECD, India has just 0.5 hospital beds for every 1,000 people. The United Kingdom has five times as many per capita (2.5), Italy has more than six times as many per capita (3.2), and South Korea has over 24 times as many per capita (12.3). If the number of infections in India rises exponentially, the country’s hospitals will struggle to cope. India has just 0.8 doctors for every 1,000 people, while the corresponding numbers for the United Kingdom, Italy, and South Korea are 2.9, 4.0, and 2.3 respectively. 

Other South Asian countries have just as much cause to worry. In an interview this week with the Associated Press, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan candidly expressed his fears: “If [the coronavirus] spreads, we will all have problems with our health facilities. We just don’t have that capability. We just don’t have the resources.”

As Sumit Ganguly writes in FP, India’s emergency response systems sometimes hold up remarkably well. In 2018, the state of Kerala curtailed the spread of the Nipah virus, and the nation has a history of successful contact tracing in influenza outbreaks. But the question now is whether the number of coronavirus cases will grow too high, too quickly, and overwhelm the country’s hospitals. Have South Asia’s countries missed their chance to flatten the curve? 

It will be several weeks before we’ll have real data and answers. Whatever happens, the pandemic will be a reminder to South Asia’s governments that they have long neglected health care infrastructure, especially for their lower-income populations. As the chart below shows, South Asian nations have among the lowest rates of spending on health care as a proportion of their GDPs.

And what of the poorer nations of Africa, i.e. "Ebola Alley"? They certainly have ample experience of lethal viral epidemics but has that sapped their resources to bear another, Covid-19?

Still Unclear About Covid-19? MiT has Links

MiT's tech review, The Download, is often a font of great information you won't find in the funny papers.

Today's edition opens with the editor-in-chief explaining that the life you knew last week is over and it's not coming back. (sorry the formatting is so screwed up)

How so?: To stop coronavirus we will need to radically change almost everything we do: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members. But what most of us have probably not yet realized—yet will soon—is that things won’t go back to normal after a few weeks, or even a few months. Some things never will. Why?: It’s widely agreed (even by Britain, finally) that every country needs to “flatten the curve”: impose social distancing to slow the spread of the virus so that the number of people sick at once doesn’t cause the health-care system to collapse, as it is threatening to do in Italy right now. That means the pandemic needs to last, at a low level, until either enough people have had Covid-19 to leave most immune (assuming immunity lasts for years, which we don’t know) or there’s a vaccine. This isn’t a temporary disruption. It’s the start of a completely different way of life. Read the full story. Then there's a discussion of "herd immunity" and what needs to happen before we get it.   Once enough people get Covid-19, it will stop spreading on its own. But the costs will be devastating, reports Antonio Regalado. The options: One involves extraordinary restrictions on free movement and assembly, as well as aggressive testing, to interrupt its transmission entirely. The second is a vaccine that could protect everyone, but it still needs to be developed. A third is potentially effective but horrible to consider: just wait until enough people get it.   Herd immunity: If the virus keeps spreading, eventually so many people will have been infected and (if they survive) become immune that the outbreak will fizzle out on its own as the germ finds it harder and harder to find a susceptible host. This phenomenon is known as herd immunity, and experts say it would kick in after about 60% of the world population has been infected.   However: About 80,000 people have recovered from the coronavirus already, and it’s likely they are now resistant, although the degree of immunity remains unknown. Some viruses, like the flu, do find ways to keep changing, which is why immunity against such seasonal germs isn’t complete. Read the full story. And now, those promised links.

1 All 50 US states now have coronavirus cases  The virus has killed over 100 and infected nearly 6,000, though the true figure is likely far higher. (CNBC)   + This map shows the hotspots. (NBC)   + The White House wants to spend more than $1 trillion to blunt the impact. (NYT $) 2 A new app would say if you’ve crossed paths with someone who’s infected Even better, it preserves your privacy. (TR)   + Maybe tech companies could use all that location data they collect to good use. (WP $)   + What to do if you think you have coronavirus. (Vox)   + Build up your mental resilience. (Bloomberg) 3 Why Italy has been so severely affected by the outbreak The country has lots of elderly people, and its young people mingle more with them. (Wired $) 4 Please post about your mundane life on Instagram We’re suddenly seeing people’s more intimate, homely side. (The Atlantic)   + Parents with young kids are pulling a triple shift during the coronavirus outbreak. (NPR)   + Pity the people planning their weddings. (Wired UK)   + This is our chance to live online. (NYT) 5 Misinformation is baked into Facebook’s business model Its current approach to moderation just won’t cut it, says a new report. (The Verge) + Facebook says a glitch meant it marked reputable coronavirus posts as spam. (Buzzfeed) 6 Birds are incredible engineers 🐦🔧 Their nests are resilient in ways we’re just beginning to understand. (NYT $) 7 Quarantini time! Virtual happy hours are on the rise 🍸 You can’t go to the pub, so make the pub come to you. (WP $)   + We’re all Zoomers now. (NYT $) 8 Airlines are carrying freight instead of passengers Coronavirus is playing havoc with supply chains. (Wired $)   + Coronavirus created the world’s longest passenger flight. (CNN) 9 A day in the life of a delivery driver right now 🛵 "I thought I'd be getting fat-ass tips. I'm not getting fat-ass tips." (Vice) 10 Jared Leto was blissfully ignorant about coronavirus until yesterday Imagine. (The Guardian)

Comparing Covid-19 to the Spanish Flu is Pointless

There are plenty of graphs and charts circulating that convey the idea that this novel coronavirus is a trifle compared to the savage viral contagions of the 20th century. That idea is right in some ways but very, very wrong in others.

The world in 1918 was a much different place than the world of 2020. Civilization, the human population, has metastasized over the past century. It has undergone massively transformative change. changes that have left us less resilient, more vulnerable and, in many ways, indefensible.

Thomas Friedman captures our overlooked predicament.

