Climate Campaign Loses Momentum As World Fights Coronavirus
In this newsletter:
1) Czech PM Urges EU To Ditch Green Deal Amid Virus
EurActiv, 17 March 2020
2) EU Should Scrap Emissions Trading Scheme, Polish Official Says
Reuters, 17 March 2020
3) Climate Campaign Loses Momentum As World Fights Coronavirus
Bloomberg, 16 March 2020
4) Coronavirus: Here’s What The Scientists Don’t Know That Could Be Key To Managing This Pandemic
The Daily Telegraph, 17 March 2020
5) What History Teaches Us About The Coronavirus Pandemic
Stephen Davies, Al Arabiya, 16 March 2020
6) Jeff Jacoby: I’m Skeptical About Climate Alarmism, But I Take Coronavirus Fears Seriously
The Boston Globe, 14 March 2020
7) High Temperature and High Humidity Reduce the Transmission of COVID-19
Jingyuan Wang, Ke Tang, Kai Feng and Weifeng Lv, SSRN, 9 March 2020
Full details:
1) Czech PM Urges EU To Ditch Green Deal Amid Virus
EurActiv, 17 March 2020
The Czech premier, whose country depends on nuclear energy and coal, said Monday (16 March) the European Union should ditch its landmark green law seeking carbon neutrality as it battles the novel coronavirus.
“Europe should forget about the Green Deal now and focus on the coronavirus instead,” Prime Minister Andrej Babiš told reporters, without explaining how the two are connected.
“Europe is now the biggest epicentre of the coronavirus in the world,” the billionaire populist added.
The EU unveiled a draft of the Green Deal earlier this month, mandating members to achieve net zero greenhouse emissions by 2050.
But ex-communist EU members like the Czech Republic have announced much less ambitious plans as their energy sectors are still largely dependent on coal.
The Czech Republic has registered 344 cases of COVID-19, including three recovered patients. No one has died of the disease in the country of around 11 million people.
The Czech Republic recently closed its borders as well as schools, most shops and cultural facilities and restricted free movement.
Full story
2) EU Should Scrap Emissions Trading Scheme, Polish Official Says
Reuters, 17 March 2020
WARSAW (Reuters) - The European Union should scrap its Emissions Trading System or exempt Poland from the scheme, which helps combat global warming, to free up funds for Warsaw to fight the effects of the coronavirus, a senior Polish official said.
Under the ETS, the EU charges for the right to emit carbon dioxide. European power generators, industrial emitters and airlines running flights within the EU must buy permits to cover their emissions.
“The results of fighting coronavirus will be painful. It is obvious that countries will be looking for extra money to help their business and citizens,” Janusz Kowalski, Deputy Minister of State Assets, told Reuters on Tuesday.
“Poland and other countries should take care of the climate on their own, and the ETS should be removed from 1 January, 2021, or at least Poland should be excluded from the system.”
The coronavirus has killed five people and infected 205 in Poland, which has barred foreigners from entering, shut schools and capped public gatherings at 50 people.
Kowalski suggested the government could discuss the proposal after the coronavirus has peaked.
“This will be the time for taking various unconventional, political decisions on all levels,” Kowalski said.
Full story
3) Climate Campaign Loses Momentum As World Fights Coronavirus
Bloomberg, 16 March 2020
The climate campaign is at risk of stalling as the pandemic and global economic crisis deepens.
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde once spent more time talking about climate change than inflation. It happened during a press conference in Frankfurt less than two months ago, but already feels like something from another century—or planet.
In the days since, the novel coronavirus and an oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia have rocked financial markets and brought the world to the brink of an economic crisis.
Understandably, these two extraordinary events have grabbed global attention. Yet the trickle of concerning climate news has not slowed....
The United Nations won’t hold any face-to-face climate change talks until at least the end of April, as part of the effort to contain the coronavirus, according to Climate Change News. An EU-China climate summit due to take place at the end of the month has also been postponed.
Such events are essential for governments to draft agreements in advance of the UN’s next global climate meeting, scheduled to take place in Glasgow in November. The COP26 conference is particularly critical, as all signatories are supposed to present even more ambitious plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions than called for under the 2015 Paris Agreement. So far, only the Marshall Islands, Suriname, Norway and Moldova have presented such plans, according to the World Resources Institute.
The climate policy push is at risk of stalling on a national level as well. The U.K. scaled back plans to put environment at the center of its budget last week. Spain, which has made climate change a central part of its political agenda, halted all legislative activity for at least two weeks and declared a state of emergency over the weekend.
Despite the temporary setbacks, European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen said last week that the European Union remains committed to its Green Deal, a moonshot plan to make the bloc carbon neutral by 2050.
