COVID-19 DEATH TOLL SHOWS NEED TO REDUCE EMISSIONS

The World Health Organization says dirty air, both indoors and out, cuts short seven million lives annually. That includes more than 100,000 Americans.

Now there’s a study from researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health indicating that higher levels of the tiny, dangerous particles in air known as PM 2.5 are associated with higher death rates from Covid-19.

U.S. counties that averaged just one microgram per cubic meter more PM 2.5 in the air, the researchers found, had a covid-19 death rate that was 15 percent higher, based on data from 3,080 counties covering 98 percent of the nation’s population.

Specifically, the researchers found that if Manhattan had lowered its average PM 2.5 level by just a single unit, or one microgram per cubic meter, over the past 20 years, there would have been 248 fewer Covid-19 deaths in the period ending April 7. “The results of this paper suggest that long-term exposure to air pollution increases vulnerability to experiencing the most severe Covid-19 outcomes,” the authors wrote.

“If you’re getting COVID, and you have been breathing polluted air, it’s really putting gasoline on a fire,” said Francesca Dominici, a Harvard biostatistics professor and the study’s senior author.

Most fine particulate matter comes from fuel combustion in automobiles, refineries and power plants. Some is from indoor sources like tobacco smoke. The fine particles penetrate deep into the body, promoting hypertension, heart disease, breathing trouble, and diabetes, all of which increase complications in coronavirus patients. The particles also weaken the immune system and fuel inflammation in the lungs and respiratory tract, adding to the risk both of getting Covid-19 and of having severe symptoms.

 In 2003, Dr. Zuo-Feng Zhang, the associate dean for research at the University of California, Los Angeles, Fielding School of Public Health, found that SARS patients in the most polluted parts of China were twice as likely to die from the disease as those in places with low air pollution.

Beth Gardiner, a journalist and the author of Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution, said she was particularly worried about what the coronavirus outbreak would mean for countries with far worse pollution, such as India. “Most countries don’t take it seriously enough and aren’t doing enough given the scale of the harm that air pollution is doing to all of our health,” she said. 

Sadly, the United States is proposing to ignore scientists’ strong recommendations that clean air standards be raised. The decision by EPA to stand pat drew a critical letter from 18 U.S. senators that cited the Harvard study. “What should be painfully obvious to all of us right now is that the cost of protecting public health is far less than the cost of breathing polluted air,” said U.S. Senator Tom Carper (D-DE), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and one of the signers of the April 14 letter. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler defended the decision and noted that the Harvard study had yet to be peer reviewed.

The world’s experience with Covid-19 has illustrated the importance of fostering public acceptance of science and a willingness to listen to scientific expertise. We also need to pay heed to scientists warning us about climate change. "Every disaster movie starts with a scientist being ignored," Texas Tech University’s Katharine Hayhoe said during a recent webinar organized by Harvard University and the American Public Health Association. 

The fastest, most efficient way to reduce air pollution is to put an honest price on fossil fuel emissions--a price that takes into account the significant costs imposed on all of us when breathing those emissions causes poor health and death. It’s time for Congress to start moving on a carbon fee.

Can Miami Beach and other coastal cities hold off rising seas?

Last October Miami Beach declared a climate emergency. Citizens who had urged the city to take that action see it as a first step toward convincing the city to do more to slow carbon emissions and climate change, The Miami Herald’s Alex Harris reported.

Over the next two decades climate change will increasingly threaten Florida’s 8,500-mile coastline and its $1 trillion economy. E&E’s Daniel Cusick, in an article picked up by Scientific American, wrote: “New modeling by Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan economic think tank, reveals that ‘100-year floods’ could occur every few years rather than once a century in many locations, endangering an additional 300,000 homes, 2,500 miles of roadways, 30 schools and four hospitals.

RFF contends that Miami will become “the most vulnerable major coastal city in the world,” with hundreds of billions of dollars in assets under assault from winds, storm surges, coastal flooding, and sea-level rise.

What will Miami Beach do to combat its emergency? We should get a glimpse of the possibilities within the next few weeks after Jacobs Engineering Group Inc., an engineering firm hired by Miami Beach to review its climate-adaptation strategy, releases its final recommendations. 

The audience will include a number of American cities that confront similar challenges, among them New York, Norfolk, Va., and Charleston, S.C., Arian Campo-Flores reported in The Wall Street Journal. Because Miami Beach is farther along than many of them in feeling the effects of climate change and trying to respond, its experience could provide lessons.

