Facebook’s plan to combat climate misinformation running rampant on its site is here. It is a... “climate science information center” of facts, figures, and news stories about the climate crisis that obscures the systematic changes needed to address climate change while peddling tips that mirror Big Oil talking points. The whole thing is a giant hand-wave to distract us from looking at the real solutions to climate change and the role Facebook is playing in corroding them.
Here is where I would usually say it is good Facebook is doing something about climate change. But the era of corporate malfeasants getting belly rubs is over. What Facebook is doing is akin to the National Rifle Association’s argument that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. In this case, Facebook is the arms dealer handing out guns to both sides.
Facebook’s announcement of the information center opens with the line, “climate change is real,” which is usually a precursor to bullshit. Congrats. Welcome to the party that scientists have been having for more than 100 years.
Many users who opened Facebook on Tuesday in the U.S., UK, and Germany were greeted with a chance to visit the climate science information center. The page contains information from trusted scientific sources, localized climate data trends, and, at least on Tuesday for this user, a prompt to share a photo of a place I want to protect from climate change with the hashtag #OurPlanetChallenge. If 100,000 users do it, Facebook said it would kick $100,000 to the Arbor Day Foundation.
The science is all well and good, but we are well past the era where science knowledge alone is going to solve anything. To paraphrase a friend of the blog and climate essayist Mary Heglar, all we need to do to understand climate change is look out the window. The fires in the West, relentless heat waves, and other crippling impacts of climate change leading to real-world suffering tell the story much more clearly than graphs showing local temperature trends.
More unsettling is that many of the solutions espoused on the page are garden variety life tips: turn off the lights, reuse things, and drive less. All great and things we should be doing, sure. But they are not going to address climate change, and highlighting them as the solutions plays right into the hands of the industry causing the crisis.
“The ‘solutions’ proposed in the information center are taken right out of the current fossil fuel playbook,” Genevieve Guenther, the founder of End Climate Silence, said in an email. “They are exclusively inadequate individual actions like recycling, turning off the lights when you leave the room, wearing your clothes longer, etc.”
Here are some solutions I didn’t see Facebook espouse: An engaged public that has a shared version of reality, politicians drastically curtailing the power of corporate monopolies from Big Tech to Big Oil, and a transformation of every sector of the economy.
Facebook is actively working against those goals, except (maybe) the latter. Its corrosive effect on democracy and shared truth is well-documented. I won’t go into it ad nauseam, but consider the past six days alone for Facebook with respect to the climate crisis and how the company contributed to dissolving reality.
We keep coming across these "revelations" that companies - particularly the really big ones - are somehow more interested in their revenues than they are in being good citizens, or even decent people.
What's weird is that we continue to be surprised by that.
And what's even weirder than that is our tendency to shrug it off, as if we actually believe those companies can exist outside the world the rest of us have to live in, and that they'll always be able to isolate themselves and never be effected by the shit they dump on everybody else.
Protests and Trump rallies both carry covid-19 risks. But there’s a reason Trump’s rallies are worse
Whenever public health experts warn about the dangers of President Trump’s large political rallies, we are accused of hypocrisy: How come we condone Black Lives Matters protests but call out these rallies as potential superspreader events?
I understand where the criticism comes from. Both events can bring together many thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people. There’s limited physical distancing, with individuals often packed shoulder to shoulder for prolonged periods. There is the kind of chanting and shouting that causes attendees to expel aerosols and potentially transmit the coronavirus. In both settings, individuals come from other cities and states; if they are infected, they can seed the virus when they return to their communities.
But there is one key difference between social justice protests and Trump rallies: Those attending BLM protests by and large grasp the danger and are motivated to reduce their risk, while a large share of those attending Trump rallies deny that there is a danger at all.
I had a patient, a woman in her 60s with chronic medical conditions, who told me she followed covid-19 precautions to the point that she only left her house once a day to take a walk. She had all of her groceries delivered, and she didn’t even see her grandchildren because they attended day care. Yet she felt strongly that she needed take part in an anti-racism protest. She’d lost family members to police brutality, and she was willing to risk her life to show her commitment to the movement.
As her doctor, I couldn’t recommend that she participate in an activity that could compromise her health. But since she was going no matter what, it was my job to help her stay as safe as possible.
This is the public health concept of harm reduction. Protesting involves risk, but she could still substantially reduce that risk by being outdoors, wearing a mask, avoiding dense crowds, limiting her time there and not using public transportation. My patient chose a protest within walking distance of her house. She made sure to stay at the outer edge of the crowd, where she was able to maintain a six-foot distance from others most of the time.
These harm-reduction opportunities continue after an event ends and participants return to their homes. My patient lived alone, but at her protest, those who live with others were instructed to self-quarantine for at least five days and then get tested. During the protests, organizers followed public health guidance to educate participants about how to protect themselves and others. Many cities have helped by offering free testing for protesters.
Not everyone follows every guideline, of course, but overall, such harm-reduction practices appear to have worked. A research paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research examined patterns of spread in more than 300 major cities and found “no evidence that net covid-19 case growth differentially rose following the onset of Black Lives Matter protests.”
Where are the harm-reduction practices at Trump’s rallies? The most recent events, in Nevada and Arizona, have been held indoors. Compared with those outdoors, indoor gatherings could increase the risk of transmission by 18 to 19 times. Many attendees appeared to not wear masks. Some rallygoers in Michigan called covid-19 a “fake pandemic” and spoke about mask-wearing as an infringement on their rights. Trump himself was not wearing a mask at the rallies. He used his platform to mock public health practices.
It seems reasonable, then, to worry that many attendees engage in other risky behaviors, such as hugging and shaking hands. Do they participate in higher-transmission activities before and after rallies, such as going to tightly packed bars and indoor restaurants? When they return to home, do they ignore guidance to self-quarantine and get tested?
And that’s the key difference between social justice protests and Trump’s political rallies. This is what public health experts should counter with when we come under fire for appearing to support one cause over the other. It’s not our job to judge why people are at an event, but it is our duty to explain — based on science — what makes one event higher-risk than another.
To be clear, from an epidemiological perspective, there shouldn’t be any mass gatherings during a pandemic. But let’s not engage in false equivalencies. The reason Trump’s rallies are more dangerous than social justice protests has nothing to do with the purpose of the gatherings and everything to do with the behavior of organizers and participants.
The distinction is this: Are attendees going in spite of the risk or in defiance of it?
A revolution of enslaved plantation laborers in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) begun in August 1791 forced France to legally abolish slavery in its colonies less than three years later. By 1802, however, Napoléon’s forces sought to resurrect the sugar-based economies of Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and other French holdings in the Caribbean by re-enslaving freedpeople who had been living as French citizens for eight years. Africans and their descendants fiercely resisted French forces—successfully in Saint-Domingue, unsuccessfully in Guadeloupe. Though little is known of her early life, Solitude is celebrated as a heroine in Guadeloupe for her role in that struggle for lasting freedom in 1802.
