Insect-borne illnesses rise around the world

By Tina Reed and Alison Snyder, Axios, Aug. 29, 2024

Almost daily headlines about the spread of rare, potentially deadly insect-borne diseases like eastern equine encephalitis and Oropouche fever highlight the expanding threat that mosquitoes, ticks, and other bugs present.

Why it matters: Longer, hotter, summers, milder winters, and changes in land use and travel are giving insects more time and space to spread diseases or compound the misery in places where they already exist.

  • Global warming is "changing where mosquitoes and ticks live, and thus what diseases are moving around in different regions," CDC director Mandy Cohen said Wednesday.

Driving the news: The death of a New Hampshire resident from eastern equine encephalitis, or EEE, brought home the threat.

  • The CDC has also warned this summer about an increased risk of dengue fever, which is spread by the same type of mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus and chikungunya.

  • West Nile Virus — which was recently blamed for the hospitalization of former NIAID director Anthony Fauci — has become a perennial threat throughout much of the continental U.S.

  • Malaria, a parasite spread by another species of mosquito, is also on the rise around the world, and several cases were reported in the U.S. last year, though the risk of catching it here remains low.

Zoom in: In the U.S. in particular, experts say the environment for insects has become far more hospitable with temperatures rising further north.

  • "We're seeing diseases that used to be "tropical." Well, now parts of the U.S. can count," Megan Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, told Axios.

  • "Ticks are not dying over the winter because it's not getting cold enough, so it's making Lyme disease spread. And then we're seeing other tick-borne diseases, like Powassan virus, start to spread. It is a predictable but potentially deadly consequence of climate change."

Yes, but: More travel and globalization are key elements that fuel the spread of vector-borne diseases, said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

  • For example, researchers believe Oropouche fever, which is spread by mosquitoes and midges, was brought to the U.S. and Europe by travelers who had been to Cuba and South America. Officials do not have evidence of local transmission in the U.S.

  • A proliferation of trash — used tires and old plastic — can also create perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes, Osterholm said.

  • Changes in land use also play a role. Lyme disease is believed to be spreading in North America, in large part, due to the suppression of wildfires, which has allowed for the maturation of forests and animals that allow ticks to thrive.

Between the lines: Around the world, there are more — and more severe — outbreaks of arboviruses, which can be spread to people when infected insects bite them. "We're putting out more fires, and it takes more to put them out," says Colin Carlson of the Yale University School of Public Health.

  • The rise in malaria in Africa and dengue fever in Asia and the Americas have been linked to global warming but it's harder to attribute individual outbreaks or rare diseases to climate change, in part because of limited data, he said.

  • "It's also important to remember that explosive epidemics of arboviruses are standard fare," says Carlson, who studies whether changes in certain diseases can be linked to climate change. It happened with Zika and chikungunya in the Americas.

  • "With both Oropouche and EEE, I think it's important to not jump the gun and immediately go to, well, this is climate change in practice," Carlson says.

  1. The intrigue: Some mosquito species are migrating around the world — presumably being transported on shipping routes, says Sadie Ryan, a medical geographer at the University of Florida.

    • One concern is a mosquito species could be deposited in a habitat that suits them and has "blood meals running around on the streets," Ryan said. If there's a disease there, the new species could pick it up and become part of the transmission cycle, she says.

    • "These are new paradigms," she adds. There's natural invasion biology happening at the same time as transformations in the landscape and climate change.

    • The challenge is "not even detecting it where it already exists. It's anticipating where it's coming to next."

  2. What to watch: Insect immunology could offer new avenues for fighting the diseases and is beginning to mature as a field, says microbiologist and National Science Foundation program director Joanna Shisler.

    • Insects don't have complex immune systems like humans but they have something akin to white blood cells and other immune cells.

    • By studying how a virus replicates in a mosquito and how the insect's immune system fights it, scientists may be able to understand why some mosquitoes are resistant while others are susceptible to different types of virus infections, Shisler says.

https://www.axios.com/2024/08/29/mosquitoes-ticks-diseases-climate-change?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosgenerate&stream=top

Another Outer Banks Home Collapses Into Ocean, a Stark Reminder of Climate Change

In Rodanthe, N.C., seven homes have been lost to the ocean in the last four years, as rising sea levels erode shorelines and put more buildings at risk.