In recent years, Miami residents have become familiar with a phenomenon called a “king tide,” a higher-than-normal tide caused by specific alignments of the sun and moon. “Under a full or new moon, the tide becomes so elevated that combined with sea-level rise the water filters through the drains flooding the streets of downtown Miami,” Irene Sans, a meteorologist at WFTV, said in a Twitter message. The worst flooding occurs in September, October and November, Washington Post reporter Matthew Cappucci wrote. And it can happen even on a sunny day.

Miami Beach started addressing the threat in 2014. Lying an average of four feet above sea level on porous limestone, the city is especially vulnerable. The grim reality: Sea levels are projected to increase as much as 21 inches by 2040, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Climate experts praise Miami Beach—a diverse, international city with wealthy sections—for devoting $1 billion to tackle the problem, Campo-Flores reported. The city installed bigger storm-water pipes and new pump stations to push rainwater out to sea. It also began elevating sea walls and raising roads in the lowest-lying areas to address sea-level rise. The roughly $1 billion program is funded by a combination of sources, including bonds and residential and business utility fees.

The Sunset Harbour neighborhood, which overlooks Biscayne Bay and often flooded during the highest tides, was the first commercial and condo area where these measures were implemented. Since January 2017, after the project was completed, the area has avoided 85 flooding incidents that would have occurred without the changes, said Roy Coley, the city’s public works director.

A January 2020 study commissioned by the city and led by consulting firm ICF International Inc. estimated that raising roads in the neighborhood increased condo values 11.9 percent.

But Campo-Flores reported that residents are split on what the city should do. Some say that proposals to raise roads as much as about five feet above sea level and add storm-water pumps with generators the size of vans would create unsightly intrusions and a potential drag on property values.

So the mayor and city commissioners face a dilemma: How far can they go in accommodating those homeowners’ concerns without undercutting the city’s long-term viability? “We will have to have the political will to make unpopular decisions,” City Commissioner Ricky Arriola told Campo-Flores. 

Our nation desperately needs elected officials willing to vote for policies that will pay off down the road. We have not seen much of that wisdom in Washington. By now it should be clear to almost all members of Congress that we need national policies that combat climate change--and that the longer these politicians sit on the sidelines, the more our health and prosperity will suffer. The time has come to put an honest price on carbon emissions.

MEDICAL PROS SOUND CLIMATE ALARM

Medical professionals are seeing the effects of climate change in their own practices more often and are increasingly concerned. Recently 150 of them gathered in Boston to start planning a response.

Sponsored by the New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and all of Boston’s teaching hospitals, the Climate Crisis and Clinical Practice Symposium aimed “to bring the issue of climate change directly to the bedside,” Dr. Aaron Bernstein told The Boston Globe’s Felice J. Freyer. He is a pediatrician and the interim chief of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He was one of the event’s organizers.

The gathering was the first of eight to galvanize health care systems to face the reality of climate change. Six additional symposiums are scheduled over the next year and a half in the United States. Australia will host another. 

“The climate crisis has created an unprecedented future that looks nothing like what we have experienced,” said Dr. Renee N. Salas, an emergency medicine doctor at Mass. General. “We are the ones that are experiencing this first and need to work collectively with the rest of the country.”

On January 2 the Medical Society Consortium wrote an open letter to President Trump urging him not to remove the United States from the Paris Agreement. “Our organizations represent hundreds of thousands of our country’s doctors, nurses and other health care providers,” wrote Dr. Mona Sarfaty, the organization’s executive director. “We are seeing, right now, the harms to our health that global warming is creating. We foresee much greater health harms to all Americans, especially our children and grandchildren, if we do not join with the rest of the world to respond to the climate crisis—because climate change is a public health emergency.”

“Climate change exacerbates chronic and contagious disease, worsens food and water shortages, increases the risk of pandemics, and aggravates mass displacement” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote in an article titled “Climate Change is Already Killing Us” in Foreign Affairs. “The broad environmental effects of climate change have long been discussed as long-term risks; what’s clear now is that the health effects are worse than anticipated—and that they’re already being felt.” He is director-general of the World Health Organization.

Heat stress is one of the health problems that is on the rise. It can lead to heart attacks, kidney stones, and preterm birth, The Globe’s Freyer reported. “Cholera, dengue, Lyme disease and valley fever are all increasing in incidence and also expanding their range. With warmer springs and later winters, the pollen season is getting longer and also more severe, because carbon dioxide prompts plants to release more pollen. That increases asthma attacks, as does air pollution.

“The heat also affects the way medications work. Drugs for depression, heart disease, and kidney failure can be less safe in hot weather. People taking beta blockers for high blood pressure are more likely to faint in hot weather. EpiPens and albuterol can be rendered ineffective by extreme heat if left inside cars.”