I wrote my book “The World Is Flat” about growing global interconnectedness in 2004. The world has gotten so much flatter and interconnected since. Heck, when I started writing that book, Facebook was just being launched; Twitter was only a sound; the cloud was still in the sky; 4G was a parking place; LinkedIn was a prison; for most people, applications were what you sent to colleges, Skype was a typo and Big Data was a rap star. And the iPhone was still Steve Jobs’s secret pet project. 

All of those connectivity tools, not to mention global trade and tourism, exploded after 2004 and really wired the world. Which is why our planet today is not just interconnected, it’s interdependent — and in many ways even fused. 

This has driven a lot of economic growth. But it’s also meant that when things go bad in one place, that trouble can be transmitted farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever. So, a virus-laden bat bites another mammal in China, that mammal is sold in a Wuhan wildlife market, it infects a Chinese diner with a new coronavirus and in a few weeks all my public schools are closed and I’m edging six feet away from everyone in Bethesda.

...

Here’s a simple way to explain the exponential threat we face — in a way an oft-bankrupt real estate developer like Donald Trump might understand. It was also offered by [Sun Microsystems'] Bill Joy: “The virus is like a loan shark who charges 25 percent a day interest. We borrowed $1 (the first coronavirus to appear here). We then fiddled for 40 days. Now we owe $7,500. If we wait three more weeks to pay, we’ll owe almost $1 million.”

That’s why working every single day to slow the rate of infection and testing everyone possible is everything. Lose that battle, lose the war.

Friedman writes that, once the pandemic is over, American society will be delineated as BC - Before Corona and AC - After Corona.

In an essay in The Boston Globe last week, [author and University of Maryland prof, Michelle] Gelfand recalled that in a paper she and her colleagues published in Science several years ago, they classified countries in terms of how much they prioritized rules over freedom as either “tight” or “loose,” writing: “Tight societies, like China, Singapore and Austria have many rules and punishments governing social behavior. Citizens in those places are used to a high degree of monitoring aimed at reinforcing good behavior. Loose cultures, in countries such as the United States, Italy and Brazil, have weaker rules and are much more permissive.”

These differences in tightness and looseness, she argued, were not random: “Countries with the strongest laws and strictest punishments are those with histories of famine, warfare, natural disasters, and, yes, pathogen outbreaks. These disaster-prone nations have learned the hard way over centuries: Tight rules and order save lives. Meanwhile, cultures that have faced few threats — such as the United States — have the luxury of remaining loose.” 

It’s been pretty obvious, said Gelfand, that “famously ‘tight’ societies like Singapore and Hong Kong … have demonstrated the most effective response to Covid-19.” 

At the same time, our deficiencies in White House coordination and reckless public figures — like Larry Kudlow, Sean Hannity, Laura In­graham, Rush Limbaugh, Kellyanne Conway, Devin Nunes and Trump himself —– who initially minimized the   

Only generosity will save us. There are millions of business owners and employers out there who are invested in long-term assets that they were assuming would go up in value — a stock, a company, a home, a restaurant, a store — with borrowed money. That’s money that they can’t now repay.

Therefore, we not only need the Fed to backstop their banks to prevent a total meltdown, we not only need the banks to restructure their debts, we need to get fresh cash into the pockets of all their workers so they can eat after their last paycheck is spent. It is encouraging to see the administration and Congress moving rapidly to do just that.
The more we simultaneously tighten our culture and loosen our purses, the stronger and kinder society we’ll be A.C. — After Corona.

The next epidemic may well be a contagion of debt and insolvency. We'll need to sort that out without the ability to throw resources at it, resources we no longer have as the world did in the 2007-2008 Great Recession. Other, more creative and vastly more constructive answers will be needed.  This brings to mind the lessons of ancient Athens and the statesman and great reformer, Solon, from the 6th century BC.

America and, for that matter, many countries in the developed world may need new policies vaguely akin to Solon's Seisachtheia.

Athenian society had become debt-bound. The economy was collapsing under its own weight. There were too many debtors who could not pay, many of them stripped of their lands and imprisoned or, together with their families put into slavery. There were too many creditors, merchants, who could not recover what was owed them and also lost the customers who had built their businesses that now languished in prisons or slavery. The city state was falling into decline.

Solon's reform of these injustices was later known and celebrated among Athenians as the Seisachtheia (shaking off of burdens).  As with all his reforms, there is considerable scholarly debate about its real significance. Many scholars are content to accept the account given by the ancient sources, interpreting it as a cancellation of debts, while others interpret it as the abolition of a type of feudal relationship, and some prefer to explore new possibilities for interpretation. The reforms included: 

annulment of all contracts symbolised by the horoi. 

prohibition on a debtor's person being used as security for a loan, i.e., debt slavery. 

release of all Athenians who had been enslaved. 

The removal of the horoi clearly provided immediate economic relief for the most oppressed group in Attica, and it also brought an immediate end to the enslavement of Athenians by their countrymen. Some Athenians had already been sold into slavery abroad and some had fled abroad to escape enslavement – Solon proudly records in verse the return of this diaspora.

I don't suggest that 21st century America could have a "shaking off of burdens" but, like ancient Athens it has a plague of debt that requires some remedy. The annual federal deficit when Trump came to power was $585 billion, 3.2% of GDP. By 2019, Trump had it up to $984 billion or 4.7% of GDP. This year it will easily break a trillion dollars. Now Trump is promising another $.85 trillion (atop the existing trillion dollar deficit) in stimulus spending. The American commercial sector has been fueled by debt and easy money. The era of "everyday low taxes" has exacerbated this dangerous imbalance. We've been warned for years that consumer indebtedness had reached perilous levels. We have created a weakness that increases our vulnerability to even a viral epidemic.

Those who survived the Black Death prospered. Those who survived WWI and the Spanish Flu pandemic were greated with the Roaring 20s.  That's not in the cards this time.

Small Batch Distilleries Step Up to Solve Sanitizer Shortage

Beamsville, Ontario's Dillon's Distillers is diverting some of its whiskey operations into producing disinfectant alcohol and hand sanitizer needed to help combat the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the States, a number of boutique distilleries are doing the same, answering the public demand.