Solitude had joined the maroon settlement of La Goyave in the mid-1790s, and during an attack by French General Desfouneaux, she became the leader of a small group that escaped to the hills of Guadeloupe, eluding capture. On May 5, 1802, French ships arrived in Pointe-à-Pitre carrying troops ready to enforce Napoléon’s decree to reinstate slavery on the islands. Battles erupted as Africans and their descendants fought to preserve their freedom.
Solitude, now pregnant, mobilized her followers to join the forces of Louis Delgrès against the French military. They struggled until they were surrounded and outnumbered by the French troops at Danglemont Plantation. Delgrès and approximately five hundred troops allowed the French soldiers to advance into their territory before igniting stores of gunpowder. The strategic suicide plan resulted in the death of approximately four hundred French soldiers. Though most of the maroons died, Solitude survived and was captured and detained in Basse-Terre prison.
The French military brought Solitude and the other survivors before a military tribunal, which sentenced them all to death. Solitude was temporarily pardoned until she gave birth to her child, who became the legal property of her owner. One day after delivering her baby, on November 28, 1802, Solitude was executed. She was thirty years old.
After her death, Solitude disappeared from the annuals of history until the 1960s, though by that time her contemporaries, such as Delgrès, were recognized. Today, Solitude’s name adorns squares, avenues, a library, and a museum room in Guadeloupe. Solitude’s bravery and courage is remembered in songs, poems, and the musical Solitude la Marronne.
August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air-conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth — 130 degrees in Death Valley — and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered grasslands and forests, some of them already hollowed out by climate-driven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst five-year drought on record. Soon, California was on fire.
This article, the second in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center.
Over the next two weeks, 900 blazes incinerated six times as much land as all the state’s 2019 wildfires combined, forcing 100,000 people from their homes. Three of the largest fires in history burned simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay Area. Another fire burned just 12 miles from my home in Marin County. I watched as towering plumes of smoke billowed from distant hills in all directions and air tankers crisscrossed the skies. Like many Californians, I spent those weeks worrying about what might happen next, wondering how long it would be before an inferno of 60-foot flames swept up the steep, grassy hillside on its way toward my own house, rehearsing in my mind what my family would do to escape.
But I also had a longer-term question, about what would happen once this unprecedented fire season ended. Was it finally time to leave for good?
I had an unusual perspective on the matter. For two years, I have been studying how climate change will influence global migration. My sense was that of all the devastating consequences of a warming planet — changing landscapes, pandemics, mass extinctions — the potential movement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet stands to be among the most important. I traveled across four countries to witness how rising temperatures were driving climate refugees away from some of the poorest and hottest parts of the world. I had also helped create an enormous computer simulation to analyze how global demographics might shift, and now I was working on a data-mapping project about migration here in the United States.
So it was with some sense of recognition that I faced the fires these last few weeks. In recent years, summer has brought a season of fear to California, with ever-worsening wildfires closing in. But this year felt different. The hopelessness of the pattern was now clear, and the pandemic had already uprooted so many Americans. Relocation no longer seemed like such a distant prospect. Like the subjects of my reporting, climate change had found me, its indiscriminate forces erasing all semblance of normalcy. Suddenly I had to ask myself the very question I’d been asking others: Was it time to move?
I am far from the only American facing such questions. This summer has seen more fires, more heat, more storms — all of it making life increasingly untenable in larger areas of the nation. Already, droughts regularly threaten food crops across the West, while destructive floods inundate towns and fields from the Dakotas to Maryland, collapsing dams in Michigan and raising the shorelines of the Great Lakes. Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making thousands of miles of American shoreline nearly uninhabitable. As California burned, Hurricane Laura pounded the Louisiana coast with 150-mile-an-hour winds, killing at least 25 people; it was the 12th named storm to form by that point in 2020, another record. Phoenix, meanwhile, endured 53 days of 110-degree heat — 20 more days than the previous record.
For years, Americans have avoided confronting these changes in their own backyards. The decisions we make about where to live are distorted not just by politics that play down climate risks, but also by expensive subsidies and incentives aimed at defying nature. In much of the developing world, vulnerable people will attempt to flee the emerging perils of global warming, seeking cooler temperatures, more fresh water and safety. But here in the United States, people have largely gravitated toward environmental danger, building along coastlines from New Jersey to Florida and settling across the cloudless deserts of the Southwest.
I wanted to know if this was beginning to change. Might Americans finally be waking up to how climate is about to transform their lives? And if so — if a great domestic relocation might be in the offing — was it possible to project where we might go? To answer these questions, I interviewed more than four dozen experts: economists and demographers, climate scientists and insurance executives, architects and urban planners, and I mapped out the danger zones that will close in on Americans over the next 30 years. The maps for the first time combined exclusive climate data from the Rhodium Group, an independent data-analytics firm; wildfire projections modeled by United States Forest Service researchers and others; and data about America’s shifting climate niches, an evolution of work first published by The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last spring. (See a detailed analysis of the maps.)
What I found was a nation on the cusp of a great transformation. Across the United States, some 162 million people — nearly one in two — will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes could be particularly severe, and by 2070, our analysis suggests, if carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at least four million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life. The cost of resisting the new climate reality is mounting. Florida officials have already acknowledged that defending some roadways against the sea will be unaffordable. And the nation’s federal flood-insurance program is for the first time requiring that some of its payouts be used to retreat from climate threats across the country. It will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status quo.
Then what? One influential 2018 study, published in The Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, suggests that one in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone. Such a shift in population is likely to increase poverty and widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate rapid, perhaps chaotic, urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the burden, testing their capacity to provide basic services and amplifying existing inequities. It will eat away at prosperity, dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of collapse. This process has already begun in rural Louisiana and coastal Georgia, where low-income and Black and Indigenous communities face environmental change on top of poor health and extreme poverty. Mobility itself, global-migration experts point out, is often a reflection of relative wealth, and as some move, many others will be left behind. Those who stay risk becoming trapped as the land and the society around them ceases to offer any more support.
There are signs that the message is breaking through. Half of Americans now rank climate as a top political priority, up from roughly one-third in 2016, and three out of four now describe climate change as either “a crisis” or “a major problem.” This year, Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa, where tens of thousands of acres of farmland flooded in 2019, ranked climate second only to health care as an issue. A poll by researchers at Yale and George Mason Universities found that even Republicans’ views are shifting: One in three now think climate change should be declared a national emergency.
Policymakers, having left America unprepared for what’s next, now face brutal choices about which communities to save — often at exorbitant costs — and which to sacrifice. Their decisions will almost inevitably make the nation more divided, with those worst off relegated to a nightmare future in which they are left to fend for themselves. Nor will these disruptions wait for the worst environmental changes to occur. The wave begins when individual perception of risk starts to shift, when the environmental threat reaches past the least fortunate and rattles the physical and financial security of broader, wealthier parts of the population. It begins when even places like California’s suburbs are no longer safe.