Dr. Gaurab Basu, a primary care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance who attended the Boston symposium, expressed concern about the many people doing physical labor outside, especially in urban “heat islands,” where asphalt and concrete can make the temperature 10 or 15 degrees higher than elsewhere. They could be injuring their kidneys day after day without knowing it. Basu told the group about a 27-year-old patient who developed end-stage kidney disease caused by chronic exposure to heat. The man, an immigrant, had worked on sugar farms in El Salvador. Doctors, she said, need to “add a climate lens” to their diagnostics.

Mental health also can suffer from climate change. Extreme heat "makes all mental illnesses worse,” said Dr. Gary Belkin, a psychiatrist and visiting scientist at the Harvard climate group. Emergency room visits for mental crises and psychiatric hospitalizations go up during heat waves.

Climate change can even affect the availability of medical supplies, Freyer reported. Bernstein had ordered intravenous fluids for an infant who had become dehydrated. He was shocked to receive an alert that IV fluids — a common, life-saving treatment — were being rationed. The reason: Hurricane Maria, which scientists believe was more intense due to climate change, had shut down the Puerto Rican plant that makes them.

Politicians reluctant to act on climate change say that doing so would threaten our prosperity. They obviously are not considering the cost of health problems. It is time for Congress to put a price on carbon that reflects ALL the costs that emissions impose on us.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS DEVELOPING CLIMATE LEGISLATION

House Republicans have started putting together a legislative package to counter climate change, a sign that their voters are increasingly concerned about the problem and want to see the party take action.

“Trees, plastics and favorable tax policy are at the core of House Republicans’ new push,” Amy Harder wrote in an Axios post. Arkansas Congressman Bruce Westerman is working on legislation, called the Trillion Trees Act, that would, among other things, create a national target for increasing the number of trees grown in the U.S. “for the purpose of sequestering carbon,” according to a summary of the bill viewed by Axios. The party will be working on the legislation into the spring.

However, any eventual plan would not set any targets for reducing carbon pollution, reported Rebecca Beitsch in The Hill. House Democrats recently outlined a plan requiring the U.S. to rely on 100 percent clean energy by 2050.

Coordinating the GOP proposals, which will be fleshed out in coming months, is Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, the top Republican in the House. “Republicans are doubling down on a small-government agenda,” Harder wrote. “They’re eschewing carbon pricing, and they're criticizing the far more aggressive and sweeping policies pushed by some Democrats as ineffective and harmful to America’s economy.”

House Republicans have convinced their most conservative members to support the plan, The Washington Examiner’s Josh Siegel reported. “Climate denial is a bad political strategy,” said Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and of the House Climate Solutions Caucus. “At some point, you have to be for something to fix it.”

The lawmakers want to make permanent and expand the 45Q tax credit that is available to companies sequestering CO2, with a new component emphasizing the importance of capturing carbon from the sky long after it was emitted.

To speed up the development of clean energy, the GOP proposes doubling federal investment in basic research and fundamental science from $16 billion to $32 billion over 10 years. Leading that effort is Oklahoma Congressman Frank Lucas, the top Republican on the House Science and Technology Committee. He rejects the idea that Washington should pass a carbon tax as a “stick” to push clean-energy technologies, as opposed to continuing to rely on “carrot” policies incentivizing new tech, Harder reported.

House Republicans also want to provide lower tax rates for U.S. companies exporting clean energy technology. “One of the top priorities,” Politico reported, “will be ‘promotion of cleaner, more efficient fossil fuels to meet global demand,’ according to slides presented to a closed-door GOP Conference meeting last week.”

They want to promote the use of natural gas and nuclear power, and they see potential in agriculture, pushing for farming techniques that reduce or capture carbon. 

A number of Republicans, including GOP icons such as James Baker and George Shultz, are taking a different tack. They have come together under the banner of a group called the Climate Leadership Council (CLC) to promote what they consider a proposal that is based on long-time Republican principles. It is simple: Put a price on fossil fuel emissions and give all the revenue back to the American people. 

Recently, Shultz and Ted Halstead, the CLC’s CEO, issued a report listing 12 reasons why its leaders believe an economy-wide fee on carbon emissions outperforms two other options: a regulatory scheme or subsides. These 12, the report says, “demonstrate the overwhelming economic, environmental and political superiority of carbon pricing as the cornerstone of America’s climate policy. While complementary policies will always be needed, pricing should be the primary driver.”