Now what we need is a government with enough courage to cajole, coerce or commandeer manufacturing plants to produce ventilators, respirators and other medical supplies so urgently needed for treatment of intensive care patients and in such short supply across the country.

And yes, Mr. Trudeau, that means you. As prime minister, your "fundamental obligations" are set out in the Emergencies Act, to wit, " the safety and security of the individual."

This pandemic is obviously a public welfare emergency under Part 1 of the Act which confers great powers on the federal government.

public welfare emergency means an emergency that is caused by a real or imminent 

(a) fire, flood, drought, storm, earthquake or other natural phenomenon,

(b) disease in human beings, animals or plants, or

(c) accident or pollution 

and that results or may result in a danger to life or property, social disruption or a breakdown in the flow of essential goods, services or resources, so serious as to be a national emergency.

Bingo. This rings all the bells.

8 (1) While a declaration of a public welfare emergency is in effect, the Governor in Council may make such orders or regulations with respect to the following matters as the Governor in Council believes, on reasonable grounds, are necessary for dealing with the emergency:

(a) the regulation or prohibition of travel to, from or within any specified area, where necessary for the protection of the health or safety of individuals;

(c) the requisition, use or disposition of property;

(d) the authorization of or direction to any person, or any person of a class of persons, to render essential services of a type that that person, or a person of that class, is competent to provide and the provision of reasonable compensation in respect of services so rendered;

(e) the regulation of the distribution and availability of essential goods, services and resources;

(f) the authorization and making of emergency payments;

(g) the establishment of emergency shelters and hospitals;

Why Mr. Trudeau has not already sought a public welfare emergency declaration is unclear. Why he has not already commandeered suitable manufacturing capacity for the production of essential equipment and supplies is unclear.

Our government seems to have fallen far behind the power curve on this one. It's time they corrected that.

Should Government Put the Manufacturing Sector on a Wartime Footing?

During WWII America mobilized the country's industrial base and put it into armaments production. Automobile manufacturers switched rapidly to churning out tanks by the thousands and car plants built giant four-engine bombers.

Today we need a new weapon for the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. There's an urgent need for ventilators, respirators and other equipment to keep patients alive and protect healthcare workers.

Louis Vuitton set the example when it chose to transform its plants from the production of high-end fragrances and cosmetics into production of hand sanitizer that it is distributing free of charge across France.

Surely there's enough industrial capacity in North America for our governments to switch the most suitable plants into production of essential medical equipment and supplies, especially ventilators for those in intensive care.

So what's holding them up? Their prime duty is to protect the security and wellbeing of the public. It's about time they stepped up.

Pandemics and Bad Habits

"Here's to a bad plague and a bloody season." I heard that line from an old friend, a former naval officer. Apparently it originated from subalterns, junior officers, in the Royal Navy during the 18th or 19th century, the age of sail. Eager for promotion they prayed for something to thin the ranks above them, something like a plague or a bloody war.

Devastation creates opportunities, many opportunities for change, or advancement in the aftermath.

Andrew Nikiforuk writes that this contagion, like those past, will usher in real change.

In 2016 the Commission on Creating a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future, a U.S. panel of health experts, warned that “the conditions for infectious disease emergence and contagion are more dangerous than ever” due to overpopulation, urbanization, industrial livestock crowds and mobility.

The panel estimated that there was a 20 per cent chance that four pandemics could unsettle the globe over the next century. 

The late Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize winning biologist, warned more than a decade ago that the world had entered a disquieting era of plague making.

“We have crowded together a hotbed of opportunity for infectious agents to spread over a significant part of the population. Affluent and mobile people are ready and willing and able to carry affliction all over the world within 24 hours’ notice. This condensation, stratification and mobility is unique, defining us as a very different species from what we were 100 years ago,” he wrote.

The only surprise in the Covid-19 pandemic is that governments were so abysmally unprepared for it. We have been warned by the science types that this was an integral part of the Anthropocene. It was going to happen - a lot - they said.  Governments seduced by the quest for perpetual exponential growth have no time for such warnings because they demand restraint on production, consumption and travel.

As COVID-19 provokes the usual spate of plague behaviours (fear, dread, generosity and compassion) it is worth remembering that pandemics remain critical and immutable social forces that shape our lives. They paralyze and disrupt. They reveal and renew.

Nikiforuk lists 10 characteristics that the global elite have ignored to our peril. He writes that there's nothing random about pandemics.

...Homo sapiens have a long history of provoking plagues with overcrowding, dirty water, deforestation, poor nutrition, ruinous poverty, soil erosion and novel agricultural practices. 

...vaccines and drugs rarely arrive on the scene until the pandemic has waned. In fact material changes in human behaviour, housing, nutrition and hygiene have always had the most impact on slowing or stopping plagues.

...The Silk Road brought rats and fleas to 13th-century Europe resulting in a demographic collapse in which one in four people died. The slave trade bombarded two continents with epidemics. Waves of cholera epidemics followed European trade routes from the Ganges Delta to the slums of major cities. Global steamship traffic dutifully carried influenza around the world and played a key role in spreading the deadly Spanish flu pandemic.

...President Woodrow Wilson was so focused on the First World War that he ignored repeated warnings about influenza and its impact on Atlantic troop movements to the Western Front. At the end of the war Canadian and U.S. authorities knowingly put sick troops on cramped ships with poor ventilation. As a result the flu killed 675,000 Americans while the trench warfare claimed but 53,000 U.S. soldiers.  

President Donald Trump, who initially accused his political rivals of perpetrating a “hoax” when they warned his administration wasn’t doing enough about COVID-19, failed to prepare the United States with adequate testing and containment. Then, saying “I take no responsibility at all,” he falsely blamed the Obama administration for inadequate testing kits.