“Clearly we cannot ignore what’s going on globally,” said EU Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius on Bloomberg TV. The global “climate emergency didn’t go anywhere.
But transforming the economy is a titanic effort, requiring all the pieces to move in perfect coordination over an extended period of time. Until now, public policy and private investment have pushed each other to advance climate goals. Whether all the stakeholders involved can deal with the immediate shocks while keeping long-term goals in sight remains to be seen.
Full story
4) Coronavirus: Here’s What The Scientists Don’t Know That Could Be Key To Managing This Pandemic
The Daily Telegraph, 17 March 2020
What we don’t know is as important as what we do when it comes to thinking about the coronavirus.
Anxiety over the UK response to the new coronavirus has been caused in part by poor communication CREDIT: AFP
The strategic planners hunkered down in Whitehall will have at the core of their operation a long list headed “known unknowns”. It will help to inform virtually every decision they make today and in the weeks to come.
The concept was popularised by the former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. Quizzed at a press conference about the lack of evidence linking Saddam Hussein to weapons of mass destruction, he told reporters: “There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.”
Mr Rumsfeld may have given the concept a bad name but listing known unknowns continues to be used by strategic planners across the globe.
A more positive example, revealed by The Telegraph in March 2018, was the inclusion of “Disease X”, a classic known unknown, in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) list of diseases that pose a serious risk of sparking a major international public health emergency.
“Disease X represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease”, the WHO said prophetically at the time.
Anxiety over the UK response to the new coronavirus has been caused in part by poor communication but also because we all want certainly in an area where – if the truth be known – there still exists very considerable doubt.
But paradoxically perhaps, it is calming to know what is not known because it helps us understand the decision making of others. So here are what experts believe are the key known unknowns about the coronavirus as things stand.
Seasonality and acquired immunity
Professor Francois Balloux, chair in computational biology at University College London, says that for an epidemiologist, the two biggest unknowns are the virus’s ability (or not) to adapt to the seasons and the immunity (if any) it gives those who are infected and recover.
“There are two major unknowns at this stage. We don’t know to what extent Covid-19 transmission will be seasonal. And We don’t know if Covid-19 infection induces long-lasting immunity”, he said in a viral thread on Twitter.
“How long immunity lasts for following covid-19 infection is the biggest unknown. Comparison with other Coronaviridae suggests it may be relatively short-lived (i.e. months). If this were to be confirmed, it would add to the challenge of managing the pandemic.
“Short-lived immunisation would defeat both ‘flattening the curve’ and ‘herd immunity’ approaches”.
Prof Balloux said there was some indication that the virus may wax and wane with the seasons but that it would be at least a year before that could be said with any real certainty.
“At the moment there is too little data and too many other variables going on to predict its seasonality with any certainty”, he said.
But the “critical variable” in predicting the course of the pandemic was acquired immunity – how long you are protected once you are recovered.
Asked whether a person can get coronavirus twice, chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said on Monday: “In any infectious disease there are cases where people can catch something again [but] they’re rare.
“There’s nothing to suggest that this is a common occurrence in this disease but we are learning as we go along.”
Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, added: “Even in diseases which do not have long-lasting immunity there’s usually a short period of immunity and that’s enough for a season.”
Children and asymptomatic infection
Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, said another major gap in knowledge about the virus was the extent to which children spread it.
“Infection in kids is still a very big deal, not just for health but for planning purposes”, he said. “We know they tend only to get very mild illness but we are not sure to what extent they spread it to others.
“With the flu children play a major role in passing round the virus but with the coronavirus it is not at all clear. If we knew, for instance, that they were unlikely to infect their grandparents that would be very useful.”
It is this known unknown which probably explains the government’s reluctance to close schools.
Some argue that should be done as a precaution but if you don’t know what role children play in spreading the disease it could also make matters considerably worse.
Also relevant is the fact that an estimated 30 per cent of the NHS and social care workforce in Britain have school age children. Close the schools, and you may take them out of work too.
Mutation
Viruses of all types are known to mutate over time, some becoming more virulent and infectious.This is also a major known unknown for coronavirus but most experts think it unlikely to mutate at the same pace as viruses like influenza.
“Coronaviruses are made up of RNA rather than DNA and have much better fidelity or stability”, said Prof Hunter.
Less optimistically he added: “What I am much more worried about is all the other coronaviruses out there in bats and other animals. We have had Sars, Mers and now Covid-19. Imagine if you got one as infectious as this but with a mortality rate like Sars or Mers. We are playing with fire allowing wet markets to continue.”
Mortality rates
Michael Tildesley, associate professor in infectious disease modelling at the University of Warwick, said that another known unknown was the mortality rate for Covid-19.
