Character and Covid

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Does our uniquely American character doom us to failure in the fight against Covid?

It certainly seems so. On a per-capita basis, we are among the global “leaders” in cases and deaths worldwide, although part of our “leadership” may be due to better and more honest reporting. We hold this unenviable position despite being among the first to develop, produce and approve effective vaccines, despite our highly-praised biomedical R & D, and despite being generally recognized as the wealthiest nation on Earth.

Now, as the new omicron variant spreads worldwide, our economy and our lives are again becoming precarious. It’s worth some effort to analyze why.

Our “American pastime,” baseball, is a rare national game. To my knowledge, it’s the only one in which you can “steal” victory. If the pitcher or base players aren’t paying attention, a runner can “steal” a base. A runner can even “steal” home base for a point or for victory. Imagine a football player winning a goal without putting the ball into the net or (in the American version) over the goal line or between the posts. It can’t happen.

Arguments are not unique to our nation. But they certainly are characteristic of our national tribe. The players huddle around a besieged umpire, shouting and gesticulating, arguing over a close play. Sometimes a close call even produces a brawl. Instant-replay helps, but only a bit. As long as there are different points of view and different opinions, there will be vehement conflict among us.

That’s why we have umpires, and that’s why their jobs are so hard. And the same facet—dare I write “defect”?—of our national character makes the US by far the most litigious country on Earth. Right now we have dozens of lawsuits ongoing, all over our country, about what, if any, measures various levels of government, public-health services and even private business can take to protect us against Covid-19. Everybody has an opinion, regardless of medical knowledge or expertise; no one is shy about asserting it.

But the virus that causes Covid-19 is not a human ball player. It’s not an umpire or a judge. Although it can force human cells to reproduce itself, it’s an inanimate biomechanical instrument of sickness and death.

You can’t beat it, as if stealing a base, by escaping its attention or by arguing with authority. You can’t “steal” your health back once it gets in your lungs, your heart, your kidneys or your brain. And as we know now, this virus is capable of infecting and ruining almost every organ in your body. In some so-called “long-haulers,” it can produce long-lasting, even lifelong, suffering that makes life a living Hell.

The virus is an equal-opportunity destroyer. It can infect vaccinated people. Even if it doesn’t make them very sick, it can make them carriers who pass the virus on to others. Then they can get sick, especially if unvaccinated.

The virus is also a relentless changeling. It’s genome consists of 29,903 RNA base pairs (nucleotides). Of those, 3,831 encode for the so-called “spike” protein—the genetic “key” that admits the virus into human cells. In the latest or “omicron” viral variant, more than 30 of those base pairs have changed. That’s about 1% of the spike-encoding genome.

What causes these random changes? Physics, chemistry and biology. Random thermal fluctuations, cosmic rays and various chemical effects cause “errors” as the virus reproduces in human or animal cells. As noted in an earlier post, this mutation is an automatic, inescapable and unstoppable process.

The more people and animals the virus infects, the faster mutations arise. The speed of mutation is roughly proportional to the number of infected bodies. The more infections we allow, they greater the risk of another devastating variant.

That’s why the vaccination and infection rates in the global south matter to us in the global north. The more people who get infected globally, the greater the chances of Covid-19 morphing from a difficult pandemic into a global death plague comparable to the Black Plague of the Middle Ages. Every new infection brings that potential catastrophe a tiny bit closer to reality. For every thousand additional infections, the roulette wheel of suffering and death spins faster.

At the moment, vaccines are our best measure of protection. But the best vaccines—Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines—have a weakness. They teach our bodies to produce antibodies against the spike protein, which unlocks our cells’ walls and lets the virus in.

That kind of vaccine was a brilliant scientific development. Unlike old-fashioned “killed-virus” vaccines, it contains no other part of the virus. In particular, it contains none of the genomic material that lets the virus force our cells to reproduce itself. So there is absolutely no way—even in theory—that an mRNA spike-protein vaccine can itself cause Covid-19. (It can, in theory, cause unrelated side effects, such as myocarditis, but actual experience shows these effects are extremely rare. They are orders of magnitude lower than similar side effects of vaccines routinely given for other diseases.)

Yet this feature of the mRNA vaccines is a two-edged sword. While it means the vaccines themselves can’t possibly cause Covid-19 or anything like it, it also gives the virus an evolutionary opening. If the virus mutates to change its spike protein so as to avoid the antibodies that these vaccines teach our bodies to produce, the mutated spike protein can still enter our cells. Then the mutated virus might evade the mRNA vaccines’ protection, or at least make them less effective.