...COVID-19, for example, could provoke challenges to the unsustainable complexity of technological life as well as the deadly biological traffic in all living organisms on a planet now crowded by eight billion people. We might, after the storm has passed, question the vulnerability of monocultures and the globalization of everything.

Justin Trudeau and his fellow leaders didn't wish this upon us. They didn't plan this. They didn't plan for it either. They ignored the warnings that a pandemic was coming and there would be a succession of them in the decades to come. Theirs are sins of omission and we need an accounting for that.

We don't know how lethal Covid-19 will turn out to be. We don't know how the virus will mutate before the second and possibly a third wave hit. In the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919, it was the mutated virus of the second wave that was, by far, the most devastating.

We live in an age of science. It is time our governments heeded the warnings of science and stopped their slavish pursuit of corporatism and the global economy.

You'll Be Needing to Wash More Than Your Hands

The BBC has a very timely article on our new global virus and how it can be transmitted. Hint: public transit may not be a good idea.

There has been some discussion of 'contact' infection - getting the virus by touching a contaminated surface. I read that Covic-19 could survive on surfaces for up to 3 days. Apparently that was wishful thinking.

One aspect that has been unclear is exactly how long SARS-CoV-2, the name of the virus that causes the disease Covid-19, can survive outside the human body. Some studies on other coronaviruses, including Sars and Mers, found they can survive on metal, glass and plastic for as long as nine days, unless they are properly disinfected. Some can even hang around for up to 28 days in low temperatures. 

Coronaviruses are well known to be particularly resilient in terms of where they can survive. And researchers are now beginning to understand more about how this affects the spread of the new coronavirus.

It sounds like washrooms are a bit worrisome, even yours at home.

Like many respiratory viruses, including flu, Covid-19 can be spread in tiny droplets released from the nose and mouth of an infected person as they cough. A single cough can produce up to 3,000 droplets. These particles can land on other people, clothing and surfaces around them, but some of the smaller particles can remain in the air. There is also some evidence that the virus is also shed for longer in faecal matter, so anyone not washing their hands thoroughly after visiting the toilet could contaminate anything they touch.

This might be a perfect time to break that disgusting habit some are reported to have developed of taking their smart phones into the can to while away the sit down time and catch up with their friends.

A few other pointers. The virus can live an estimated three hours as droplets from coughing. On cardboard it's 24 hours.

The findings suggest the virus might last this long on door handles, plastic-coated or laminated worktops and other hard surfaces. The researchers did find, however, that copper surfaces tended to kill the virus in about four hours. 

But there is a speedier option: research has shown that coronaviruses can be inactivated within a minute by disinfecting surfaces with 62-71% alcohol, or 0.5% hydrogen peroxide bleach or household bleach containing 0.1% sodium hypochlorite. Higher temperatures and humidity also tend to result in other coronaviruses dying quicker, although research has shown that a related coronavirus that causes Sars could be killed by temperatures above 56°C or 132°F (hotter than even a bath scalding enough to cause injury) at a rate of about 10,000 viral particles every 15 minutes.

It sounds as though the fight against the virus doesn't stop at our front door. It may be time for a regime of disinfecting countertops, appliances and, absolutely, bathrooms at least every few days, more if you have many visitors.

While We're On the Subject of Pipelines

It's not just human health that's in jeopardy from the Covid-19 pandemic. The fossil fuel industry is taking a pounding. Part of it is the decline in energy consumption from economies that are largely shutting down due to the virus. International air travel has tanked. People are being told to work at home and stay there. There's a glut of fuel on the markets and prices aren't expected to get out of the $30 per bbl doldrums any time soon.

Then there's the oil war underway between Russia and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis wanted production cutbacks. Russia refused. The Saudis intend to retaliate by flooding world markets with ultra-cheap oil.

How that going? Well it's creating a seller's market for supertanker operators. Supertanker rates have soared 678 per cent.

Just before the OPEC+ break-up on March 6, daily rates for VLCCs were in the low $30,000s. At the end of last week, the cost to charter a supertanker had surged to $200,000-$300,000 a day, depending on the destination of the crude oil cargo, brokers told The Journal.

What's Better Than Givenchy of Christian Dior? And Trump Tries to Scoop German Vaccine.

Hand sanitizer, that's better than fancy fragrances. And who's okay with that? Louis Vuitton, Hennesy, Moet - the company that produces those high end fragrances and cosmetics.

Answering the patriotic call, the company is going on a war footing. It is converting its plants to the production of hydroalcoholic gel, hand sanitizer, to meet French demand - for free.

“Through this initiative, LVMH intends to help address the risk of a lack of product in France and enable a greater number of people to continue to take the right action to protect themselves from the spread of the virus,” the statement said.

On Sunday, France’s health minister reported 29 more coronavirus deaths, marking France’s biggest single-day jump in fatalities from covid-19. Over the weekend, the government joined other European countries, including Italy and Spain, in taking measures to stop the virus’s spread, closing its restaurants, cafes, entertainment venues and all nonessential businesses.

In a less altruistic development, German authorities are meeting to discuss an approach by the American president to buy the exclusive rights to a Covid-19 vaccine under development by German researchers.

The governments of Germany and the United States are wrestling over the German-based company CureVac, which is working on a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, reported German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. 

The prominent German media outlet reported, citing unnamed sources, that US President Donald Trump was offering large sums of money to German scientists working on a vaccine. He wanted to secure exclusive rights to their work, the newspaper reported.

See, there's no ally like an American ally.

Nikiforuk - Welcome to the "Age of Pandemics"

Does Covid-19, the latest pandemic, herald a new era?

For years climate scientists have warned that among the many perils posed by climate change would be the spread of disease. Our focus on extreme weather events and their impacts consigned the disease thing to the back pages. Suddenly it is all over the front page, everywhere.

The Tyee's Andrew Nikiforuk writes that the current pandemic may be the opening act in what he terms an "Age of Pandemics."

This particular biological invader springs from an ancient, large and diverse family of viruses hosted by a variety of wild animals, including bats and birds. 