“One of the key challenges that we have with trying to predict the future spread of the disease is that there is still significant uncertainty regarding the number of individuals in the population who may only have mild symptoms (or no symptoms at all) and do not report infection.
“This impacts our estimates of the mortality rate of the disease as if the number of mild, undetected, cases is high, then the true mortality rate is significantly lower than one has been reported.”
Full story
5) What History Teaches Us About The Coronavirus Pandemic
Stephen Davies, Al Arabiya, 16 March 2020
Currently there is much debate over what kind of policy is best for dealing with the coronavirus epidemic. We are dealing with a true pandemic and have been ever since the virus was confirmed to have spread to every continent in early February. This will not be over by the summer but will last in a series of episodes for about eighteen months.
The virus has a bad combination of qualities inasmuch as it is highly infectious but has serious effects in a large proportion of cases and a not-insignificant mortality rate while in addition another large part of those infected show no symptoms. What is worth doing is thinking about the likely longer-term results and here history is the best guide.
Pandemics and major epidemics are a recurrent feature of human history. A true pandemic is global but the term is also used for any epidemic that spreads widely beyond its geographical point of origin. In such cases it is spread by humans, though their movement and that of animals associated with us, such as rats and lice. Pandemics are epidemics that spread throughout what we may call an ecumene, a part of the world that has an integrated economy and division of labour, held together and produced by trade and exchange. What we now have is a truly global ecumene.
If we look at the history of pandemics, they tend to occur at the end of a period of increasing trade and economic integration over a large part of the planet’s surface. That is because those processes have results, such as much more human movement and increased urbanisation, that make major epidemics more likely. Historically pandemics have spread along trade and exchange routes.
Several features of the way we live now make a serious pandemic more probable, particularly higher levels of globalization and modern intensive livestock farming because of the way it leads to new pathogens emerging in animals and then jumping species. Scientists have been concerned about this for some time and contingency plans drawn up, which are now being tested.
What will be the results of this pandemic? The evidence of history is that pandemics arrest and delay, or even reverse, the process of economic integration. We are likely to see this now. There will be serious disruption to long distance supply chains and this will make many turn back to more local suppliers with consequently less long-distance integration of economies. This was already starting before the epidemic. We are also seeing far more controls over movement and not only across national borders but also within them. This is unlikely to be completely reversed so we will see a hardening of borders and much less international and long-distance travel.
The pandemic will also possibly have significant political impacts. Historically epidemics weaken the legitimacy of states and rulers and often coincide with popular unrest. They also weaken elites because they are proportionately more likely to catch infectious diseases, because they travel more and live in large metropoles that are the hubs of trade systems, and in today’s world are typically older than average. Another major and more widespread outbreak in China could have serious implications, particularly if the Communist Party is seen to have lost the “Mandate of Heaven” because of it.
In addition, this particular epidemic may well add to other pressures on a fragile world finance and monetary system and trigger a sharp fall in asset values which will wipe out much of the wealth of the rich. As Walter Scheidel argues in The Great Leveller it is major catastrophes such as wars and pandemics that typically bring about big reductions in inequality.
Finally, and more speculatively, pandemics often have significant psychological and cultural effects. They are often associated with an upsurge in millenarian religion, with the idea that the end of the world is imminent, unless we change our wicked ways. This kind of quasi-religious belief has already found expression in movements like Extinction Rebellion and that is likely to gain strength, with unforeseeable political and cultural results. In contrast, many people react by thinking that if life is precarious, they may as well live for the moment and not hold back any of their desires. Some people have their trust in experts restored or strengthened but many lose what little faith they had and turn to fringe ideas – again a process that was already under way.
The pandemic the world is experiencing will pass but it will not be the last. Moreover, regardless of how severe it proves to be, history suggests that it will have consequences and impacts on the way people behave in the future, and these may be more important and have longer lasting consequences than the pandemic itself.
6) Jeff Jacoby: I’m Skeptical About Climate Alarmism, But I Take Coronavirus Fears Seriously
The Boston Globe, 14 March 2020
A friend asked me the other day if I didn’t think the agitated media coverage of Covid-19, the coronavirus disease, was getting out of control. She knows that I have long been skeptical of the shrill alarmism that has become inseparable from public discussions of climate change. Isn’t this pretty much the same?
It isn’t, I said, and explained briefly why the two cases strike me as very different. But I’ve been reflecting on her question. Perhaps a longer explanation might be useful.
The first and most obvious difference between climate panic and the mounting anxiety over coronavirus is that there is a long history of viral epidemics, plagues, and pandemics. There is nothing speculative or theoretical about the murderous efficiency with which new diseases can burn through societies encountering them for the first time. The Plague of Justinian that erupted in Constantinople in 541 is estimated to have killed at least 25 million people as it spread across Asia, North Africa, Arabia, and Europe. The Black Death in the 14th century wiped out one third of the population of Eurasia. The most lethal pandemic of the 20th century, the Spanish flu outbreak at the end of World War I, sent more than 50 million victims to early graves — more than all the soldiers and civilians killed during the war.