Even then, all is not lost. The beauty of the mRNA vaccine technology is that it makes vaccine development a bit like programming a computer. No matter how the virus mutates, scientists can sequence its spike-protein genome, copy it, and make a vaccine that will produce antibodies to the mutated protein. According to news reports, they can do this in less than 100 days. The rest is up to the regulators, who must insist that even modified vaccines be tested for side-effects and other unintended consequences.

So here’s the big picture. As the virus unstoppably mutates, it creates a game of vaccine “whack-a-mole.” Air travel may be one of the greatest miracles of human civilization, but it’s also the fastest means our species has ever developed to spread infectious disease around the globe. So air travel gravely accelerates the game of “whack-a-mole.”

Already air travel is a big reason why many experts think it’s too late to stop the new omicron variant from spreading as widely and as disastrously as did the delta variant before it. It takes less than a day to fly halfway around the world. But the virus’ incubation period is from five to eight days. So before you know it—before passengers themselves can even suspect it—the omicron virus might be in your city. Recently 61 people tested positive for Covid-19 on two flights from South Africa. They were being tested for the omicron variant, which requires more careful genetic sequencing to detect.

What’s the solution? There’s no magic bullet, no single solution. Of course our already overworked biomedical researchers should get to work preparing an mRNA vaccine for the omicron variant. Of course our regulators should consider ways to expedite approval of new-variant vaccines while maintaining the assurance of safety and effectiveness that’s the linchpin of the whole vaccine system.

But we also have to get back to basics. We have to use all the tools at our disposal: (1) masking whenever among strangers, (2) social distancing, and (3) testing, contact tracing and quarantining/isolation. Most of all, we have to stop trying to “steal bases” against an implacable and ever-changing enemy. We have to stop arguing with the umpires (our biomedical and public health experts) and get serious about Covid discipline. If we don’t, the omicron variant could devastate our lives and our global economy once again, just as did the original virus and the delta variant now dominating the globe.

Our much-vaunted primate brains are supposed to make us more adaptable than other species and therefore better able to survive. But so far, we have been extraordinarily slow to learn from experience with Covid-19. The divergent reactions of cruise lines and airlines illustrate just how slow.

My wife and I recently took a short five-day ocean cruise. It was our first more-than-overnight joint vacation since the pandemic began. We chose this particular cruise because we could easily drive to and from it, without getting on an airplane. We felt safe because of the Covid precautions that our cruise line (Princess) took. Those precautions are rapidly becoming a cruise-industry standard.

Each and every passenger and crew member had to be vaccinated before boarding. All had to show original evidence of vaccination, either an original CDC vaccination card (not a copy) or an official online record. Every passenger also had to have a negative Covid test taken within 48 hours of boarding plus third-party documentation of that test (eliminating self-administered tests). Everyone on board also had to wear masks in public areas, except when eating or drinking. (The crew enforced this rule especially in food-dispensing areas, as I learned when I forgot my mask one time. I felt safer for the reminder and thanked the attendant for reminding me.)

As far as I could tell, the cruise line also had made some effort to increase the distance between tables in restaurants and bars. Best of all (for the passengers’ safety, not the line’s income), the number of passengers on board was less than half the ship’s rated capacity. Management apparently accommodated this reality by reducing the ship’s staff and closing several common areas, including certain dining rooms and bars.

Contrast these admirable safety precautions with what the airlines have done or, more to the point, what they still have not done. To my knowledge, no domestic airline requires passengers to be vaccinated at all. (Qantas does on trans-Pacific flights Down Under.)

A few airlines, including United, require crew to be vaccinated. But what good does that do passengers, whose interaction with crew is momentary and sporadic? What about the six or so surrounding passengers, who may be complete strangers, sitting well within the recommended six feet, and eating or drinking with no masks or letting their masks slip down below their noses?

And how, pray tell, can you get away from a mask scofflaw who “just knows” he or she won’t get Covid, on a full plane? (I’ve actually met two people who said that: their blind faith did not impress me, except as a mark of their ignorance of medicine and biology.) On a big cruise ship, it’s easy to walk or sit away from people whose actions show they don’t take the virus seriously.