It has already begun.
Let’s start with some basics.
Across the country, it’s going to get hot. Buffalo may feel in a few decades like Tempe, Ariz., does today, and Tempe itself will sustain 100-degree average summer temperatures by the end of the century. Extreme humidity from New Orleans to northern Wisconsin will make summers increasingly unbearable, turning otherwise seemingly survivable heat waves into debilitating health threats. Fresh water will also be in short supply, not only in the West but also in places like Florida, Georgia and Alabama, where droughts now regularly wither cotton fields. By 2040, according to federal government projections, extreme water shortages will be nearly ubiquitous west of Missouri. The Memphis Sands Aquifer, a crucial water supply for Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana, is already overdrawn by hundreds of millions of gallons a day. Much of the Ogallala Aquifer — which supplies nearly a third of the nation’s irrigation groundwater — could be gone by the end of the century.
It can be difficult to see the challenges clearly because so many factors are in play. At least 28 million Americans are likely to face megafires like the ones we are now seeing in California, in places like Texas and Florida and Georgia. At the same time, 100 million Americans — largely in the Mississippi River Basin from Louisiana to Wisconsin — will increasingly face humidity so extreme that working outside or playing school sports could cause heatstroke. Crop yields will be decimated from Texas to Alabama and all the way north through Oklahoma and Kansas and into Nebraska.
The challenges are so widespread and so interrelated that Americans seeking to flee one could well run into another. I live on a hilltop, 400 feet above sea level, and my home will never be touched by rising waters. But by the end of this century, if the more extreme projections of eight to 10 feet of sea-level rise come to fruition, the shoreline of San Francisco Bay will move three miles closer to my house, as it subsumes some 166 square miles of land, including a high school, a new county hospital and the store where I buy groceries. The freeway to San Francisco will need to be raised, and to the east, a new bridge will be required to connect the community of Point Richmond to the city of Berkeley. The Latino, Asian and Black communities who live in the most-vulnerable low-lying districts will be displaced first, but research from Mathew Hauer, a sociologist at Florida State University who published some of the first modeling of American climate migration in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2017, suggests that the toll will eventually be far more widespread: Nearly one in three people here in Marin County will leave, part of the roughly 700,000 who his models suggest may abandon the broader Bay Area as a result of sea-level rise alone.
From Maine to North Carolina to Texas, rising sea levels are not just chewing up shorelines but also raising rivers and swamping the subterranean infrastructure of coastal communities, making a stable life there all but impossible. Coastal high points will be cut off from roadways, amenities and escape routes, and even far inland, saltwater will seep into underground drinking-water supplies. Eight of the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan areas — Miami, New York and Boston among them — will be profoundly altered, indirectly affecting some 50 million people. Imagine large concrete walls separating Fort Lauderdale condominiums from a beachless waterfront, or dozens of new bridges connecting the islands of Philadelphia. Not every city can spend $100 billion on a sea wall, as New York most likely will. Barrier islands? Rural areas along the coast without a strong tax base? They are likely, in the long term, unsalvageable.
In all, Hauer projects that 13 million Americans will be forced to move away from submerged coastlines. Add to that the people contending with wildfires and other risks, and the number of Americans who might move — though difficult to predict precisely — could easily be tens of millions larger. Even 13 million climate migrants, though, would rank as the largest migration in North American history. The Great Migration — of six million Black Americans out of the South from 1916 to 1970 — transformed almost everything we know about America, from the fate of its labor movement to the shape of its cities to the sound of its music. What would it look like when twice that many people moved? What might change?
Americans have been conditioned not to respond to geographical climate threats as people in the rest of the world do. It is natural that rural Guatemalans or subsistence farmers in Kenya, facing drought or scorching heat, would seek out someplace more stable and resilient. Even a subtle environmental change — a dry well, say — can mean life or death, and without money to address the problem, migration is often simply a question of survival.
By comparison, Americans are richer, often much richer, and more insulated from the shocks of climate change. They are distanced from the food and water sources they depend on, and they are part of a culture that sees every problem as capable of being solved by money. So even as the average flow of the Colorado River — the water supply for 40 million Western Americans and the backbone of the nation’s vegetable and cattle farming — has declined for most of the last 33 years, the population of Nevada has doubled. At the same time, more than 1.5 million people have moved to the Phoenix metro area, despite its dependence on that same river (and the fact that temperatures there now regularly hit 115 degrees). Since Hurricane Andrew devastated Florida in 1992 — and even as that state has become a global example of the threat of sea-level rise — more than five million people have moved to Florida’s shorelines, driving a historic boom in building and real estate.
Similar patterns are evident across the country. Census data show us how Americans move: toward heat, toward coastlines, toward drought, regardless of evidence of increasing storms and flooding and other disasters.
The sense that money and technology can overcome nature has emboldened Americans. Where money and technology fail, though, it inevitably falls to government policies — and government subsidies — to pick up the slack. Thanks to federally subsidized canals, for example, water in part of the Desert Southwest costs less than it does in Philadelphia. The federal National Flood Insurance Program has paid to rebuild houses that have flooded six times over in the same spot. And federal agriculture aid withholds subsidies from farmers who switch to drought-resistant crops, while paying growers to replant the same ones that failed. Farmers, seed manufacturers, real estate developers and a few homeowners benefit, at least momentarily, but the gap between what the climate can destroy and what money can replace is growing.
Perhaps no market force has proved more influential — and more misguided — than the nation’s property-insurance system. From state to state, readily available and affordable policies have made it attractive to buy or replace homes even where they are at high risk of disasters, systematically obscuring the reality of the climate threat and fooling many Americans into thinking that their decisions are safer than they actually are. Part of the problem is that most policies look only 12 months into the future, ignoring long-term trends even as insurance availability influences development and drives people’s long-term decision-making.
Even where insurers have tried to withdraw policies or raise rates to reduce climate-related liabilities, state regulators have forced them to provide affordable coverage anyway, simply subsidizing the cost of underwriting such a risky policy or, in some cases, offering it themselves. The regulations — called Fair Access to Insurance Requirements — are justified by developers and local politicians alike as economic lifeboats “of last resort” in regions where climate change threatens to interrupt economic growth. While they do protect some entrenched and vulnerable communities, the laws also satisfy the demand of wealthier homeowners who still want to be able to buy insurance.
At least 30 states, including Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas, have developed so-called FAIR plans, and today they serve as a market backstop in the places facing the highest risks of climate-driven disasters, including coastal flooding, hurricanes and wildfires.
In an era of climate change, though, such policies amount to a sort of shell game, meant to keep growth going even when other obvious signs and scientific research suggest that it should stop.
