{"id":9298,"date":"2020-04-28T07:04:50","date_gmt":"2020-04-28T15:04:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=9298"},"modified":"2021-03-14T08:37:36","modified_gmt":"2021-03-14T16:37:36","slug":"weird-al-yankovic-and-the-global-phase-shift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=9298","title":{"rendered":"Weird Al Yankovic and the Global Phase Shift"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“We’re living by science and data, not our constitution.
That’s wrong. We are not safe if we are not free.”
\u2014Darwin Award contender, protesting in Pennsylvania<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The target won’t stop moving. Not so long ago the WHO came out with a mortality rate of 3.4%; country specific rates span the range from almost 10% to virtually zero (let\u2019s just say I wouldn\u2019t want to be stuck in Italy or North America right n\u2014 oh, wait\u2026) A Lancet study<\/a> from the beginning of the month derives a China-wide mortality rate of less than 1.4%, though, which is closer to earlier estimates based on contained populations with complete sampling. That\u2019s good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, the infection rate R0\u2014originally estimated as somewhere between 2 or three\u2014 might in fact be as high as 5.7<\/a>. That\u2019s bad. And over on the good ship Theodore Roosevelt<\/em>\u2014you know, that aircraft carrier whose captain was fired after he had the temerity to ask for assistance with an on-board C19 outbreak\u2014 a solid 60% of the sailors who tested positive<\/a> were asymptomatic. That would also be bad, if it didn\u2019t pale compared to asymptomatic figures reported from other closed populations: 80% in China<\/a>, over 90% in US Prisons<\/a> (the biggest \u201cclosed population\u201d on the planet, depending on your definition). Also a lot of C19 victims present an abnormally high incidence of clotting<\/a>, which while maybe not downright dire in Big Picture terms is certainly curious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the meantime, the number of recorded cases worldwide has sailed past three million as I write this; deaths over 200,000. People who\u2019ve survived one bout with C19 are starting to test positive for it again. Still no treatment or vaccine. Here in Canada our politicians speak hopefully about the way we\u2019re flattening the curve, while at the same time warming us up to the possibility of food shortages<\/a> in the not-too-distant future. And apparently there\u2019s a plan afoot to lock a skeleton crew inside<\/em> local generating stations\u2014to isolate them from the growing social unrest and chaos beyond the fences\u2014so they can keep maintaining the plant and forestall the day the grid goes down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this is news most folks would describe as hopeful<\/em>. So you might be forgiven for giving me a funny look when I tell you that I really don\u2019t think Covid-19 is a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think it\u2019s a symptom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a while, rumor had it that C19 had been built in a Chinese bioweapons lab, that bats and pangolins were just innocent fall-mammals. When that proved inconsistent with the evidence<\/a>, the rumor mutated into a less virulent strain that suggested C19 might have at least escaped from a lab<\/a>, even if it hadn\u2019t actually originated there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I kinda wish it had, although not for the reasons you might expect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I played with a similar idea on this very \u2018crawl back in 2016<\/a>, when I expressed modest and wistful hopes for the impact of the Zika<\/em> virus\u2014a bug that never killed anyone, barely even inconveniences adults, but whose deformation of fetuses was proving enough to scare even dyed-in-the-blood-of-Christ Catholics out of reproducing. In that post I lamented my own failure of imagination: I\u2019d imagined Zika<\/em> would expand its range by switching from its original tropical-mosquito host to one with a more temperate distribution, spreading out of the impoverished Third World into the gluttonous First where a reduction in our numbers might actually make a difference. Instead, Zika<\/em> had ditched the insect vector altogether and gone into sexual-transmission mode, a much more effective strategy that spread it throughout the lower states in a matter of months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet here I am again, with yet another mea culpa<\/em> about my limited imagination: because my scenario described a gradual<\/em> reduction in our impact, a fear of breeding that would take decades to manifest in any ecological sense. I never imagined that a relatively benign bug could cause us to drastically reduce emissions, to change our very lifestyles literally overnight. Which is why I think it would\u2019ve been cool if C19 had<\/em> been conjured up in a lab and deliberately released: not as a bioweapon, but as an object lesson. A teaching moment. An inspiration<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because we know, now, that we can do it. We can live without the luxuries. We can live without the billiona\u2014sorry, the job creators<\/em>. We know who the essential members of this society are, and we can identify the parasites1<\/sup>. We can watch with awe as New Zealand kicks Corona\u2019s ass: we can whoop with schadenfreude as church-going evangelicals and MAGAmaniacs re-enact the airlock scene<\/a> from Avenue 5, while their stumbling demented child-king cheers them on. We can clear the skies in a matter of days; you\u2019ve all seen the pictures. All it takes is for us to be in imminent fear for our lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also for the crisis to be over by the time we\u2019ve finished bingeing Tiger King.