By Kate Selig, The New York Times, Aug. 17, 2024

In the community of Rodanthe on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, residents witnessed on Friday an event that was not new and is unfortunately becoming more frequent: A house on the picturesque shoreline collapsed into the ocean.

Weather experts said that crashing waves produced by Hurricane Ernesto hundreds of miles away, combined with especially high tides, appeared to be the cause, though local officials also said that the house was at risk of collapsing before the storm. For those on the Outer Banks, the destruction was one more stark reminder of the larger force at play — climate change, which is making storms more intense and sea levels higher, accelerating the erosion of beach fronts.

Rodanthe, home to about 200 people, has lost seven homes to the ocean in the past four years. The house that was destroyed on Friday was unoccupied at the time of the collapse. There have been no reports of injuries from any of the seven collapses, according to the National Park Service.

Officials warned that many more homes are at risk for damage or collapse in the coming days as Hurricane Ernesto pummels the East Coast from afar, even as it follows a path that is not expected to hit the mainland United States. Some other homes near Rodanthe have already appeared to sustain damage.

Forecasters predict that the storm could bring dangerous rip currents and a high surf along the East Coast through the weekend. The risks could persist in the Outer Banks through early next week, they said.

In North Carolina, climate change has caused the sea level to rise by about half a foot since 2000, and the level could rise by about another foot by 2050, said William Sweet, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

He added that the amount of sea-level rise in North Carolina is comparable to other nearby states. But the Outer Banks, a low-lying barrier island and a popular vacation destination, is particularly vulnerable to rising waters because it faces rougher waters and is built on shifting sand, Mr. Sweet said.

Rodanthe, located on Hatteras Island, is home to many oceanfront properties with elevated houses sitting on pilings that were once surrounded by dunes and dry sand. Now, that land is often partially or fully covered by water, which erodes the sand around the pilings that support the homes, creating the risk of a collapse.

That was the case with the home on Friday, officials said.

“The pilings were washed out from under it,” said Robert Outten, the manager of Dare County, which includes Rodanthe, describing a video he had seen of the collapse. “The house just sat down in the surf and floated off.”

Officials said that residents facing the threat of home collapse have limited — and largely unappealing — options.

They can move their home to drier ground, a costly and logistically complicated process that is not always feasible. They can pay to have their home demolished. Or, they can wait until the home collapses and then seek reimbursement through insurance, if covered.

The Cape Hatteras National Seashore, a 70-mile stretch of shoreline that includes the beach in front of Rodanthe, recently began a pilot program where it purchased and demolished two threatened oceanfront properties, according to David Hallac, superintendent of the national parks in eastern North Carolina. Those homes were the only ones in the program, and the owners were paid fair market value, he said. Many other homeowners were interested in participating, but there were not enough funds to expand the program, Mr. Hallac said.

Along with endangering homeowners, a collapsed house can also pose significant risks to both beachgoers and the local ecosystem, according to Mr. Hallac.

He said debris from a collapsed structure can spread for miles, especially when there are powerful waves, which can break homes into tens of thousands of pieces. Following Friday’s collapse, the National Park Service has urged visitors to avoid the beaches and stay out of the water in Rodanthe.

At the county level, officials in some communities have tried to replenish the sand along the beach. However, Mr. Outten said that such a process has not yet been carried out in Rodanthe because of funding constraints, estimating that it could cost tens of millions of dollars.

“The fact that a house fell isn’t surprising to anyone,” he said. “Our problem is that we don’t have any easy solutions for it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/us/north-carolina-house-collapse-ernesto.html?searchResultPosition=1

Solving Problems With Susan Solomon

She played a crucial role in fixing the ozone hole, and has thoughts on climate change.

By Cara Buckley, The New York Times, July 18, 2024

It’s been an especially intense week, with election-related stress and political divisiveness only increasing. So, it seemed like a good time to hear from someone who has demonstrated how people can come together to fix huge problems and who has also played a crucial role in helping remediate a global threat.