In contrast to cruise lines, airline management has been about as unresponsive to the pandemic as it’s possible to be. And so we have the third dangerous variant in less than two years (original, delta and omicron) spreading unstopped around the globe at a little less than the speed of sound, courtesy of an industry that still doesn’t get it.

No doubt the clueless airline CEOs wonder why all those unused aircraft are still sitting out in the middle of the Mojave desert gathering dust and producing no revenue. The only way to get them back in the air is to take every reasonable precaution against Covid and let prospective passengers know, by means of consistent safety requirements strictly enforced. Then maybe people like me, and millions of others, will feel safe to fly again.

Russian peasants have a saying. When gardening, you might step on the short end of a rake, so that the long handle rises up and hits you in the head. If you do that once, it can be a sign of bad luck. If you do it twice, it’s a sign of stupidity. At least so goes the saying.

So far, we have suffered two serious variants of Covid-19, the original one and the delta variant. Each time, we Americans have stepped on the short end of the rake, hoping that the virus would bypass our economy without us having to accept the rules and discipline required for masking, distancing, testing-tracing-and-isolation and, eventually, near-universal vaccination. Each time, we’ve experienced localized and regional infection spikes, overwhelmed hospitals and public-health systems, and consequent drops in those oh-so-precious economic indicators.

Now the third dangerous variant, omicron, is upon us. I wonder whether we’ll finally get smart. If not, I wonder what a good Russian peasant would say about us as we step on the short end of the rake for the third time.

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Electricity Rules the Road

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One thing the MAGA-hat crew doesn’t get is basic economics. They don’t have a clue that the gasoline-powered muscle cars and trucks they love are already obsolete.

Gasoline now costs around $4.50 per gallon in California, and close to that in other states. At a respectable mileage of 30 MPG, that’s 15¢ per mile. In contrast, an average Tesla gets over four miles to the kilowatt-hour of electricity, for which the average US price is 10.59¢. So the Tesla costs 2.65¢ to drive a mile, or 12.35¢ per mile less than a gasoline car or truck.

Over a hard-driving 50K-mile year, that’s a saving of $6,175. It’s enough to bring the relative price of the cheapest Tesla Model 3, which sells for $37,990, down to $31,815 after one year and $25,640 after two. And for every year of driving after that, the relative loss gets $6,175 worse.

Is that price differential going to change? Probably not in the right direction for gas-lovers. Why? Because the Russians and the Saudis have learned how to manipulate global oil prices to their advantage.

Remember that iconic high-five between Vladimir Putin and MBS at the 2018 G20 meeting? Commentators thought maybe they were celebrating getting away with murder, or at least benefitting from it. (The high-five came not long after the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who had criticized MBS. It also followed poison attacks, which the Brits suspected Putin of approving, that had killed a Briton and harmed a renegade Russian spy and his daughter.)

But the G20 conference wasn’t about suppressing dissidents, let alone murder. It was about economics. Apparently Putin and MBS had something less bloody and more serious to celebrate. They had learned that, as key oil producers, their nations could control the global market for oil to their mutual advantage and suck the rest of the world dry.

For a time, the US had managed to break their grip. It used fracking technology to squeeze the last drops out of its depleting oil fields. It even managed to find some new fields suitable for fracking.

But fracking is a high-cost technology. It costs a lot more to drill a bunch of wells, and to pump them with fluids to fracture the rock and extract oil, than it does just to drop a few wells into the type of huge, near-surface oil pools that the Saudis and Russians have. Not only that, their non-fracked oil is among the “lightest and sweetest” in the world. It costs less to refine into usable fuels.

So simply by cooperating and controlling global production, the Saudi-Russian-OPEC combine can control the global market for oil. They can produce enough to keep the price low enough to make fracking uneconomic, but not so much as to reduce their own high profits. This ploy causes frackers to put their drilling rigs in mothballs, and their crews to take jobs elsewhere. The expense of starting up again increases the price gap between fracked oil and OPEC oil even more.

The Saudis and the Russians can do this for a long time. The cost advantage of producing their cheap oil over fracked oil, let alone the tar-sands muck that comes from Canada, is durable. Using their near-surface pools of “light, sweet” crude, they can control the global oil market, sideline fracked and tar competition, and gobble up the profits from most of the global market.

Two things are clear. First, the price advantage of Saudi-Russian-OPEC oil will endure for as long as their reserves last. Although the per-mile price differential between gas and electricity might not necessarily go up much more, unless there’s another pandemic it’s pretty sure not to go down. Second, the price of electricity is likely to be far more stable than that of gasoline, because almost all of our electric energy comes from domestic sources, either renewables like solar, wind or hydroelectric power, or natural gas, of which we have plenty. We’ve even begun (imprudently) exporting our own natural gas now.