These species are particularly hard pressed by global economic forces now ruinously reducing biological diversity everywhere. As biological biodiversity declines, viruses will seek reliable hosts and jump from animals into people at any given opportunity. Peter Daszak, a pioneering disease ecologist, says we now live in Age of Pandemics. 

SARS, a close relative of SARS-CoV-2, plugged up hospital systems and cost $50 billion to bring under control in 2003/2004. MERS, a coronavirus present in bats and camels, has burdened the care of patients with diabetes and heart disease in Middle Eastern hospitals for years now. 

COVID-19 behaves a lot like its relatives. It targets the ill, smokers and the elderly. For 80 per cent of the infected, it appears as a cold-like nuisance; for 20 per cent, it is a life or death battle with hellish pneumonia (see sidebar). Judging by the escalating outbreaks in Australia, Spain, U.S., England and France, COVID-19 will trump the impacts of SARS or MERS by several orders of magnitude. 

Still, at this point it seems COVID-19’s effect on the globe’s highly complex and fragile economy will likely be far more severe than its impact on public graveyards.

Will cyclical pandemics bring us to our senses? Will the neoliberal order fall victim? If it does, it won't be a painless transition.

Viewed through the lens of climate crisis survival, the pandemic has produced some good news. Reduced economic activity in China, the world’s largest oil user, has already resulted in a 25 per cent drop in greenhouse gas emissions and blue skies. Container ship traffic across the Pacific has dropped by half to 100 sailings a month. Auto sales are down 80 per cent and exports have fallen off by nearly 20 per cent. 

In this regard, the virus is readying us for what could be the new reality. To really address the climate emergency, we must slow down economic activity, reduce trade, re-localize economies and severely restrict travel. 

Out with the new, back in with the old. There's nothing radical in this.

Just in time, a business model pioneered by Toyota in the 1980s, now dominates the world economy — everything from grocery stores to hospital beds.
JIT thinking goes like this: Why waste money stocking up on supplies or making stuff locally, when you can order the cheapest stuff from a distant Chinese factory? 

Or why waste money on inventory when a truck can act as moving storage room? 

COVID-19 has punched several holes in such short-term thinking as Chinese factories, under quarantine orders, stopped making things. Supply chains have failed and transportation networks are now backlogged. Medical authorities have struggled to order masks, gloves and antibiotics just in time. 

The "global economy" is broken.

The virus, notes actuary Gail Tverberg, has revealed the “world economy has effectively put way too many eggs in one basket, and this basket is now not functioning as expected.”

The fragility of just-in-time systems has been long foretold. According to decade-old reports by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office and BMO Nesbitt Burns, a severe pandemic with a 2.5-per-cent death rate will shock the economy and turn health care systems upside down. That rate sounds a lot like estimates for COVID-19, which, if it infects more than 100 million North Americans, could kill two million.

Experts now predict a terrible outbreak in the U.S., which has failed to test properly for the virus. A germaphobe president that could not be unseated by an impeachment hearing, may be undone by a chaotic and incompetent health response.

The U.S. has private and public hospital beds for less than one million people but even a minor pandemic would create at least five million infections needing hospitalization. ( - That's not a million 'surplus' beds. Most, if not all, of those beds are being used every day for some other form of care, often critical care. Many American hospitals already have plenty of patients in beds out in hallways, people who may never get to see the inside of a ward.)

The demand for mechanical ventilators for those with failing lungs will exceed supply. China, Iran and Italy have experienced that truth.

Getting ahead of the pandemic curve.

After this relatively modest pandemic, individual nations might adopt a new business model called planning ahead. Prudent societies will make sure they have extra supplies of metals, fuel, medicine and food on hand to keep things running when disruptions occur. Nations will untie many of the ropes of globalization and seek greater independence by consuming fewer resources.

When Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney implemented the age of neoliberal globalism they sold us down the river. Maybe they weren't bright enough to grasp what they were doing. Reagan certainly wasn't. Maybe they were just too inebriated with this new economic ideology to see what lurked behind the curtain. Whatever, that's water under the bridge now.

That does not excuse today's governing parties, Liberal or Conservative, from perpetuating this flawed, risky, even murderous economic model. We need to  build a higher level of self-sufficiency. The price for playing on these margins is too high and it's likely to get worse. It's time for the public interest to prevail over the powerful narrow interests.

Government must reclaim the powers it abandoned to the corporate sector in the course of globalization.  Teddy Roosevelt praised Lincoln for showing "the proper sense of proportion in his relative estimates of capital and labor, of human rights and property rights."

The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. 

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.

The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered-not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means.

We need leaders of courage and vision. There's little to none of that on offer in the Tory ranks. If our current prime minister has either, this is his golden opportunity to reveal it.

h/t Sal

Another Obituary for the Mango Mussolini

Another pundit proclaims Trump's political career DOA. This time it's Republican pundit, Peter Wehner, writing in the Atlantic.

“They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up. You can’t get back six weeks of blindness,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration and is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told The Washington Post. “To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.”

Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, the widely respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whose reputation for honesty and integrity have been only enhanced during this crisis, admitted in congressional testimony that the United States is still not providing adequate testing for the coronavirus. “It is failing. Let’s admit it.” He added, “The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that. I think it should be, but we’re not."

We also know the World Health Organization had working tests that the United States refused, and researchers at a project in Seattle tried to conduct early tests for the coronavirus but were prevented from doing so by federal officials. (Doctors at the research project eventually decided to perform coronavirus tests without federal approval.)

But that’s not all. The president reportedly ignored early warnings of the severity of the virus and grew angry at a CDC official who in February warned that an outbreak was inevitable. The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council’s global-health office, whose purpose was to address global pandemics; we’re now paying the price for that. “We worked very well with that office,” Fauci told Congress. “It would be nice if the office was still there.” We may face a shortage of ventilators and medical supplies, and hospitals may soon be overwhelmed, certainly if the number of coronavirus cases increases at a rate anything like that in countries such as Italy. (This would cause not only needless coronavirus-related deaths, but deaths from those suffering from other ailments who won’t have ready access to hospital care.)