That’s what happened in Florida. Hurricane Andrew reduced parts of cities to landfill and cost insurers nearly $16 billion in payouts. Many insurance companies, recognizing the likelihood that it would happen again, declined to renew policies and left the state. So the Florida Legislature created a state-run company to insure properties itself, preventing both an exodus and an economic collapse by essentially pretending that the climate vulnerabilities didn’t exist.
As a result, Florida’s taxpayers by 2012 had assumed liabilities worth some $511 billion — more than seven times the state’s total budget — as the value of coastal property topped $2.8 trillion. Another direct hurricane risked bankrupting the state. Florida, concerned that it had taken on too much risk, has since scaled back its self-insurance plan. But the development that resulted is still in place.
On a sweltering afternoon last October, with the skies above me full of wildfire smoke, I called Jesse Keenan, an urban-planning and climate-change specialist then at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, who advises the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission on market hazards from climate change. Keenan, who is now an associate professor of real estate at Tulane University’s School of Architecture, had been in the news last year for projecting where people might move to — suggesting that Duluth, Minn., for instance, should brace for a coming real estate boom as climate migrants move north. But like other scientists I’d spoken with, Keenan had been reluctant to draw conclusions about where these migrants would be driven from.
Last fall, though, as the previous round of fires ravaged California, his phone began to ring, with private-equity investors and bankers all looking for his read on the state’s future. Their interest suggested a growing investor-grade nervousness about swiftly mounting environmental risk in the hottest real estate markets in the country. It’s an early sign, he told me, that the momentum is about to switch directions. “And once this flips,” he added, “it’s likely to flip very quickly.”
In fact, the correction — a newfound respect for the destructive power of nature, coupled with a sudden disavowal of Americans’ appetite for reckless development — had begun two years earlier, when a frightening surge in disasters offered a jolting preview of how the climate crisis was changing the rules.
On October 9, 2017, a wildfire blazed through the suburban blue-collar neighborhood of Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, Calif., virtually in my own backyard. I awoke to learn that more than 1,800 buildings were reduced to ashes, less than 35 miles from where I slept. Inchlong cinders had piled on my windowsills like falling snow.
The Tubbs Fire, as it was called, shouldn’t have been possible. Coffey Park is surrounded not by vegetation but by concrete and malls and freeways. So insurers had rated it as “basically zero risk,” according to Kevin Van Leer, then a risk modeler from the global insurance liability firm Risk Management Solutions. (He now does similar work for Cape Analytics.) But Van Leer, who had spent seven years picking through the debris left by disasters to understand how insurers could anticipate — and price — the risk of their happening again, had begun to see other “impossible” fires. After a 2016 fire tornado ripped through northern Canada and a firestorm consumed Gatlinburg, Tenn., he said, “alarm bells started going off” for the insurance industry.
What Van Leer saw when he walked through Coffey Park a week after the Tubbs Fire changed the way he would model and project fire risk forever. Typically, fire would spread along the ground, burning maybe 50 percent of structures. In Santa Rosa, more than 90 percent had been leveled. “The destruction was complete,” he told me. Van Leer determined that the fire had jumped through the forest canopy, spawning 70-mile-per-hour winds that kicked a storm of embers into the modest homes of Coffey Park, which burned at an acre a second as homes ignited spontaneously from the radiant heat. It was the kind of thing that might never have been possible if California’s autumn winds weren’t getting fiercer and drier every year, colliding with intensifying, climate-driven heat and ever-expanding development. “It’s hard to forecast something you’ve never seen before,” he said.
For me, the awakening to imminent climate risk came with California’s rolling power blackouts last fall — an effort to pre-emptively avoid the risk of a live wire sparking a fire — which showed me that all my notional perspective about climate risk and my own life choices were on a collision course. After the first one, all the food in our refrigerator was lost. When power was interrupted six more times in three weeks, we stopped trying to keep it stocked. All around us, small fires burned. Thick smoke produced fits of coughing. Then, as now, I packed an ax and a go-bag in my car, ready to evacuate. As former Gov. Jerry Brown said, it was beginning to feel like the “new abnormal.”
It was no surprise, then, that California’s property insurers — having watched 26 years’ worth of profits dissolve over 24 months — began dropping policies, or that California’s insurance commissioner, trying to slow the slide, placed a moratorium on insurance cancellations for parts of the state in 2020. In February, the Legislature introduced a bill compelling California to, in the words of one consumer advocacy group, “follow the lead of Florida” by mandating that insurance remain available, in this case with a requirement that homeowners first harden their properties against fire. At the same time, participation in California’s FAIR plan for catastrophic fires has grown by at least 180 percent since 2015, and in Santa Rosa, houses are being rebuilt in the very same wildfire-vulnerable zones that proved so deadly in 2017. Given that a new study projects a 20 percent increase in extreme-fire-weather days by 2035, such practices suggest a special form of climate negligence.
It’s only a matter of time before homeowners begin to recognize the unsustainability of this approach. Market shock, when driven by the sort of cultural awakening to risk that Keenan observes, can strike a neighborhood like an infectious disease, with fear spreading doubt — and devaluation — from door to door. It happened that way in the foreclosure crisis.
Keenan calls the practice of drawing arbitrary lending boundaries around areas of perceived environmental risk “bluelining,” and indeed many of the neighborhoods that banks are bluelining are the same as the ones that were hit by the racist redlining practice in days past. This summer, climate-data analysts at the First Street Foundation released maps showing that 70 percent more buildings in the United States were vulnerable to flood risk than previously thought; most of the underestimated risk was in low-income neighborhoods.
Such neighborhoods see little in the way of flood-prevention investment. My Bay Area neighborhood, on the other hand, has benefited from consistent investment in efforts to defend it against the ravages of climate change. That questions of livability had reached me, here, were testament to Keenan’s belief that the bluelining phenomenon will eventually affect large majorities of equity-holding middle-class Americans too, with broad implications for the overall economy, starting in the nation’s largest state.
Under the radar, a new class of dangerous debt — climate-distressed mortgage loans — might already be threatening the financial system. Lending data analyzed by Keenan and his co-author, Jacob Bradt, for a study published in the journal Climatic Change in June shows that small banks are liberally making loans on environmentally threatened homes, but then quickly passing them along to federal mortgage backers. At the same time, they have all but stopped lending money for the higher-end properties worth too much for the government to accept, suggesting that the banks are knowingly passing climate liabilities along to taxpayers as stranded assets.
Once home values begin a one-way plummet, it’s easy for economists to see how entire communities spin out of control. The tax base declines and the school system and civic services falter, creating a negative feedback loop that pushes more people to leave. Rising insurance costs and the perception of risk force credit-rating agencies to downgrade towns, making it more difficult for them to issue bonds and plug the springing financial leaks. Local banks, meanwhile, keep securitizing their mortgage debt, sloughing off their own liabilities.