So people who buy big gas-guzzlers now are chumps. They are facing cost disadvantages as far as the eye can see. And they are putting their economic fates in the hands of Putin and MBS. Good luck with that!

Yet that’s still not all. There’s maintenance, and there’s performance.

Over a dozen years ago, I wrote a blog post about the ten or so systems that an internal-combustion car has that an electric car doesn’t. I won’t recap that post here. But just consider that an electric car has no pistons, rings, crankshaft, camshaft, valves, radiator, transmission, fuel pump, distributor, spark plugs, exhaust pipe or muffler. Therefore it requires none of the maintenance that all these systems require. And most electric-car drivers recharge their cars at their homes, so they don’t need to “gas up” on the road, except on long trips.

About the only parts of an electric car that require replacement during its normal life are the tires, the windshield-wiper blades, and the brake linings. But even the brake likings require replacement less often, because electrical regenerative braking means they get a lot less use in an electric car.

As for performance, let’s not prolong the agony. I’ll just quote this passage from a MotorTrend discussion of the high-end Tesla Model 3:

“The Model 3 Performance is Tesla’s equivalent to a BMW M3 or a Mercedes-AMG C63. One of our staffers has spent a year with a Model 3 Performance, and when we tested that car, it launched to 60 mph in just 3.0 seconds. That’s quicker than either of the aforementioned German competitors, not to mention our long-term C8 Corvette.”

If they had had the brains, I suppose the dinosaurs would have thought they were impressive, too. They were so much bigger, more powerful and faster than those little mammals scurrying around in burrows. But it looks as if electric cars, like those little furry mammals, are ready to own the future now.

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“You Break it, you Own it!” Our Moral Obligation in Afghanistan

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The more I recall his elegance, decency and ability to serve wisdom in small, digestible bites, the more I miss Colin Powell. In March 2003, less than eighteen months after 9/11, the triumvirate of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld decided to invade Iraq. Powell resisted, advising them: “You break it; you own it.”

The triumvirate ignored him. They also ignored the lack of credible evidence that Iraq’s then ruler, Saddam Hussein, had conspired in 9/11 or had nuclear weapons under development. They forced Powell to attest to their unfounded suspicions—the greatest embarrassment of his professional life. Still his wisdom cries out from his grave.

Iraq isn’t broken yet. But it has oil, lots of it, and a long history of trade relations with its neighbors. Afghanistan has little to sell but opium made from its poppies and the bare rights to rare-earth elements that only may be in its mountains in quantities and locations worth mining. Afghanistan was and remains one of the poorest countries on Earth.

So Afghanistan was a lot easier to break. And we have broken it badly.

While still there, we didn’t so much beat the Taliban on the battlefield as overwhelm all Afghans with our power, technology and riches. For nearly two decades, the whole country depended on us and our allies. Even today, three-quarters of Afghanistan’s economy depends on outside funding.

In pulling out so abruptly, we pulled the rug out from under it. As the courageous independent reporter Jane Ferguson reminds us, over one-third of Afghans are now starving. It doesn’t help that a four-year drought has decimated their agriculture, and that now the harsh mountain winter is setting in.

Do we bear responsibility for this humanitarian catastrophe? Of course we do. We corrupted Afghans and their government with unaccustomed torrents of cash. The people at the top—apparently including even erstwhile President Hamid Karzai—all took their cut. Some stashed it abroad, and many sent it out of the country before the Taliban’s boom came down.

While we were still there, at least some of our largesse trickled down to Afghans at the bottom. Even peasants could survive and fight the Taliban. But after we left, over half the Afghan economy stopped cold, as if by flicking a switch. The top and many of the middle people had departed, and there was nothing left to trickle down.

So if you want to see the end-game of “trickle down,” look at Afghanistan today. The people at the top and most of the middle took theirs and got out. The people at the bottom are starving. Young babies are dying of malnutrition, two to four to a hospital bed, in surprisingly modern but overwhelmed facilities that our money once paid for.

These innocents are dying because their parents no longer have jobs or sources of income, which dried up when we cut off our torrent of cash. The Afghan government, now badly run by uneducated Taliban, has no resources. Afghans’ remaining national wealth is stashed in Western banks that won’t release it because their governments see the Taliban as terrorists.