In the 1980s, the groundbreaking atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon pioneered our understanding that the then-gaping hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica was caused by industrial chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. A damaged ozone layer increases ultraviolet radiation on Earth, harming humans, ecosystems, plants and animals. Dr. Solomon’s work underpins the Montreal Protocol, which banned 99 percent of ozone-depleting substances. Ratified by every country on the planet, the agreement is reversing the harms done to the ozone layer and is considered one of the most successful environmental treaties in history.

In her latest book, “Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do it Again,” which was published last month, Dr. Solomon, who teaches at M.I.T., argues that we can learn from past environmental fights. Public awareness and consumer pressure can influence lawmakers, she says, and lead to positive change.

Here are excerpts from our interview, edited and condensed for clarity.

Why this book and why now?

People need to have some hope. We imagine that we never solve anything, that we have all these horrific problems and they’re just getting worse and worse and worse. I’m not going to say we don’t have any problems. We do. But it’s really important to go back and look at how much we succeeded in the past and what are the common threads of those successes.

The chemical companies’ pushback to reining in CFCs is arguably minimal compared to resistance from oil and gas companies to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And the ozone issue didn’t have quite the same fervent political and polarized dissent from the public around it. Are these apples and apples comparisons?

No doubt, climate change is probably the heaviest lift we’ve ever attempted, just because energy is so embedded in the economy. Countries that use more fossil fuel energy are generally richer. There’s almost a linear relationship between how much you emit and how rich you are.

The key thing is how much technologies have changed. It follows from public opinion. It follows from the extent to which the public is actually demanding it. Sixty percent of the American public believes the climate is changing and that it’s caused mainly by human activities, according to current polls. I would argue the paralysis hasn’t been as bad as people think it has been. And with CFCs, the companies actually did resist quite a bit.

I recognize that there were ozone wars. But it was a smaller market and they could shift to other chemicals. This seems bigger and a bit scarier.

I think the smog issue was a better analog. In 1970, when the Clean Air Act was passed, the auto industry was one of the most profitable industries in the United States. They did not want to change. They pushed back like crazy. But there was a massive amount of popular will. There was therefore bipartisan support. Ultimately, it happened because of popular support and clever technology forcing policies that could flow from that support.

The Supreme Court recently threw out the Chevron deference, which will almost certainly weaken or eliminate limits on water and air pollution, toxic chemical regulations, and policies that tackle climate change. So, how do we square that with the idea of hope for the planet?

I am scared about Chevron and was pretty appalled by that decision. It remains to be seen how much it’s really going to affect things, because if it moves forward the way the worst projections are suggesting, it will completely paralyze the courts. And that’s not viable, either.

At that point, I think Congress will have to go back and create a new law that will modify some form of Chevron. So to me, the only question is, how long is that going to take? My gut feeling is it won’t be very long. It depends on your definition of long.

I think fortunately, in a way, the globalization of economies is going to continue to put pressure on America to meet standards in other parts of the world.

Despite an increase in renewable energy, the world is not decreasing overall fossil fuel use. We’re just using ever more energy, including now with A.I. And countries very understandably want to have this lovely developed world existence. Could it be that humans are just insatiable for energy?

When it comes to building a power plant today, in almost any country in the world, solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels. There’s no reason to be building more fossil fuel powered power plants except that that’s what the utilities know how to do.

The real need is in the developing countries. Those are the countries where they have to be building a lot more power plants and other things in order to develop. That’s where the development needs to occur in a clean manner. If that doesn’t happen, we are in deep trouble.

You said in the book that without the right governmental structure, it’s hard to get things done. We’re looking at the prospect of a second Trump presidency, and he pulled the U.S., historically the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, out of the Paris accord. Do you think the technological and economic genies are out of the bottle in terms of embracing green energy, or do you think that a second Trump term could do permanent or semi-permanent damage?

How do you stop the growth of renewable power plants if they’re cheaper than fossil fuels? I’m not saying we should be sanguine. I am saying sound the alarm. Get going. Do what you need to do. Form groups. Help to create the popular will that’s going to propel this issue to where it needs to be. Sure, he may very well pull us out of the Paris Agreement again. He did it before. Did that really slow things down all that much?