Keenan, though, had a bigger point: All the structural disincentives that had built Americans’ irrational response to the climate risk were now reaching their logical endpoint. A pandemic-induced economic collapse will only heighten the vulnerabilities and speed the transition, reducing to nothing whatever thin margin of financial protection has kept people in place. Until now, the market mechanisms had essentially socialized the consequences of high-risk development. But as the costs rise — and the insurers quit, and the bankers divest, and the farm subsidies prove too wasteful, and so on — the full weight of responsibility will fall on individual people.
And that’s when the real migration might begin.
As I spoke with Keenan last year, I looked out my own kitchen window onto hillsides of parkland, singed brown by months of dry summer heat. This was precisely the land that my utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, had three times identified as such an imperiled tinderbox that it had to shut off power to avoid fire. It was precisely the kind of wildland-urban interface that all the studies I read blamed for heightening Californians’ exposure to climate risks. I mentioned this on the phone and then asked Keenan, “Should I be selling my house and getting — ”
He cut me off: “Yes.”
Americans have dealt with climate disaster before. The Dust Bowl started after the federal government expanded the Homestead Act to offer more land to settlers willing to work the marginal soil of the Great Plains. Millions took up the invitation, replacing hardy prairie grass with thirsty crops like corn, wheat and cotton. Then, entirely predictably, came the drought. From 1929 to 1934, crop yields across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri plunged by 60 percent, leaving farmers destitute and exposing the now-barren topsoil to dry winds and soaring temperatures. The resulting dust storms, some of them taller than skyscrapers, buried homes whole and blew as far east as Washington. The disaster propelled an exodus of some 2.5 million people, mostly to the West, where newcomers — “Okies” not just from Oklahoma but also Texas, Arkansas and Missouri — unsettled communities and competed for jobs. Colorado tried to seal its border from the climate refugees; in California, they were funneled into squalid shanty towns. Only after the migrants settled and had years to claw back a decent life did some towns bounce back stronger.
The places migrants left behind never fully recovered. Eighty years later, Dust Bowl towns still have slower economic growth and lower per capita income than the rest of the country. Dust Bowl survivors and their children are less likely to go to college and more likely to live in poverty. Climatic change made them poor, and it has kept them poor ever since.
A Dust Bowl event will most likely happen again. The Great Plains states today provide nearly half of the nation’s wheat, sorghum and cattle and much of its corn; the farmers and ranchers there export that food to Africa, South America and Asia. Crop yields, though, will drop sharply with every degree of warming. By 2050, researchers at the University of Chicago and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies found, Dust Bowl-era yields will be the norm, even as demand for scarce water jumps by as much as 20 percent. Another extreme drought would drive near-total crop losses worse than the Dust Bowl, kneecapping the broader economy. At that point, the authors write, “abandonment is one option.”
Projections are inherently imprecise, but the gradual changes to America’s cropland — plus the steady baking and burning and flooding — suggest that we are already witnessing a slower-forming but much larger replay of the Dust Bowl that will destroy more than just crops. In 2017, Solomon Hsiang, a climate economist at the University of California, Berkeley, led an analysis of the economic impact of climate-driven changes like rising mortality and rising energy costs, finding that the poorest counties in the United States — mostly across the South and the Southwest — will in some extreme cases face damages equal to more than a third of their gross domestic products. The 2018 National Climate Assessment also warns that the U.S. economy over all could contract by 10 percent.
That kind of loss typically drives people toward cities, and researchers expect that trend to continue after the Covid-19 pandemic ends. In 1950, less than 65 percent of Americans lived in cities. By 2050, only 10 percent will live outside them, in part because of climatic change. By 2100, Hauer estimates, Atlanta, Orlando, Houston and Austin could each receive more than a quarter million new residents as a result of sea-level displacement alone, meaning it may be those cities — not the places that empty out — that wind up bearing the brunt of America’s reshuffling. The World Bank warns that fast-moving climate urbanization leads to rising unemployment, competition for services and deepening poverty.
So what will happen to Atlanta — a metro area of 5.8 million people that may lose its water supply to drought and that our data also shows will face an increase in heat-driven wildfires? Hauer estimates that hundreds of thousands of climate refugees will move into the city by 2100, swelling its population and stressing its infrastructure. Atlanta — where poor transportation and water systems contributed to the state’s C+ infrastructure grade last year — already suffers greater income inequality than any other large American city, making it a virtual tinderbox for social conflict. One in 10 households earns less than $10,000 a year, and rings of extreme poverty are growing on its outskirts even as the city center grows wealthier.
Atlanta has started bolstering its defenses against climate change, but in some cases this has only exacerbated divisions. When the city converted an old Westside rock quarry into a reservoir, part of a larger greenbelt to expand parkland, clean the air and protect against drought, the project also fueled rapid upscale growth, driving the poorest Black communities further into impoverished suburbs. That Atlanta hasn’t “fully grappled with” such challenges now, says Na’Taki Osborne Jelks, chair of the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, means that with more people and higher temperatures, “the city might be pushed to what’s manageable.”
So might Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Boston and other cities with long-neglected systems suddenly pressed to expand under increasingly adverse conditions.
Once you accept that climate change is fast making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this: With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot. Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South and the Southwest — from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Southern California — decide to move north in search of a better economy and a more temperate environment. Those who stay behind are disproportionately poor and elderly.
In these places, heat alone will cause as many as 80 additional deaths per 100,000 people — the nation’s opioid crisis, by comparison, produces 15 additional deaths per 100,000. The most affected people, meanwhile, will pay 20 percent more for energy, and their crops will yield half as much food or in some cases virtually none at all. That collective burden will drag down regional incomes by roughly 10 percent, amounting to one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history, as people who live farther north will benefit from that change and see their fortunes rise.
The millions of people moving north will mostly head to the cities of the Northeast and Northwest, which will see their populations grow by roughly 10 percent, according to one model. Once-chilly places like Minnesota and Michigan and Vermont will become more temperate, verdant and inviting. Vast regions will prosper; just as Hsiang’s research forecast that Southern counties could see a tenth of their economy dry up, he projects that others as far as North Dakota and Minnesota will enjoy a corresponding expansion. Cities like Detroit, Rochester, Buffalo and Milwaukee will see a renaissance, with their excess capacity in infrastructure, water supplies and highways once again put to good use. One day, it’s possible that a high-speed rail line could race across the Dakotas, through Idaho’s up-and-coming wine country and the country’s new breadbasket along the Canadian border, to the megalopolis of Seattle, which by then has nearly merged with Vancouver to its north.
Sitting in my own backyard one afternoon this summer, my wife and I talked through the implications of this looming American future. The facts were clear and increasingly foreboding. Yet there were so many intangibles — a love of nature, the busy pace of life, the high cost of moving — that conspired to keep us from leaving. Nobody wants to migrate away from home, even when an inexorable danger is inching ever closer. They do it when there is no longer any other choice.
As we home in on 200,000 dead Americans, the pandemic is being pushed out of the top spot on the list of our biggest problems by wildfires and hurricanes.
Nature bats last, motherfuckers.