There are two solutions to this dilemma. First, sit down with the Taliban and trade them money to feed their people in return for their restarting education for girls and women. Second, provide food aid directly to starving Afghans, through NGOs now operating in the country, some of which claim to have permission to work independently of the Taliban. (David Beasley, Executive Director for the UN World Food Programme, claims that his group has that permission.)

Why not try “trickle up” for a change? It isn’t rocket science. It’s simple humanity and decency.

I can think of only one reason why we don’t, right away: we’re too proud to help (or even recognize) our erstwhile enemies, who defeated us, primarily by default. Maybe the Europeans, who shared our misadventure, can talk some sense into us.

The Taliban are mostly uneducated religious fanatics. To the extent they can read and write at all, many are familiar only with the Q’uran and Islamic religious tracts. They missed out on modern economics, medicine, chemistry, engineering, biology, physics, agriculture and logistics, all of which post-dated the Prophet Muhammad by at least a millennium. They don’t have a clue how to run a modern nation, let alone one in such distress. The people who do all have left.

But the Taliban have promised to fight the real terrorists in their midst, including ISIS-K and what remains of Al Qaeda in their country. They have every reason to do so. Already they have suffered suicide-bombing attacks on their watch. So why not take them at their word, when their own interests align with ours, at least until we have hard evidence to the contrary?

Are we going to condemn innocent people to death by starvation for their conquerors’ ignorance and primitive religion, after we failed for nearly two decades to provide them with a better option for the long term? Or are we going to do the right thing for a change?

After the fall of Saigon to the Viet Cong, we generously took in many Vietnamese refugees. Decades later, once the Vietnamese had helped account for our missing in action, we established diplomatic relations with them. Vietnam is now an important trading partner and something of an ally, as it seeks our help in pushing back on its aggressive neighbor and millennial frenemy China.

But we don’t have that kind of time to reconcile our hurt feelings about Afghanistan. If we don’t act now, up to a third of its entire population could starve.

We broke Afghanistan. Though the Taliban now claim to own it, we have an obligation not to let its innocents die. To do so would be a crime of omission against humanity.

We Americans often claim the moral high ground. Now is the time to stand there for real. We could stave off starvation for millions for a small fraction of what we spent so rashly on war.

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A Rare Win for America: Leadership

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For once, the circular firing squad that is the Democratic Party unwound itself. For once, it took aim at our real enemies: inertia, inaction, stagnation and decline. For once, in the not-quite two years since the pandemic began, our paralyzed government accomplished something besides emergency spending to keep desperate people off the streets.

Ten years ago, I published a post on our ten gravest national problems, noting how long each had festered. Even at that time, their average longevity was 17.5 years. Today it’s over a quarter of a century.

How many of the ten have we even begun tackling seriously? Until yesterday, only one. With our disastrous exit from Afghanistan, we have mostly wound down our endless wars, although we keep contemplating yet another over Taiwan.

For a time, fracking seemed to have solved our dependence on foreign oil. But recently OPEC and the Russians have learned how to exploit our individualistic “wildcat” oil culture. By calibrating their collective oil production, they keep prices just low enough to discourage the incessant drilling that fracking requires, but high enough to drain away the substance of our nation’s wealth. And that’s precisely what they are doing now.

Eleven years ago, I published a post entitled “Four Dollars a Gallon by Next Summer.” It explained how petrostates were rapidly learning economics and thus discovering how to squeeze us cleverly for cash. My timing was off. The rise of fracking delayed the inevitable for almost another decade. But gasoline prices in California are now closing on five dollars a gallon with no end in sight.

So I wouldn’t say that we’ve kicked our foreign-oil habit quite yet. Even if we ourselves produce much of the oil we need, the global market dominated by OPEC and Russia sets the price of gas at our pumps. Our transition to electric vehicles is only now beginning in earnest.

Thus today we’ve seriously addressed only two of our ten big national problems that have festered, on average, for over a quarter century. We’ve cut our losses in our last current endless war. And last night’s House passage of the so-called “hard” infrastructure bill marked the bare beginnings of a fix to our woefully dilapidated physical infrastructure. The biggest problem, which underlies them all, is still broken government.

Two out of ten. Twenty percent. That’s a failing grade in any course that I know of. And a failing grade means that “USA!” as “Number One!” is rapidly fading into history, propelled by our dismal scores in math and even reading on international tests.