...

Yet in some respects, the avalanche of false information from the president has been most alarming of all. It’s been one rock slide after another, the likes of which we have never seen. Day after day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic and political harm he faced. But Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it. 

The president’s misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading. He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more.

Trump falsely blamed the Obama administration for impeding coronavirus testing. He stated that the coronavirus first hit the United States later than it actually did. (He said that it was three weeks prior to the point at which he spoke; the actual figure was twice that.) The president claimed that the number of cases in Italy was getting “much better” when it was getting much worse. And in one of the more stunning statements an American president has ever made, Trump admitted that his preference was to keep a cruise ship off the California coast rather than allowing it to dock, because he wanted to keep the number of reported cases of the coronavirus artificially low. 

“I like the numbers,” Trump said. “I would rather have the numbers stay where they are. But if they want to take them off, they’ll take them off. But if that happens, all of a sudden your 240 [cases] is obviously going to be a much higher number, and probably the 11 [deaths] will be a higher number too.” (Cooler heads prevailed, and over the president’s objections, the Grand Princess was allowed to dock at the Port of Oakland.)

...

Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious.

...

It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.

"The Joke is Over"

It's almost too much to hope for but The Guardian's Richard Wolffe sees a silver-lining in the Covid-19 pandemic.

For three long years the world has been treated to the sick joke of Donald Trump’s presidency. Some days were more sick than others. But now the joke is over. 

So is the entire facade of the Trump White House: the gold-plated veneer of power and grift will be stripped bare by a global pandemic and recession. 

Of all the obituaries we’ll read in the next several weeks, every one will be more meaningful than the political end of a former reality-TV star. 

But make no mistake. The humanitarian crisis about to unfold will consume what’s left of this president and the Republican party that surrendered its self-respect and sense of duty to flatter his ego and avoid his angry tweets. 

Trump was right about one thing, and only one thing, as the coronavirus started to spread across the world. The sight of thousands of dead Americans will hurt him politically. It will also hurt many thousands of Americans in reality.

Multiple reports have detailed how Trump did not just ignore the growing pandemic; he actively sought to block his own officials’ attempts to track and stop it. Why has there been such a disastrous lack of testing? Because the president didn’t want to know the answer, and because his staff were too busy fighting each other to do the right thing. 

“The boss has made it clear he likes to see his people fight, and he wants the news to be good,” Politico reported one Trump health adviser saying. “This is the world he’s made.”
Never mind a world turned upside down by fear and death. Trump’s world is upended by his gobsmackingly childish comments about how the whole thing will blow over. “It’s going to disappear,” he told one reception inside the White House just two weeks ago. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” 

The only miracle of this presidency is that it’s taken so long for this country to wake up to the catastrophe.

Covid-19. We're In It For the Duration.

It's a bit worrisome when our leaders come out with misleading narratives on something as serious as a pandemic. In the case of Donald Trump that's to be expected. Others you might expect to know better, to be more factually grounded.

The message that I'm getting from world leaders is that Covid-19 is a global contagion but it's going to come and then, in some more or less orderly and predictable fashion, go and we'll all get back on with our lives.  Today's recession warning from the Royal Bank assumes the current pandemic "will run its course by the end of the first half of the year."

So, if this pandemic isn't a "slam, bam, thank you ma'am" what is it?

The US Centers for Disease Control, CDC, looks at the deadly Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19.  That  virus hit in three waves, the second by far the most deadly.

There are many other sites but they all confirm that pandemics aren't over quickly and they come in waves, the subsequent waves usually far more lethal because the virus itself mutates.  In 1918, the first wave hit in the spring but it was the second wave, in the fall of 1918, that was by far the more devastating. The third wave that hit in the winter 1918/spring 1919 was much smaller in deaths and infections.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control sums it up.

The virus has to be novel enough to prevail over the seasonal A viruses, and because of its novelty there can be little specific immunity among humans, except for older people who may have met a similar virus in the past. This new virus can then spread rapidly from human to human all over the world. Because of the lack of human immunity the virus causes a variable amount of severe disease and deaths: this is an influenza pandemic. As immunity increases among humans, and the pandemic virus changes, the pandemic strain becomes part of (and may dominate) the mix of seasonal influenza A viruses, perhaps changing some of the characteristics of seasonal influenza.

It remains to be seen whether Covid-19 will behave as other 'novel' viruses have in the past. If so, it's a 12 to 18-month contagion that will see either two or three waves of infection.

Is Recession in Our Future?

The Royal Bank of Canada figures that, between the Covid-19 pandemic and the engineered collapse in world oil prices, recession is in our near future.

The bank is predicting Canada's economy will grow at an annualized pace of 0.8 per cent in the first quarter, but then contract in the second and third quarters of the year. 

RBC is forecasting an annualized decline of 2.5 per cent in the second quarter and 0.8 per cent in the third quarter. 

Its forecast is based on an assumption that the impact of the virus will run its course by the end of the first half of the year, but an economic recovery will be prevented by persistent low oil prices. 

RBC expects the economy will pick up in the fourth quarter.

The Trudeaus Have Covid-19

Still no word on the prime minister but Sophie Trudeau has tested positive for the coronavirus Covid-19.

How a Pandemic Plays Out. It's Going to Be a While.

I've been wondering when is this Covid-19 pandemic likely to run its course. Two months, three?

Here's the skinny from the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety.

A pandemic is not a "one time" event and periods of illnesses may come in 2 or 3 "waves" anywhere from 3 to 12 months apart. The total duration of a pandemic is likely to be 12 to 18 months.

18 months. About the same time some experts claim we'll have to wait for a proven vaccine to come on stream.

Two or three waves of recurrence, from 3 to 12 months apart.

Well, it looks like we're in this for the duration. I suppose we'll have to find new ways of doing a great many things. I wonder what we'll look like coming out the other side.

Can We Finally Talk About Resilience?