The stress test being applied right now - in my opinion, by radical libertarians who want to make government fail - is part of the big push towards Daddy State plutocracy.
These assholes intend to make life as hard as possible so they can "trade" us our democracy for a steady diet of table scraps.
Medicaid rolls swell amid the pandemic’s historic job losses, straining state budgets
The unlikely portrait of Medicaid in the time of coronavirus looks like Jonathan Chapin, living with his wife and 11-year-old daughter in a gated community in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Chapin had a thriving Reno, Nev., production company, We Ain’t Saints, booking bands, managing weddings, hosting 600-strong karaoke nights at the Tahoe Biltmore Lodge & Casino. When the novel coronavirus came, forcing northern Nevada’s entertainment industry to go dark, he said, “everything I knew all disappeared.”
The family’s health insurance gone along with their income, Chapin applied online for Medicaid on April 1, the day after his wife’s job ended and three days before he needed a molar pulled. By the time his mouth was throbbing, Chapin and his family had become early additions to Nevada’s Medicaid rolls — rolls swollen now to record levels while pandemic-inflicted fiscal wounds have damaged the state’s ability to afford the safety-net health coverage.
By the most recent count, the roster of Nevadans on Medicaid has climbed from fewer than 644,000 in February, the month before the state reported its first case of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, to about 731,000 through August.
That 13.5 percent increase places Nevada among at least three states, along with Kentucky and Minnesota, where the cadre of people on Medicaid has spiked that much, including families, like the Chapins, who have never before asked for government help. But increases are widespread: Caseloads had risen on average 8.4 percent through July in 30 states for which researchers have enrollment information. And in 14 states with enrollment data through August, the average is 10 percent.
If the past is a guide, this is merely the beginning.
During the Great Recession from late 2007 to mid-2009 and previous bad economic spells in the history of Medicaid, Americans have turned to the program more gradually than to unemployment benefits, food stamps and other aid for people sliding out of comfortable lives. Medicaid is insurance for the poor that is a shared responsibility of the federal government and states, begun as a pillar of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society expansion of government help of the 1960s.
“We believe Nevada has not yet seen the full impact as a result of the covid pandemic,” said the state’s Medicaid director, Suzanne Bierman, echoing expectations elsewhere of experts on the social safety net.
With Nevada’s tourism-fueled economy stalled, the unemployment rate soared to 30.1 percent in April, the highest ever recorded for any state in any month.
“You can pick just about any adjective you like to describe just how unprecedented the numbers are, and you wouldn’t be exaggerating,” said David Schmidt, chief economist for the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation.
“When all the casinos had to close all at once by the end of March, 95 percent of our members were off work, so it was a complete wipeout,” said Bobbette Bond, director of public policy for the Culinary Health Fund, which provides insurance to about half the cooks and dishwashers, porters and housekeepers and other unionized casino workers. The fund is covering unemployed members for another month.
Some casinos’ lights are back on, but fewer than one-third of workers have returned to their jobs, Bond said, and some have too few hours to qualify for their old health benefits. Even Nevada’s most recent reported unemployment rate — 14 percent for July — is higher than the nationwide rate at the Great Recession’s worst.
With most Americans’ private health insurance tethered to their jobs, this enormous disappearance of work is a central reason Medicaid programs are swelling and strained.
Another reason: Under the Cares Act, a broad set of pandemic relief measures Congress adopted in the spring, states may not remove anyone from their rolls if they accept extra federal Medicaid aid provided by the law. But in Nevada, most of the growth is fueled by people joining, with about two-thirds of the enrollment boom most months attributed to new applicants, according to state estimates.
The spiraling demand for Medicaid is colliding with a diminished ability by the state to pay for it. With Nevada confronting a $1.2 billion deficit and a requirement to balance its budget, the legislature has taken steps to slow the program’s spending — notably, curbing payments to doctors, hospitals and others who care for Medicaid patients to save $53 million through next summer. That 6 percent rate cut is the largest so far in the nation.
“Nevada is the extreme of what’s happening around the country,” said Aviva Aron-Dine, vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who has been tracking Medicaid in the pandemic. “The fear is that it’s the leading edge.”
Chapin finally posted on his personal Facebook page July 1 what had been true for months: “It’s with a heavy heart and a lot of fantastic memories, I regret to announce the closing of my business of 19½ years. . . . With covid spiking again. Wedding season cancelled, no bars to do Karaoke, no venues to book bands, and no real return for the music and entertainment industry in sight.”
It had been 2001, months into his sobriety, when he launched We Ain’t Saints, with its logo of a devil holding a beer and its motto straight from Alcoholics Anonymous. Over the years, the weddings he hosted twice made Brides magazine. He counted Google, Instagram and Squaw Valley Ski Resort among his clients for events.
The business earned him $80,000 to $140,000, depending on the year. “My company allowed me to raise a family nicely,” Chapin, 49, said. “This is what we do seriously for years and years and years. Bringing live music for people. . . . Making sure your bar is filled on Friday night. Not only is it something financially but emotionally you have all these ties with all these people.”
His wife’s final day as an administrative assistant for an organization working with children who have autism was March 31. Her health benefits ended at once. He already had stopped paying into Access to Healthcare Network, a nonprofit medical discount program that covered him and their daughter for a monthly fee. Chapin was approved for Medicaid hours after he typed up an application — a contrast to delays often vexing people as they try to get unemployment checks flowing.
For the emergency molar extraction, he had to find a dentist open in the pandemic and willing to accept SilverSummit, a Medicaid managed-care plan. Discovering none in Reno, he drove to Carson City, about 30 miles south. But he could still go to Northern Nevada HOPES, a community health center where he gets some of his care, when he awoke in April with a blood clot in his left calf. Medicaid paid for him to have it removed and is paying for a blood-thinning drug. His daughter, who has entered sixth grade online, has just been approved for braces.
If not for Medicaid, “we would have sold things, or we would have gone into debt,” Chapin said. “I think about it all the time.”
As it is, they are scraping by, using savings for house payments. Even without a job, he is finding a way to give back. Before starting his production company, he was a chef. Now, he is raising money, making beef stroganoff and peach and avocado salad, pork loin with mushroom sauce and grilled asparagus, and giving the meals to families in need. A lot of the people picking up his meals are recent exiles from the middle class.
Looking over his own rise and pandemic fall, Chapin said, “It’s part of being American. I started this business, and I was living the dream.” And now, to get health insurance, “I have to ask” the state.
Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) issued a report just after July 4, laying out the depth of the economic wreckage wrought by the coronavirus. In nearly three years during and after the Great Recession, the governor noted, Nevada lost 180,000 jobs; in the previous three months, the state had hemorrhaged more than 250,000.
The governor said he wanted to go easy on cuts to health services. But with the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services accounting for one-third of the state’s budget through next summer, and Medicaid the department’s biggest expense, the program was a target.