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the Big Question, of course. What happens after. If there even is an After.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imagine The Who\u2019s next Farewell Concert. People file into the local stadium and find their seats; tinny music plays from the speakers up in the rafters. It\u2019s an hour or two before even the opening act sets up. And yet, a distressingly large number of people seem to think this preamble comprises the Main Event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

How else do you explain those idiotic memes juxtaposing Mad Max with \u201cLet\u2019s stream our art for free! Let\u2019s sing to each other!\u201d? How else to explain the fact that even the usually-brilliant Laurie Penny<\/a> has bought into the whole \u201cfuzzy teledistant social apocalypse\u201d model. More Douglas Adams than Danny Boyle<\/em>, she writes over on Wired. Maybe now. Maybe on Month 2 of an interminable slide. Try sharing your homemade sourdough recipes when the grid goes down. Have you forgotten that two weeks ago, people were coming to blows over toilet paper?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For what it\u2019s worth, I don\u2019t think the grid will<\/em> go down\u2014this time. I expect we\u2019ll get a bit of a breather. I don\u2019t expect it to last\u2014hell, I\u2019ve been writing about this shit for over twenty years, I\u2019m hardly going to heave a sigh of relief just because the Reavers haven\u2019t kicked in my door by Week 8\u2014but let\u2019s put that aside for the moment. Let\u2019s ignore William Hanage<\/a>, accept that Covid-19 will subside in a few months (outside the US, at least), and restrictions will ease enough for us to come outside again and rub shoulders with the occasional stranger before the second wave<\/a> comes back and does it all over again. We\u2019ve learned some important lessons over the past weeks. We\u2019ve learned how many \u201cimpossible\u201d things were actually just inconvenient to the guys holding the reins. The question now is, will any of those lessons stick?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because all those reduced emissions, all the before\/after pics of the sky over Paris, the whole ecofriendly mass-migration to work-from-home\u2014none of it matters. 2020 is still on track to be the hottest year in recorded history<\/a>. The Great Barrier Reef is still in the throes of yet another devastating bleaching event<\/a>. A whole shitload of fold catastrophes will still be taking out ecosystems<\/a> in sudden waves, starting within the decade. We\u2019ve been fouling the air for generations; a few months of lowered emissions isn\u2019t even a drop in the bucket. (I\u2019m pretty much on-side with climate scientist Kate Marvel<\/a> on this score, right up until she tries to absolve us of all blame and hang responsibility on the plutocrats. I hold us to blame as much as them. But that\u2019s a whole other post<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clear skies over LA? Nice start, but meaningless on its own. Have we learned anything that we\u2019ll apply going forward? (Beyond the take-home message that front-line medical professionals should be evicted from their homes or beaten in the street because they might be carriers, which people from Toronto to Kolkata seem to have already internalized just fine.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s some cause for hope. The Democrats, for example, came out of the mid-pandemic election with a massive majority (thanks largely to their exemplary handling of C19) and have embraced the Green New Deal, pledged to end the nation\u2019s reliance on coal, and to go carbon neutral by 2050. Looking for a silver lining that\u2019s less nihilistic than Hey, at least it\u2019s reduced the number of idiot hominids fucking up the planet<\/em>? Look no further than the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(The South Korean Democratic Party<\/a>, that is. Over here, the US Democrats are still helmed by people who pledge craven fealty to Wall Street, who treat the Green New Deal like a magical unicorn some six-year-old girl wants for her birthday, and whose Chosen One\u2019s strongest selling point is that he hasn\u2019t been accused of sexual misconduct as often as the sitting president.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there\u2019s the city of Amsterdam, which has committed itself, post-Covid, to swapping out conventional rapacious economics for the more eco-friendly \u201cdoughnut<\/a>\u201d type. Germany is talking about enshrining the right to Work From Home<\/a> into law. Hell, even here in Canada\u2014just last week\u2014 our own empty-suit PM opined<\/a> that “Just because we’re in a health crisis doesn’t mean we can neglect the environmental crisis”. Sure it was a platitude; but a platitude from someone who traditionally provides billions in annual subsidies to the oil industry. This time, the payout was earmarked for the clean-up of abandoned oil wells and limiting methane emissions. It\u2019s a teensy step in the right direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if there\u2019s cause for hope, there\u2019s also more than sufficient grounds for skepticism. Other parties have internalised their own lessons, not always with epidemiology foremost in mind. Governments<\/a> around the world<\/a> have lost no time ramping up their surveillance states under cover of \u201ctracking the virus\u201d; anyone want to lay odds on how quickly Ontario stops passing our health information to local law enforcement once the danger has passed, given how responsibly the cops have treated such data<\/a> in the past? (The question is barely rhetorical even in Canada; there\u2019s no point even asking it about China or Russia or the US.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