Never, no, never, 
did Nature say one thing

and Wisdom another."

                                                                              - Edmund Burke

I've been writing about resilience in its many permutations since early 2009.

Resilience is a measure of the health of any nation state, including our own. It is determined not only by what we do in the present but also what we have done in the past and what others have done before us.  A commitment to posterity is a component to the maintenance of a healthy degree of resilience. It causes us to look back to our ancestors and ahead to descendants, including those not yet in existence. It is a stretching of time beyond our typical focus on the here and now.

Many years ago Bill Moyers produced an excellent series on posterity, how it had been expunged by neoliberalism and the prospects of a rebirth.

In that first post I looked at posterity in the context of the Great Recession that still plagued the world.

Posterity doesn't fit into our economic model of maximized production and consumption because it creates a fetter on both. We have lost our understanding of the importance of posterity to our society, to our country. We no longer plan today for generations to come far in the future. We no longer look much beyond the next electoral cycle. 

Protecting posterity is an act of collective consciousness and will. It is acknowledging that we're entitled to our fair share and no more. We can't have it all without depriving future generations of their fair share. 

To try to understand the idea of "fair share" imagine if our great, great, great grandparents had followed our path. 

Imagine if our ancestors had two things - the ability to consume everything they could get their hands on and a blind indifference to the day when it was our turn to populate this country. Imagine if two or three generations had gone on a rapacious binge gobbling up the world's resources; going into serious deficit on renewables (emptying the oceans, logging off the forests, transforming farmland into desert) and fouling the environment. Then consider how their depredations might impact on your life today. I think that's beyond the imagination of all but the best science fiction writers but that's of no real matter. It's enough in any event to make the case for posterity and the concept of "fair share."

These ideas are anathema to neoliberal ideology. The future, including future generations, is discounted to near nothingness. It doesn't have to be this way. It just is. It has become our orthodoxy. The New York Times ran a feature story on how Norway thrives while protecting the interests of future generations.

Norway’s relative frugality stands in stark contrast to Britain, which spent most of its North Sea oil revenue and more during the boom (Thatcher) years. Government spending rose to 47 percent of G.D.P., from 42 percent in 2003. By comparison, public spending in Norway fell to 40 percent from 48 percent of G.D.P. 

“The U.S. and the U.K. have no sense of guilt,” said Anders Aslund, an expert on Scandinavia at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “But in Norway, there is instead a sense of virtue. If you are given a lot, you have a responsibility.” 

Eirik Wekre, an economist who writes thrillers in his spare time, describes Norwegians’ feelings about debt this way: “We cannot spend this money now; it would be stealing from future generations.”

Neoliberalism is at odds with progressivism generally. Government in Canada is decidedly neoliberal. It is not progressive, despite its trappings.

Part of the problem is that the ‘now’ commands so much more attention. We are saturated with knowledge and standards of living have mostly never been higher – but today it is difficult to look beyond the next news cycle. If time can be sliced, it is only getting finer, with ever-shorter periods now shaping our world. To paraphrase the investor Esther Dyson: in politics the dominant time frame is a term of office, in fashion and culture it’s a season, for corporations it's a quarter, on the internet it's minutes, and on the financial markets mere milliseconds. 

Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future,” she wrote in 1978. We can only guess her reaction to the relentless, Twitter-fuelled politics of 2019. No wonder wicked problems like climate change or inequality feel so hard to tackle right now. 

That's why researchers, artists, technologists and philosophers are converging on the idea that short-termism may be the greatest threat our species is facing this century. 

...What these thinkers from myriad fields share is a simple idea: that the longevity of civilisation depends on us extending our frame of reference in time – considering the world and our descendants through a much longer lens. What if we could be altruistic enough to care about people we might never live to see? And if so, what will it take to break out of our short-termist ways?

Are we colonizing the future?

 According to the social philosopher Roman Krznaric, failing to value the lives of all these descendants is akin to ‘colonising’ the future – essentially deciding that future generations have no ownership rights there, or any say over how it evolves. “We treat the future as a distant colonial outpost where we dump ecological degradation, nuclear waste, public debt and technological risk,” he told attendees at a recent event in London organised by The Long Time Inquiry, an initiative to encourage long-term thinking in the cultural sector.

Our petro-economy is a profoundly stupid attempt at meeting today's needs to the impairment of future generations of Canadians. The environmental havoc our bitumen production creates today won't be our problem but theirs and they will pay dearly for our indifference to their future. We know our descendants will not enjoy the ease and comfort we have known. We are not leaving Canada a better place than we found it.

The wisdom of the Iroquois guides some futurists: 

...a principle called ‘Seventh Generation’ stewardship, defined by the leaders of the Native American Iroquois Confederacy many centuries ago. “Every decision they took had to keep in mind seven generations hence.” 

...They propose that the prevalence of short-termism is entwined with our attitude to death. “We’ve got a hunch that our inability to deal with the future of the world beyond our lifespan is wrapped up with our inability to deal with the fact that our lives will end,” they write. “Our denial of our own mortality prevents us from engaging with the long-term future.”

The defence of posterity spans the political spectrum. Edmund Burke and Theodore Roosevelt. centuries apart, shared a high regard for the role of posterity. Progressivism should not be the exclusive preserve of the left and centre-left.

Burke, the 18th century political philosopher, wrote of posterity as the glue that connects future generations to the past but also the present:

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust. 

...one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers."

In Burke's view, each generation has a life estate in our land but no more and that life estate, bequeathed to us by our ancestors, is in the nature of a trust. We are trustees of the land for the generations that will follow us. I would like to think he had the current neoliberal contagion or something like it in mind when he writes of "floating fancies or fashions" that undermine the continuity of the commonwealth and prevent one generation from linking with the other.

 
Roosevelt wrote of "skinning the land."

"I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation."

I'm sure he was speaking plainly and pointedly when he talked of one generation robbing future generations, skinning the land and leaving it worthless to those who will follow. I wonder how he might have phrased that in this, the age of climate change and the threat of mass extinction?