Democrats have been busy, too. On January 28 the majority staff of the House Committee on Energy & Commerce released a discussion draft of the Climate Leadership and Environmental Action for our Nation’s (CLEAN) Future Act. The draft legislative text can be found here, along with a section-by-section overview here. Among its provisions:

• New requirements for EPA to set emissions standards for cars, trucks, locomotive and aircraft engines;

• EPA must issue new rules delivering 90 percent reduction of methane emissions from oil and gas sources below 2012 levels by 2030; and

• Each state must develop its own plan for reaching net-zero emissions.

In addition, Democrats in the House have just introduced an ambitious five-year infrastructure plan with a major focus on climate. House Transportation Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio of Oregon said the plan will be a radical departure from previous highway-focused transportation bills. Instead, the proposal will put clean energy and climate "resilience" at the center. "We're looking at every sector under my jurisdiction and attempting to meet the goals of the Green New Deal," he told reporters. 

Young evangelicals urging action on climate

Young American evangelicals increasingly believe that the climate is changing, that humans have something to do with that, and that we need to take action. “They’re reading the Bible and they’re saying, ‘Wait a minute, something is not jibing, and we need to rethink this,’ ” said Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Dartmouth College who studies evangelicals and spoke with Boston Globe reporter Laura Krantz.

About a quarter of all American adults identify as evangelical Protestants, according to a 2014 poll by the Pew Research Center. One in six of those is between the ages of 18 and 29. To capture the energies and attention of these people hungry for change within their faith community, Ben Lowe founded Young Evangelicals for Climate Action.

“More and more, we have younger evangelicals who are pretty disillusioned and disenfranchised with that traditional political alliance,” Lowe told Krantz. The organization educates young people on Christian college campuses and in churches, as well as political leaders through legislative meetings and advocacy.

Last fall, when Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania introduced the Market Choice Act to create a carbon tax, Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, the national organizer and spokesperson for YECA, said, “A price on carbon is long overdue, and needs to be one of the first steps we take to tackle the climate crisis at a national level. We’ve long advocated that durable climate policy must be bipartisan. We applaud Rep. Fitzpatrick and co-sponsors Reps. Rooney (R-FL), Carbajal (D-CA), and Peters (D-CA) for their courage and their commitment to rising above partisan acrimony and putting forward a common sense solution to help us move toward a 100% clean energy economy.”

YECA developed a Faithful Action Pledge: “We are young evangelicals striving to live out what Jesus said was most important: loving God fully and loving our neighbors as ourselves. Climate change is already impacting our neighbors and God’s creation here in the United States and around the world. For the sake of ‘the least of these,’ we believe God is calling us to faithful action and witness in the midst of the current climate crisis. Therefore, we commit ourselves to living faithfully as good stewards of creation, advocating on behalf of the poor and marginalized, supporting our faith and political leaders when they stand up for climate action, and mobilizing our generation to join in.”

Chelsey Geisz is a YECA member at Wheaton College, sometimes called “the Harvard of Christian colleges” and the alma mater of Billy Graham. "I'm not encountering anyone at Wheaton, even among my most conservative friends, who disagree with climate change," she told Meera Subramanian of InsideClimate News.

Katharine Wilkinson, author of Between God & Green: How Evangelicals Are Cultivating a Middle Ground on Climate Change, believes that YECA is influential. “My sense is that they are probably doing some of the most promising and savvy work in this space, particularly because they are focused on the population where I think there’s actually an opening,” she told Grist’s Kate Yoder.

“The best messengers are sons and daughters, they’re grandkids, they’re young people who grew up in the church,” Meyaard-Schaap said. “They see someone like them who they love and respect, who’s involved in the story and can invite them into it in a way that resonates with them.”

Lindsay Mouw, 25, is working with YECA in her native Iowa and told The Boston Globe, “I think it’s important for us as evangelicals who care about climate to really be involved in the political scene and make sure we are electing people who promote the sustainability of the Earth.”

She is doing her utmost to persuade older evangelicals to press lawmakers to act. “You’re right to say that younger evangelicals are probably particularly more attuned to the issue and probably give it a higher priority than maybe some of our older members,” said Galen Carey, vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, a group that considers climate change a problem but does not lobby lawmakers on the issue. “But we’re not giving up on our older members either. We want everyone to recognize what a concern it is.”

We urge evangelicals--young, old, and in between--to join us in building support for pricing carbon emissions, whether via Congressman Fitzpatrick’s bill or some other measure.

To hear young evangelicals explain why they are committed to helping fend off climate change, go to: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd5UiteryKHLFq9GDdmB-Og