The Paris Agreement is written in a clever way. It actually takes about four years after you say you’re going to pull out before you can actually do all the things that you have to do to pull out. Biden put us right back in. So we were out for like, two or three months. I’m not saying that that will have no effect. Whether or not we have a little bit of a hiatus for four years, yes, that would hurt, and climate policy would definitely be slowed down. But it’s not going to be the end of the world.

Your book is called “Solvable.” We have the data scientist Hannah Ritchie, who wrote “Not the End of the World.” We have the marine biologist, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, whose books include “All We Can Save.” And we have the climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe highlighting solutions. I don’t want to be gender essentialist, but do you think there’s something there? When I think of the scariest books about climate change, they tend to have been written by men, to be frank.

I think women are actually pretty good problem solvers. So in all of those cases, they’re thinking about how this thing can actually end up being solved. But as a scientist, I have to say we’re dealing with a small number of statistics here.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/18/climate/susan-solomon-q-and-a.html

US examines carbon pricing on imports, climate envoy says

John Podesta signals shift in policy targeting goods from ‘dirtier’ countries

By Attracta Mooney, Financial Times, July 1, 2024

The US is examining a potential carbon pricing system on imports among a “range of options”, its most senior climate diplomat said, in what would be a key policy shift as it looks to combat Chinese industrial competition and cut emissions.

John Podesta said the US would fight against “freeriding” by foreign producers of carbon-intensive industrial imports, in an interview with the Financial Times in London.

“We’re not going to just give up our industrial base to people who are dumping carbon and freeriding on a system that doesn’t account for, and in fact, kind of subsidises the dumping of high carbon production cost into open markets,” he said.

Podesta took over the role of US climate envoy from John Kerry earlier this year, after leading the rollout of the Biden $369bn clean energy push under the landmark Inflation Reduction Act signed almost two years ago.

“The global trading system doesn’t properly take into account the embodied carbon in tradable goods,” he said. “So we’re undertaking a review of that, trying to deepen the data that we are going to need to implement a policy framework for that.”

Podesta, who announced a task force for climate and trade in April, said the data it gathered would be factored into the policy considerations.

“We need to decide what we’re going to do about this question on carbon in the tradable goods sector, particularly steel and aluminium, cement, glass, fertiliser, et cetera,” he said.

The increased US focus on the fallout for its industrial sector from trade in carbon-intensive products comes as the EU rolls out its carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), a tariff aimed at imports such as cement and steel. China is also considering expanding its carbon permit pricing system, from presently very low levels for emissions allowances granted to industry.

“What we need is to move towards a global trading system that is going to push towards clean,” Podesta said. “The specific policy mechanism that we will adopt needs to fairly reflect the carbon that is embodied in the goods being produced.”

While there was “no decision about what the specific policy mechanism looks like” yet, he said there was a “bipartisan conversation about how we tackle this question” taking place in the US.

Lawmakers from both sides have put forward proposals targeting carbon-intensive sectors in recent years. Republican senator Bill Cassidy and Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse are among those calling for a carbon tariff that allows the US to take advantage of its less carbon-intensive goods while making foreign producers pay for their dirtier products. 

A report from the Niskanen Center last year found that the US industry was much less carbon-intensive than some of the world’s largest emitters, such as China, India and Russia, but lagged behind the EU.

Podesta also defended the US launch of tariffs this year on Chinese electric vehicles and solar panels, and addressed the concerns that the protectionist moves could result in a slowdown of the green transition.

He argued China dominated important clean energy sectors such as batteries and the critical minerals needed for electrification because of “non-market practices”, and through the heavy use of polluting coal for the production of goods such as steel.

“We have to have a stable market for these products and industries. And I think that if you create a system that has short-term benefits, but a long-term vulnerability, you haven’t created stability in the transition.”

Some Kind of Carbon Tax Is Coming to America, Like It or Not

Fifty countries now have national systems for pricing global warming emissions, and they may soon drag the US into joining them.

Op-ed by Mark Gongloff, Bloomberg News, June 13, 2024

The late economist Milton Friedman, the patron saint of conservative capitalism, didn’t have much use for government involvement in business. But he made an exception for pollution. If an industry spoils the environment, he often said, then the government should tax it until it cleans up its act. Because if polluters can pollute for free, then they are essentially stealing wealth and well-being from everybody else.