Today we face near apocalyptic threats, challenges. We can expect to be stressed to the breaking point especially if we continue to neglect the essential resilience of our nation, our provinces and our communities.  Thomas Homer-Dixon addressed our predicament in his book, "The Upside of Down."

...we really do have some ability to choose our future. But we have to recognize what kind of forces we're up against, we have to have courage, and we have to be smart - not only at the time of the social earthquake and the moment of contingency that follows but well in advance. Specifically, if we're going to have the best chance of following a different and positive path, we must take four actions. First, we must reduce as much as we can the force of the underlying tectonic stresses in order to lower the risk of synchronous failure - that is, of the catastrophic collapse that cascades across boundaries between technological, social and ecological systems. Second, we need to cultivate a prospective mind so we can cope better with surprise. Third, we must boost the overall resilience of critical systems like our energy and food supply networks. And fourth, we need to prepare to turn breakdown to our advantage when it happens - because it will.

...

Alas, humankind's track record when it comes to proactive policy, especially in response to slow-creep problems, doesn't inspire much confidence that we will succeed in these tasks. Today, most of us are simply too deep in denial, and our political and economic systems are too hobbled by powerful vested interests for real change to happen in the absence of a sharp push or shock from outside. With colossal effort by the relatively small numbers of people today engaged in trying to do something about these problems, and perhaps with a good deal of luck, we might divert or somewhat weaken the tectonic stresses. But we're unlikely to weaken them enough to reduce significantly the danger we face, so we'd better get ready for social earthquakes.

...

A prudent way to cope with invisible but inevitable dangers ...is to build resilience into all systems critical to our well-being. A resilient system can absorb large disturbances without changing its fundamental nature. ...in an increasingly uncertain and dangerous world, we should sometimes give up extra efficiency and productivity in order to gain resilience - especially to improve our ability to prevent foreshocks from triggering synchronous failure. We can do this in many ways. One involves loosening some of the coupling inside our economies and societies and among our technologies ...We can gain resilience, too, by increasing the buffering capacity or slack in our economies. Industries can rely less on just-in-time production - a particular obsession of the past two decades - and instead build up inventories of feedstocks and parts so they can keep running even when supplies of essential inputs are temporarily interrupted. 

...

Of course, many of these recommendations fly in the face of the ideology of today's globalized capitalism. In its most dogmatic formulation, this ideology says that larger scale, faster growth, less government, and more efficiency, connectivity and speed are always better. Slack is always waste. So resilience - even as an idea, let alone as a goal of public policy - isn't found anywhere on the agendas of our societies' leaders. ...And because our leaders hardly ever think about resilience, we keep doing things that make our lives progressively less resilient - we pile on more debt, build tract housing over the finest cropland, develop addictions to distant sources of energy, become so specialized that we can't take care of ourselves when everyday technologies fail, and fill every nook and cranny of our days with so much junk information and pointless running around that we don't have time to reflect on what we're doing or where we're going.

In other words we must get ourselves, our society, out from under this ultimately destructive, even suffocating neoliberal ideology that our political leadership is so determined to perpetuate. That will be an act of unplugging from a system in which we've become tightly integrated. Think of it as leaping from the car of a runaway train after you spot the bridge out just ahead. You're choosing a somewhat slim chance over no chance at all.

Neoliberalism expunges posterity and saps our resilience, leaving us vulnerable to disruption and chaos. We are placing the very continuation of a habitable future in jeopardy. What prevents us from seeing that? When we do see it why do we succumb to complacency?

Last October The Guardian ran a lengthy essay exploring our "environmental vandalism" and how we betray future generations. It's about how we have made ourselves "bad ancestors" in waiting. The article discussed Greta Thunberg and the contemporaries she has inspired to take their claims against us to the courts.

The youth lawsuits and school strikes dramatise a crucial aspect of the threat to democracy posed by climate emergency: the question of intergenerational responsibilities and ethical duties across decades and centuries. 

To put it another way: what is the relationship of democracy to time? This question may seem abstract but is actually foundational. We are all born into a world we did not make, subject to customs and conditions established by prior generations, and then we leave a legacy for others to inherit. The project of self-government invariably requires navigating the tension between short- and long-term thinking, our immediate circumstances and what is to come, the present and the future. Nothing illustrates this more profoundly than the problem of climate crisis, which calls into question the very future of a habitable planet. 

When individuals like me take multiple flights a year and buy food imported from halfway around the world, we can rest assured that we won’t meet the people who will, down the road, be most gravely affected by our carbon-intensive lifestyle. But don’t we have democratic obligations to them regardless? If we expect justice from our predecessors, don’t we owe this debt to future generations? Right now the world’s relatively affluent are on the way to being bad ancestors, the kind who think only of themselves in the here and now.

The writer stresses that climate breakdown is the greatest problem requiring collective action ever faced by humanity but the advantaged (that's us) prefer to look the other way.

Since 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that developed countries must make a radical break with fossil fuels, which means lowering consumption and switching to renewable energy sources while also shifting our diets away from meat and dairy, as animal agriculture is a massive source of emissions. A proposal for curbing emissions from the developed world so that the billion individuals who live without electricity can enjoy its benefits would probably pass in a landslide in a world referendum, but it would likely fail if the vote were limited to people in the wealthiest countries.

Resilience without social justice has a dim future. Collective action means all of us, all in.

“The Earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence … would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climactic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.”  - US Congressman, George Perkins Marsh, 1847.

A century later, two pioneering climate scientists issued the following statement in a 1957 coauthored paper, bolstering Marsh’s case for urgent action with carefully marshalled evidence: “Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.”

The Covid-19 coronavirus is rocking the world and provides a rare opportunity to examine just what in hell we're doing to our planet and to ourselves. It invites us to undergo societal "stress tests" that we might discern and accurately measure our strengths and our vulnerabilities. It may be our last chance to restore resilience to our nation. It's time we had a conversation.