To help carve $233 million from the department, Sisolak urged lawmakers to eliminate a raft of services that Nevada has offered Medicaid patients, beyond what the federal government requires.
A $3.2 million savings by getting rid of optometry for adults. Another $2.1 million by no longer covering adults’ prostheses. Other services would be restricted. No more than a dozen physical therapy sessions. Limited dental care, except for pregnant women and children.
By the time state legislators finished their special session in late July, they had set aside the idea of reducing benefits — for as long as the nationwide public health emergency continues, at least through the end of the year. Other cuts were approved and, if federal health officials accept them, will be retroactive to mid-August.
Beyond lowering doctors’ pay, the state reversed a 2.5 percent increase that had begun in January in the daily rate for hospitals’ inpatients. It delayed certain payments to HMOs. It reduced payments for treating the sickest newborns. More than $130 million worth of Medicaid cuts in all.
The health-care industry and some consumers are fuming.
“We have real concerns about our ability to continue to provide for Nevada Medicaid patients,” William Ziesmer, chief financial officer for Sunrise Hospital & Medical Center, the state’s largest, said at a public hearing last month on the changes.
Sunrise officials are examining services “to determine which can be saved and which we’ll be forced to reduce,” Ziesmer said. “This is an incredibly difficult position to put hospitals in, when there is so much need in the community.”
Pam Berek, whose 18-year-old son, Carson, has cerebral palsy, epilepsy and autism, implored officials at the hearing to rethink the cuts. “We don’t want to put our children away in an institution,” Berek said, predicting that an undersupply of home therapists and nurses will worsen, costing the state more in the long run. “We are not just numbers on a paper. We are actually families struggling to keep our children at home.”
On the third floor of a medical office building three miles east of the Las Vegas Strip, Howard Baron has been in practice for 27 years. Nevada’s first pediatric gastroenterologist recruited him in 1993. Baron was the second.
He and three partners treat children with growth failure, nutritional deficits, malfunctioning gastrointestinal tracts, liver disease, a need for feeding tubes. Their patients’ families vary from well-off to undocumented, but many live in the poor neighborhoods nearby. Nearly 6 in 10 of the children the practice cares for are on Medicaid.
To avoid the virus, Baron and his partners stopped performing elective procedures for two months. Other patients simply stayed away. He applied for a federal Paycheck Protection Program loan for small businesses, was turned down on the first round, then received nearly $150,000 on the second. It allowed his practice to pay two months’ salaries and health benefits for the nurse practitioner and dietitian who work with the doctors.
The immediate past president of the Nevada State Medical Association, Baron was in his office around the time the loan ran out in early July, before a special session of the legislature began, when he got an email from Jaron Hildebrand, the association’s executive director. The governor, Hildebrand was hearing, wanted to cut doctors’ Medicaid payments by 6 percent.
Baron’s first thought: “Wow, how are we going to continue to do what we do?”
He does not yet know how he and his partners will cope. But he knows that, even before these cuts, Medicaid reimbursement for their patient visits are slightly less than they usually cost. “We are going to have to make some difficult decisions,” he said. Perhaps letting staff go. Perhaps limiting patients on Medicaid.
And he knows the costs to Nevada’s low-income children and their parents if his practice was to shut its door to Medicaid — and if other doctors reeling from the fresh cuts did the same.
In a state with a scarcity of medical professionals, Hildebrand said, “It’s only going to exacerbate the shortage and lack of access to care,” coinciding with more and more Nevadans depending on Medicaid.
At Nevada HOPES, the Reno community health center where Chapin gets care, executive director Sharon Chamberlain steels for the strain on clinics such as hers as more doctors with private practices may become less welcoming of Medicaid patients.
“We’re bracing for it,” said Chamberlain, who came to Nevada HOPES when it was a pioneering HIV clinic, turning it into a full-service health center.
The clinic has always helped patients apply for Medicaid. Before the pandemic, it was helping an average of eight households a month get on the program. Since mid-March, the monthly average has been 24. Of the 136 households HOPES has led onto Medicaid during the pandemic, almost half are new to it.
“I just think we are headed into a dark time,” Chamberlain said, with private doctors likely to back away.
Baron broached the subject a couple of weeks ago, at the monthly lunch when he and his partners gather in their small conference room, usually ordering in Thai. The cuts are significant, he said. If Medicaid patients could return more often to their main pediatricians for follow-up care, that might be something to consider.
He hates the idea of treating sick children differently, depending on who is paying the bill. Still, Baron said, “the fact is, we won’t be here for any patient if we continue to absorb the cost of providing the care.”
In this time of covid, Medicaid offers a broader tent than it did during the Great Recession. The Affordable Care Act, the sprawling health-care law, did not exist then. Now, 38 states and the District have expanded Medicaid as the law allows, enabling people with somewhat more money to sign up.
In Nevada, 4 in 10 of the state’s new enrollees are in that group, according to state estimates.
That does not mean Medicaid is rescuing everyone who needs it. Rechica Ledesma, 48, was an administrative assistant in the conventions and catering department at Caesars’s Rio Hotel and Casino. Her last day in the office was March 18. After working from home, she was furloughed a month later, then laid off in August. Conventions were not viable once the governor banned public gatherings of more than 50 people.
Her husband, Arnulfo Ledesma, lost his commercial roofing job in May, the month he was diagnosed at age 44 with colon cancer. With unemployment checks of about $700 between them and her health insurance ending, she realized last month the price of Cobra coverage — insurance laid-off workers can buy — that the hotel offered was out of reach. She began exploring Nevada’s ACA insurance marketplace, soon turning off her phone, pummeled with marketing calls for health plans she could not afford.
Finally, with a medical appointment looming to decide on treatment for her husband’s Stage 2 cancer, she applied to Medicaid. When she checked the online app Aug. 31 — the last day of her coverage from Caesars — she found a ruling that they are ineligible because they have too much money.
She does not understand the denial. After months of looking for work, she finally had a job interview this month. She did not know how many other out-of-work Nevadans were being interviewed or how she and her husband would pay for his cancer treatment if she was not hired. She just started as office manager for a company that sells garage doors. It will take 90 days — longer than her husband can go without cancer treatment — but eventually her job will provide insurance.
If Nevada’s Medicaid is not rescuing everyone, it is helping many. It is helping Rich Cox, who takes 14 medications, nine of them psychiatric drugs for the chronic PTSD he came home with after Army stints in Somalia, Bosnia, North Africa and Iraq.
Cox, 47, lost his Aetna health plan when he got an email in mid-April, abruptly ending the job he’d held for 15 years with an auto-repair retailer, working his way up to running a store and being sent into stores around the country to train other managers.
He’d been earning $150,000 to $180,000 a year, mostly in commissions and bonuses, said Cox, whose two daughters live with him half the time.
“I was not exactly careful with my money,” he said. “So losing my job meant losing everything — home, car, of course the insurance.”