When he said that in the 1960s and ’70s, he was talking about smog and the like. But as scientists and oil companies knew then, and we all know now, carbon dioxide is another form of pollution, one that is heating the world and threatening human civilization. Making polluters pay a price for this negative externality, as Friedman would call it, is an idea that is not only conservative and capitalist and moral but also a boon to both the environment and federal budgets.

So, naturally, the world’s shining bastion of conservative capitalism, the United States, consistently rejects Friedman’s idea. Fortunately, plenty of other countries are getting on board with it. And they may soon enough drag the US into joining them.

Fifty countries now have national systems for pricing carbon, involving a carbon tax, emissions trading or a combination of both, according to the latest World Bank tally. These systems cover 24% of the world’s carbon emissions, up from just 7% in 2013.

Dozens of local governments have their own mechanisms, including California, Massachusetts and Washington. Nineteen countries and 13 more local governments are actively debating or preparing to take up the practice, including six more US states.

The US government is one of just three members of the Group of 20 nations that are in no hurry to price carbon. The other two are Russia and Saudi Arabia (and even Saudi Arabia is at least about to launch a voluntary carbon-credit market, for whatever that’s worth). This is not what you would call good company, though it is perhaps understandable — all three are large producers of fossil fuels. Refusing to price carbon amounts to a $700 billion annual gift to US oil companies.

But the pressure to change is building, even if the pace is still too slow. Carbon pricing raised a record $104 billion in revenue last year, a far cry from the trillions needed annually to deep-six fossil fuels and avoid the most catastrophic climate change. US involvement would move the needle significantly.

Europe, of all places, may be the source of the most pressure. The European Union is transitioning to a carbon tariff, called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, that will be fully in place in 2026. This will charge foreign exporters for the emissions they generate in the production process, which will move the market’s invisible hand to favor cleaner production. And it will be fair because EU producers already pay a price for carbon as part of the union’s cap-and-trade system. The tariff and the trading system work together to set a carbon price that everybody pays.

Another key detail about the CBAM is that it gives exporters a break if they can prove they’ve already paid a carbon fee in their home countries. That will push those countries — including the US — to set their own carbon price or get left behind, MIT economist Catherine Wolfram noted in a recent session at Harvard University’s Climate Action Week.

Not that there aren’t plenty of other great reasons for the US to jump on board. At the session with Wolfram was Harvard economist James Stock, who estimated that adding a carbon tax to the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy incentives would cut US carbon emissions by 66% by 2035, easily surpassing the Biden administration’s stated goal of cutting emissions in half by 2030. Without it, the country is on a path to climate failure.

“No models indicate the 2030 US climate target would be met with the IRA alone,” Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said on the panel. He has proposed legislation for both a domestic carbon price and a border tariff. “If we want a pathway to climate safety, it will require we do what’s economically and morally right and price carbon pollution.”

A carbon tax could also raise $2 trillion over a decade, Wolfram said, putting a huge dent in the federal budget deficit when everybody is starting to panic about it again. That estimate is consistent with other studies — though a new one from researchers at the University of British Columbia suggests a global carbon tax could raise $2 trillion per year, enough to cover a universal basic income for the entire planet.

As Whitehouse noted, US manufacturers are already two-thirds less carbon-polluting than those in, say, China. This means Europe’s tariff will benefit them even if the US doesn’t lift a finger to impose its own price. But doing so would benefit them even more while also tweaking China. That calculus has inspired bipartisan interest, including a bill by Republican Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina proposing their own carbon tariff.

As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Liam Denning noted, Cassidy has gone out of his way to deny his tariff would amount to carbon pricing. Without a domestic carbon price, a border tariff probably wouldn’t be fair enough to withstand World Trade Organization scrutiny, Wolfram suggested. Still, the bill was another encouraging sign that momentum is growing toward the US finally taking Milton Friedman’s advice. It can’t happen soon enough.

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-13/climate-change-carbon-pricing-is-coming-to-america-like-it-or-not?leadSource=uverify%20wall&embedded-checkout=true