But let’s be optimistic. Until last night, our grade in solving major problems was only 10%. Doubling our score is something, albeit from a dismal base.

What’s the secret sauce that made this happen? A little thing called “leadership,” which is woefully rare today.

Last night brought a strange but welcome sight. Our three Democratic House leaders stood in a “Vee” formation. Jim Clyburn (House Majority Whip) was on the left, with Steny Hoyer (House Majority Leader) on the right. Slightly built Speaker Nancy Pelosi, dwarfed by the men, stood in the center. Together they represent states with 15.31% of our national population and 17.94% of national GDP. Together, they look a lot like America.

What a nice contrast from the dismal trio of GOP Senate leaders: Barrasso, Thune and McConnell! So often arrayed together like a Mafia don backed by his enforcers, all are white men. Collectively, they represent states with 1.79% of our national population and 1.43% of our national GDP.

For years, if not decades, these leaders of so little have effectively controlled our nation’s Congress and therefore our government. If they couldn’t control it for good, they made it impotent. Besides the gross malapportionment of our Senate and its archaic filibuster, their secret was personal leadership.

They ordered, and the GOP rank and file mostly obeyed. Their followers stuck with them through the most corrupt and incompetent presidency in over a century, if not ever. They stuck together through two impeachments, both of which failed conviction. They stuck together through multiple attempts to repeal Obamacare and replace it with nothing. (The last such attempt failed by a single vote in the Senate, cast by their own renegade, the late John McCain.)

They stuck together through massive public rejection of masks, social distancing, and vaccines. In fact, they encouraged much of the recalcitrance, while hypocritically vaccinating themselves in private. And now they are sticking together in insisting that what happened on January 6 was not an insurrection by their own followers. Some even support the bald lie that it was a “false flag” operation by progressives.

So we, the people, are confused and deluded. In the worst pandemic in a century, many of us don’t wear our masks, don’t get vaccinated, don’t take precautions, and so suffer and die. Many of us think that our personal “freedom” to do as we wish and to raise our kids as we wish outweighs doing something—anything!—to advance the nation’s real interests and solve those ten long-festering problems.

So a rich guy named Youngkin, having no experience in elective office but a glib and optimistic line, won the governorship of Virginia in a stunning upset. He won, many think, with a lie that critical race theory—something developed and taught in law schools—is being shoved down the throats of kids in high school and even grammar school. Like the Big Lie of a stolen election, this lie now animates the GOP “base” and propels our nation faster down the drain of decline.

The solution is obvious but lately unaccustomed: leadership. We need leadership that respects the truth and science and exerts its power in aid of both. We need realists for leaders, not ideologues and demagogues.

Speaker Pelosi made a good start in getting the “hard” infrastructure bill over the finish line. So did President Biden (belatedly) in forcing big companies to get their employees vaccinated or tested weekly, and federally-supported health-care facilities to get their employees vaccinated period.

The right will scream and holler “tyranny!” To so-called “conservatives,” leading is OK only when they do it, even if they lead with lies toward nothing.

But our nation has been leaderless for far too long. Lately “leadership” has meant promoting fantasy, made up out of whole cloth, about things like massive voter fraud, the alleged “dangers” of the safest and most effective vaccines in medical history (and the fastest developed), and the “indoctrination” of young school children in a theory taught only electively in law schools.

None of our Democratic leaders is a great orator. Not President Biden. Not Speaker Pelosi. Not Jim Clyburn or Steny Hoyer. Certainly not Chuck Schumer. But collectively they have over a century of political experience. They know what needs to be done and how to do it.

Speaker Pelosi just showed she knows how to count votes. Now she has to start twisting arms like Lyndon Johnson, but politely. (“Pecker in my pocket” is not a good metaphor for a lady to use.) So does Majority Leader Schumer.

Now all our Democratic leaders have to lead, as President Biden and Speaker Pelosi are ever-so-tentatively starting to do. And we, the people, have to follow. We have just spent over a quarter century, on average, dead in the water, with little progress in solving the ten big problems that threaten our national survival, let alone our pre-eminence. That’s far too long.

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Our Coming Die-Off

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In the next few decades, our human species could suffer a massive die-off. Hundreds of millions of us could die miserably before our times. Billions might.

There’s not much we can do now to prevent the catastrophe. Most of it is already baked in (pun intended). All we can do is mitigate it.