China is easing back<\/a> on environmental enforcements to help its economy recover. The Czech Republic is using Covid-19 to advocate ditching the European Green Deal<\/a>. The US oil industry has responded to the pandemic by demonizing renewables<\/a> as \u201cunconscionable and immature political opportunism in a time when Americans\u2019 lives are literally at stake\u201d (without, apparently, any sense of irony). The Trump administration has wasted no time suspending environmental regulations<\/a> for Big Fossil, under cover of Covid Hardship. So has Alberta<\/a>, whose premier responded to the cratering value of oil by investing $1.5 billion<\/a> of taxpayer\u2019s money into the Keystone XL pipeline. The Canadian oil lobby is demanding<\/a> that our pesky carbon tax be shelved in this tragic time of economic crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They may have history on their side, in terms of public opinion at least. The Canadian public was increasingly in favor of strong climate action back in the last decade, until the crash of 2008 made everyone forget about everything but The Economy. Given how much worse said Economy is this time around, it\u2019s reasonable to wonder how much we\u2019ve learned in the meantime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not much, if columnist Heather Scoffield is any kind of metric. Over at the Star<\/a> she coos sympathetically about our \u201coil-centered\u201d provinces, laments \u201call the pain\u201d endured by the hard-working souls trapped in that industry. As though they\u2019ve all been caught completely unawares, as though nobody could have possibly foreseen the hardship that price wars and pandemics might have inflicted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
And yet, far more credible than the Commander-in-Chief.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

To which I say: hey, you know who was ranting about the threat of climate change way back in 1977? Weird Al Yankovic<\/em><\/a>, during his high school valedictory address. Not a scientist. Not a prophet. He couldn\u2019t even look things up on the Internet (which barely even existed back then, and couldn\u2019t be accessed by high school students in any case). A nerd with an accordion saw the writing on the wall over forty years ago<\/em>\u2014three years before Exxon officially (if not publicly) recognized the global threat of climate change in its own internal memos\u2014 and we\u2019re supposed to feel sorry for an obscenely-profitable multinational subsidy-siphoning parasite because they never bothered to diversify over the past four decades? We\u2019re supposed to pity the poor blue collars laboring on the rigs who had access to the same wall, could see the same writing\u2014 and who continued to shit on the tree-huggers and elect haploid brainstems like Ralph Klein and Jason Kenney?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fossil had all the money in the world and almost half a century to prepare. All they did was spit on those who tried to raise the alarm. Let them rot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(And to head off an obvious rejoinder: anyone who bleats some variation of Think of the children! <\/em>gets circular-filed. Every generation has children. Every generation squeezes out a brood who\u2014 for a few years, at least\u2014 can be described as \u201cinnocent\u201d. To claim that you should avoid accountability for your crimes because it will hurt \u201cthe children\u201d is not an argument; it\u2019s a hostage scenario. If you cared so much about about your fucking children, you would have cleaned up your act before having them.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Full disclosure, there\u2019s no evidence that climate change played a significant role in the spread of Covid-19 (in fact, hot weather seems to be anathema to the little bugger). Climate change is but one of the major variables contributing to the global spread of disease. The other two are destruction\/encroachment of wild habitat (bringing people into contact with new and undiscovered pathogen reservoirs)2<\/sup> and the globalization of travel (which carries said pathogens to new\u2014 and newly-habitable\u2014 locations at lightning speed). Any of those variables can be enough to provoke an outbreak. Put \u2018em all together, and you\u2019ve got a world in which the incidence of emerging diseases have more than quadrupled since 1970 (and a world in which only about one percent of wildlife viruses are thought to have even been identified, much less countered).