The horrors of pandemics have been documented and depicted often. Yet while climate activists have been forecasting world-ending doomsday scenarios since the 1960s, the apocalypse never seems to materialize.
Although climate is always in flux, unmitigated anthropogenic warming would doubtless lead to cataclysm. But human societies have a genius for mitigating and adapting their way out of existential threats. Which is why it’s dangerous, as climatologist Michael Mann has written, to overstate the science of global warming “in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability, and hopelessness.”
By contrast, worrying about the devastation of an active viral epidemic is not merely a matter of “trusting science” or “waking up” to an inconvenient truth. Plagues are real. They have erupted with deadly effect in the past, just as Covid-19 is erupting in the present.
Italy, the first European country to experience the disease, went from no cases to more than 12,000 in just three weeks. On Wednesday alone, Italy’s death toll from the coronavirus rose from 631 to 827. In Iran, well over 11,000 people are reported to have the disease, of whom 514 had died, as of Friday morning. But dozens of senior regime officials are among the afflicted, which strongly implies that the disease is far more widespread than Tehran is acknowledging. As I write, the numbers in the United States are far lower, but they won’t be for long.
Governments and industries are putting up once-in-a-generation firewalls to create the social distancing that can break the chain of viral transmission and “flatten the curve” of the epidemic’s growth — banning flights from Europe, suspending the NBA season, cancelling marathons and major parades.
All this is in keeping with scientific principles that are well-known, empirically confirmed, and grounded in experience, not politics.
This is not to suggest that the Covid-19 crisis hasn’t been infected by politics: Of course it has. Like so much else these days, this crisis has been turned into political fodder — on the rightno less than the left. Whenever something bad happens, partisans try to score political points or cast political stones.
By and large, however, the health and public-policy response to the coronavirus has been focused on the practical and the here-and-now: gathering data, prioritizing research, developing a vaccine, readying medical facilities — and communicating to the public in temperate language and timely fashion the most practical means of mitigating the expected harm.
Experts have stuck, for the most part, to known knowns and known unknowns, even as they have candidly made clear that the contagion is certain to get much worse before it gets better.
The contrast with the debate over climate change could hardly be more pronounced.
On the basis of computer models whose results have repeatedly missed the mark, climate-change crusaders, including many in the media, fervently insist that “the time for debate is over,” that “97 percent” of scientists share their view, and that anyone skeptical that catastrophe looms is the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier. With intolerant zeal, they declare that contrary opinions must be silenced.
Nothing like that can be seen amid the mounting anxiety over Covid-19. Indeed, as Larry Kummer points out at the geopolitics blog Fabius Maximus, statements from the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization have been “explicit and specific about the uncertainties in our knowledge about the coronavirus epidemic. . . . The scientists of WHO and the CDC have conducted their campaign without attacks, let alone smearing, of those experts who disagreed with them (and there are many areas of disagreement).”
But maybe the most significant difference between the coronavirus and climate cases is this: No one is turning coronavirus into a culture-war battlefield. The disease is not being exploited to demand a drastic overhaul of modern life. There is nothing punitive about the extreme steps now being undertaken — quarantines, school closures, shutting the US Capitol, the lockdown of an entire European country. Harsh as they are, their sole purpose is to slow a contagion, not to radically transform society in keeping with environmental activists’ utopian notions.
7) High Temperature and High Humidity Reduce the Transmission of COVID-19
Jingyuan Wang, Ke Tang, Kai Feng and Weifeng Lv, SSRN, 9 March 2020
Abstract
This paper investigates how air temperature and humidity influence the transmission of COVID-19. After estimating the serial interval of COVID-19 from 105 pairs of the virus carrier and the infected, we calculate the daily effective reproductive number, R, for each of all 100 Chinese cities with more than 40 cases. Using the daily R values from January 21 to 23, 2020 as proxies of non-intervened transmission intensity, we find, under a linear regression framework for 100 Chinese cities, high temperature and high relative humidity significantly reduce the transmission of COVID-19, respectively, even after controlling for population density and GDP per capita of cities. One degree Celsius increase in temperature and one percent increase in relative humidity lower R by 0.0383 and 0.0224, respectively. This result is consistent with the fact that the high temperature and high humidity significantly reduce the transmission of influenza. It indicates that the arrival of summer and rainy season in the northern hemisphere can effectively reduce the transmission of the COVID-19.
Full paper
The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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