To see why, watch two short YouTube videos. The first is this one, of David Attenborough addressing the COP26 opening session. Pay special attention to the ever-rising CO₂ numbers. Then don’t miss the graph of 10,000-plus years of stable climate—during which our species, having completed its long evolution, civilized itself. Finally, note the horrifying spike at the modern end.

For the final touch, watch this eloquent plea by the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, speaking for the people of the so-called “Third World.” They are already starting to die off, as in Haiti and several parts of Africa today. The “homeless, tempest-tost” masses now storming the southern borders of the US and EU are just the vanguard of far larger, more desperate masses to come.

The cause of the coming die-off is something familiar to engineers and scientists: positive feedback. As its ice melts, the Earth gets less reflective and absorbs more heat from the Sun. As the warming sky fills with water vapor, it, too, acts like a blanket, and solar panels and windmills generate power less efficiently. As permafrost melts, the vast reaches of northern Canada and Siberia belch out methane—a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO₂—in unknown but increasingly massive quantities. Ditto for disassociating methane hydrates in the deep ocean, which break apart as the oceans warm.

More heat, then repeat. The first two causes of heating feedback are well modeled. The last two are not. They are big wild cards, and they may become the dominant sources of positive feedback.

Scientists can’t and haven’t studied them well because they are occurring in sparsely populated and inaccessible areas. But scientists know their general effects: they accelerate global warming dramatically. (Melting permafrost is better established: visitors and scientists alike can see and measure permafrost melting and methane bubbling out of nearby lakes and ponds. The dissociation of deep-sea methane hydrates relies on indirect evidence, including laboratory experiments.)

The point of all this is subtle but profound. As these feedback mechanisms gather steam, the source of global heating is no longer just the steady drip, drip, drip of CO₂ from our power plants and exhaust pipes. Some of the heating has already become not just self-sustaining, but self-multiplying. Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, or if a new pandemic killed us all off, heating would continue, due to the four feedback mechanisms described above. And recall that methane—the product of the last two—has up to 80 times the heating power of CO₂.

That’s why the last ten years have seemed so decisive, even to a casual observer. Relative to the pre-industrial baseline of about 280 ppm, our present CO₂ level of 415 ppm is nearly 50% higher. But the increase didn’t happen in just the last ten years.

In that short time, the level rose only about 25 ppm, less than 10%. Yet you don’t need a supercomputer model to tell that something in our climate and weather has changed dramatically in the last ten years. That’s the effect of positive feedback: we’ve reached some sort of tipping point from which recovery may be impossible.

How hot will we get? There’s no clear stopping point for climate feedback, like the maximum sound output of an amplifier whose speakers are too close to the microphone. Venus’ atmosphere has far more CO₂ than Earth’s, and it has an average surface temperature of 847°F, higher than the melting point of lead. No mammal could live there; in fact, no multi-celled organism we know of could survive there.

Of course Venus is also much closer to the Sun and has more volcanic activity. But you get the point. There’s no intrinsic limit on how hot the Sun’s radiation can make a planet. For Earth, there is only the next higher equilibrium state based on its particular atmosphere, seas, geography, composition, and biosphere. No one has any idea now what its next equilibrium state will be like, after we’ve disturbed the one we’ve been living with for 10,000 years.

So what’s the upshot? Positive feedback is causing global warming to accelerate more rapidly than anyone expected—even the most “alarmist” scientists—as few as ten years ago. And positive feedback, primarily through the release of methane, has made the heating process self-sustaining, at least in part, for the foreseeable future.

You don’t have to be a scientist yourself to understand. You just have to have a good memory. For decades, scientists have been predicting catastrophe by the end of this century. But it’s already happening now. Wildfires have devastated large stretches of California (even Northern California) and Australia. Repeated, unprecedented hurricanes have hit our Gulf Coast and our Atlantic Coast, not to mention the Philippines. Little, presumably safe mountain villages in Germany and Belgium have been all but washed away by unprecedented floods. This year, parts of Oregon, Washington and Northern Siberia have experienced 100°F-plus temperatures never before recorded. And the Great, Desperate Migration from overheated, drought-stricken Africa (including parts of the Middle East) has caused an ongoing immigration crisis in the EU.

Whether you are a scientist or an ordinary citizen, be honest with yourself. Ten years ago, did you foresee any of this, let alone all of it? Who predicted that climate change would hit us so hard so soon?