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This time, wilderness intrusion and global travel gave us a coronavirus pandemic courtesy of the People\u2019s Republic. Climate change didn\u2019t happen to play a role, but that was just the luck of one draw: China has other gifts waiting in the wings, in which it takes center stage. Climate change causes drought; drought results in increased rodent populations, and voila<\/em>: pneumonic plague<\/a> kicks off its comeback tour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If not plague, Henra virus. If not Henra, West Nile. Babeiosis. Anaplasmosis. Nipah: now there<\/em>\u2019s a scary little fucker. The original reservoir was in bats, but it jumped to humans via pigs: back in 1998<\/a> it infected 276 people in Malaysia, killing 106 of them. That\u2019s a 38% kill rate\u2014higher than smallpox. Nipah\u2019s been on intermittent tour throughout Bangladesh and Malaysia ever since, racking up kill rates as high as 90<\/em>%. Half the cases are transmitted human-to-human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no cure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I keep saying this is only the beginning. I\u2019ve said it so often that people are starting to say \u201cPeter Watts predicted a global virus pandemic in 2019<\/a>\u201d, as though the predictions actually were <\/em>mine, as though I wasn\u2019t just repeating what other, vastly-better-informed experts have been saying for years. But just as each new outbreak reflects an interaction of different causal variables, pandemics themselves are but one factor in a wider, even more catastrophic cascade. This isn\u2019t just about pandemics, it\u2019s not just about climate change: it\u2019s about emptying the oceans and strip-mining the seabed, it\u2019s about cutting down the world\u2019s forests, it\u2019s about hormone disruptors and plastics and insect pollinators cratering in fast-forward. It\u2019s about a civilization build out of cards and supply lines that span hemispheres; an economic system so out of touch with reality that oxygen and clean water are accorded zero value, while mine tailings in a river are accorded zero cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We appear to be headed towards a scenario described in Nafeez Ahmed\u2019s recent essay \u201cCoronavirus, synchronous failure and the global phase-shift<\/a>\u201d: a series of synchronous failures along multiple axes that will pretty much gut The Way Things Are from the inside out. What comes out the other side\u2014whether <\/em>we come out the other side\u2014depends on how well we can transpose the lessons we\u2019re learning during this mild, training-wheels minipocalypse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Unexpectedly, a small minority (photo credit Joshua A. Bickel).<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I honestly don\u2019t know if we will. I didn\u2019t believe we had the political will to take the necessary steps even for C19\u2014yet here we are, banded together, changing the very shape of society from the highest reaches of government to the face-masked peasants lined up uncomplainingly outside the supermarket, a requisite two meters apart. As an added and unexpected bonus, the stupider members of the population are altruistically gathering together in churches<\/a> and public spaces<\/a>, drinking bleach<\/a> on presidential advice, and otherwise helping to weed themselves out of the equation. (Not to mention increasing the mean IQ of the species a bit.) It\u2019s a vision that\u2014how strange it feels to say this\u2014 gives me hope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, I can\u2019t help but wonder\u2014like a myriad others<\/a>\u2014 why we can respond so effectively to this relatively small immediate crisis but not to the gargantuan one that\u2019s been swallowing the planet for generations. Even as one part of my brain serves up the same old answer\u2014 the future isn\u2019t real to us, we\u2019ll run like hell from the charging grizzly but we couldn\u2019t care less about the slow boil\u2014 <\/em>another part doesn\u2019t quite buy it. Put aside the mind-boggling statistics, the three million infected and two hundred thousand dead. The gut doesn\u2019t do numbers. It goes by immediate experience\u2014 and for most of us C19 is still something we watch from a distance, far less \u201creal\u201d than the countermeasures implemented to fight it. We\u2019ve watched our cities shut down. We\u2019re in <\/em>this quarantine. So many of us are suddenly unemployed, staring destitution in the face. Next to that, how many of us even know someone who\u2019s died of Covid-19?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t for a split nanosec buy into that idiotic bullshit about The Cure Being Worse Than the Disease\u2014but dammit, it must feel that way to the gut. And yet most of us are buckling down, against all my expectations. Most of us accept the need for drastic action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Could the molehill have possibly, finally, primed us to deal with the mountain?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

1<\/sup> We always could, of course, but nobody ever seemed to act on the knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2<\/sup> Sixty percent of our emerging infectious diseases originate in other species.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“We’re living by science and data, not our constitution.That’s wrong. We are not safe if we are not free.”\u2014Darwin Award contender, protesting in Pennsylvania The target won’t stop moving. Not so long ago the WHO came out with a mortality rate of 3.4%; country specific rates span the range from almost 10% to virtually zero […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-praise-of-biocide","category-scilitics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9298"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9839,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9298\/revisions\/9839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}