He gave up a five-bedroom house on a lake in Summerlin, on Las Vegas’s west side, his bedroom the size of the entire first floor of the two-bedroom he found for a cheap rent. He traded his high-horsepower truck for a small car.
Medicaid approved him before his one month of Cobra insurance ran out in May. He discovered that his psychiatrist, primary care doctor and the orthopedic surgeon — for his bad knees and tendon trouble in his arms — he’d been seeing through Aetna do not accept Medicaid. He has found doctors who do.
Still, he said, Medicaid is “the only good thing to come about with this whole lifestyle change that covid forced me into. . . . Instead of feeling like I was thrown off a cliff, I feel like I was thrown off a boat.”
Local authorities in Indonesia ordered eight people who broke the country’s face mask laws to dig graves for COVID-19 victims, according to a report.
The province of East Java punished the mask violators with the manual labor at a local cemetery in hopes of deterring others from disregarding the nationwide face-covering mandate, the Jakarta Post reported.
“There are only three available gravediggers at the moment, so I thought I might as well put these people to work with them,” politician Suyono told local media, according to the paper.
“Hopefully this can create a deterrent effect against violations,” he added.
None of the rulebreakers were forced to handle the corpses, the outlet reported. Only local health officials wearing full-body protective equipment are allowed to do so to limit the risk of exposure.
Indonesia has seen infections on the rise with more than 221,000 cases, including at least 8,841 deaths, according to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University.
Now, where have I heard this kinda thing before? Hmmm...
Frederick Douglass was a “from here.” Where I was raised, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a “from here” is the opposite of a “come here,” and much is made of whether you were born on this side of the Chesapeake Bay or arrived later in life. In weighty matters, the question of just how many generations of your family have called this place home can become relevant, too.
One such matter is the Confederate monument at the Talbot County Courthouse, in Easton, a town of about seventeen thousand people. The monument, which is the last in Maryland on public property outside of cemeteries and battlefields, has two parts: a granite base, which was erected in 1914 and bears the names of ninety-six Confederate soldiers with some connection to the county—most carved in stone, others on two brass plaques—and a six-foot-tall statue, added two years later, of a young man with “C.S.A.” carved into his belt buckle and a Confederate flag in his arms. The front of the base is inscribed “To the Talbot Boys / 1861 - 1865 / C.S.A.”
For most of the past decade, that monument has shared the courthouse lawn with another: of Douglass, who was born into slavery some twelve miles from where his statue stands. Probably no one would be more surprised by this arrangement than Douglass himself, whose home state never seceded from the United States and whose home county voted against secession, sending more than three hundred soldiers to the Union Army. And yet there is no monument for the Union dead at the courthouse, or anywhere else in Talbot County.
The absence of a Union monument and the prominence of a Confederate one are part of why many a “from here,” like me, grew up believing that Talbot County was a Confederate stronghold. I love where I am from, so much so that I moved back to the Eastern Shore as an adult and, for years now, I have been one of many residents advocating for the removal of the “Talbot Boys” from the courthouse lawn. Earlier this summer, I thought I might be able to tell the story of how the Confederate monument finally came down. Instead, I’m left to confront why it remains.
Talbot County’s monument was installed fifty years after the Civil War, in an era when the gains of Reconstruction were already being reversed, Jim Crow was under way, and revanchist public commemorations of the Confederacy were spreading across the country. Thousands of squares and streets were dedicated to Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, and historical markers to Confederate sites and causes went up anywhere that the United Daughters of the Confederacy could inspire local action. So common were these memorials that there were companies devoted to their production. Though defenders of the “Talbot Boys” insist that the statue is a one-of-a-kind effort to honor the local dead, in reality it once had an identical twin, known as “The South’s Defenders,” on the lawn of the Calcasieu Parish courthouse, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Both statues came from the W. H. Mullins Company, in Salem, Ohio, which had so many Civil War wares on offer that it advertised them in a catalogue: “The Blue and the Gray: Statues in Stamped Copper and Bronze.”
Advocates for the “Talbot Boys” also like to say that the monument has nothing to do with slavery, and that the political beliefs of those who are honored on it and those who erected it are unknowable or distinct from the motivations of Confederate champions elsewhere. In fact, many of those involved left extensive archives of their lives, detailing their thoughts about the Civil War and everything else. The effort to erect Easton’s statue was started in 1912, by a lawyer named Joseph Seth. He was not a Confederate veteran, but he was a sympathizer. He was also active in local politics, eventually becoming mayor, and not long before his election he decided the time had come to honor the “Talbot Johnnies.” The statue was dedicated on June 5, 1916. Ten years later, Seth published a memoir with his second wife, Mary, which recorded his views on, among other things, race relations on the Eastern Shore. “Slaves were held here from the early days of the Colony until the Emancipation Act, but they lived under a paternal, kindly rule,” he claimed.
That does not comport with the narratives of slavery from the enslaved themselves, and certainly not with the most notable account from someone forced to live and work in bondage in Talbot County. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass wrote of his master:
"He was a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding. He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose."
At least fourteen of the men whose names appear on the Confederate monument in Easton owned slaves or belonged to slave-owning families, including the man whose name comes first: Admiral Franklin Buchanan, who married into the Lloyd family, which enslaved more than seven hundred people, Douglass among them, at their Wye House plantation. In the passage above, the man whom Douglass is describing worked for the Lloyds. The year before the Civil War began, nearly four thousand people were enslaved in Talbot County. Easton’s port had become a hub for the domestic slave trade, and the town’s slave market was located on the very grounds where the Confederate statue now stands.
The surnames on that statue also appear on local streets, towns, landmarks, and landings: a geography of place and power. Take “Tilghman,” the name of a nearby island, but also of Oswald Tilghman, who survived the war and helped Seth raise money for the monument. Around the same time that it was erected, Tilghman published a “History of Talbot County,” in which he described the death of another one of the statue’s honorees, his relative Lloyd Tilghman, at the Battle of Champion Hill, in Mississippi: “He was laid under the shade of a peach tree where his life’s blood ebbed slowly away, and another hero was added to that long list of martyrs who died for the cause, ‘the lost cause,’ though it be, still dear and will ever remain dear to the hearts of all true Southerners to the end of time.”
The piece goes on at some length, but you get the picture - there's a butt-load of conclusive evidence that those monuments are there to change history by controlling the narrative. They exist because white people were desperate to rationalize their atrocities and to further the agenda of White Supremacy.
By tearing down those monuments, we're not erasing history - we're acknowledging the reality of that history, and trying to accept responsibility for what our history has bequeathed to us.
Google is in the process of "improving" my blogging experience by fucking up their software upgrade. I'm really sorry about all that, but there will probably be plenty more fucked up posts - at least for a while - until they start to get their shit together. My apologies - please bear with me. Ever notice how the kings of social media can't ever really get it right because just as it's going pretty well, some genius in marketing decides to shake it all up and make it so much better that it practically stops working altogether? I've seen the future and we're all completely fucked.