No one did. Scientists did least of all, not on this time scale. They can’t predict what they can’t model, and they can’t study stuff happening in the melting Arctic tundra very well, or on the deep-sea bottom much at all. Add the relentless social and political pressure of business people and politicians with an agenda to minimize the danger, and you have a recipe for perpetual scientific understatement.

Anyway, one thing is clear. All the disasters to this date are just the beginning of anthropogenic climate destabilization.

Much heating is now baked in, with CO₂ levels already unprecedented during the entire span of human civilization. Like a blanket, greenhouse gases store the Sun’s heat relentlessly; and the Sun isn’t going out any time soon, else we would all freeze and die from cold. So all we can do now, with the greatest collective effort we can muster, is slow down the acceleration of heating. Stopping or reversing it, at least in this century, will be virtually impossible, short of something like a deliberately induced “nuclear winter.”

Why is reversing the heating so far physically impossible? It takes many decades to absorb CO₂, let alone methane, from the atmosphere, whether in the oceans or by growing trees. Meanwhile, all four positive-feedback processes are continuing without regard to human activity. As for trees, the Brazilians under Jair Bolsonaro are busy cutting and burning them down as fast as possible in the Amazon Jungle, our planet’s largest remaining forest “lungs.” Despite all our species’ so-far feeble effort, our total greenhouse-gas emissions currently are continuing to increase.

As if all this were not bad enough, there is yet another positive feedback loop: a social and political one. The only way that we humans can fight the climate destabilization we have caused is by working hard together. Fighting it will take decisive, global, species-wide action. It will require the strongest, widest, most sustained cooperation that our fractious and contentious species has ever attempted.

Yet at the moment, we are “cooperating” worse than a herd of cats. Leaders of China, Russia and Brazil, whose nations are collectively responsible for over half of today’s global greenhouse-gas pollution, simply didn’t show up at COP26. Joe Manchin, a single senator, has hobbled the United States’ attempt at “leadership.” He appears, pathetically and catastrophically, to be protecting his tiny state’s dying coal industry and his own personal investment in it.

One of the saddest things to watch at COP26’s opening session was British PM Boris Johnson’s demeanor as Attenborough spoke. Johnson represents the island nation that produced three of the four greatest thinkers in human history: Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, and Charles Darwin (the fourth being Albert Einstein).

Yet there he was, looking downcast like a scolded school child. Not only was his much-vaunted Brexit too little and too late to repair the fragility of a senselessly globalized and now brittle economy, shattering under the pressure of Covid-19 even as you read this. It was also a step in the wrong direction, making climate cooperation just a bit harder.

So don’t expect much from COP26. It was doomed before it even started, doomed by the selfishness of our species. It was doomed by the absolute predominance of unrestrained capitalism as a global economic religion. It was doomed by the rejection of any concerted planning (aka “industrial policy”) almost everywhere but in China and Germany. It was doomed by the weakness of traditional religions, such as Pope Francis’, which teach selflessness and cooperation but are fading under the influence of internal problems like pedophilia and a species-wide stampede toward short-term greed.

Will our species ever undertake the tasks that it must do collectively, not to ward off the worst—that is inevitably coming—but to mitigate it? The hour is late, and the prognosis is sober. The task won’t get easier as crops begin to fail, large populations start to migrate to safety even within the “First World,” desperate hordes from without it become massive waves of refugees, and dominant powers like China seize the turmoil as a chance to make military plays. Just don’t forget that little, fragile Taiwan is where many of the world’s computer chips are made, and we will need those chips for any technological solution.

Besides throwing a good party, perhaps the thing we humans do best is congratulate ourselves. We once thought we were the center of the Universe and our small blue planet its focal point, around which all else revolved.

Now we know we are but one ever-vulnerable species, dominating a small planet in a solar system on the outer edge of a spiral arm of a rather small galaxy. Our once-comfortable civilization has pretty much stopped our biological evolution, which anyway takes far longer than our recorded history to produce recognizable change. So we are unprepared biologically for the next climate equilibrium, which we have already set in motion. Perhaps the best we can do to save ourselves is to move toward the poles.

Maybe we should downgrade our self-awarded designation from Homo sapiens to Homo ordinarius. For when it comes to our self-created catastrophe, we are on track to repeat the suffering of every other species facing loss of food and a livable habit: migration, conflict, starvation, and a big die-off. Let’s hope that nuclear weapons won’t play a leading role in our partial or total self-extinction.

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