In mid-2020, after the pandemic had settled in, I wrote in a TIME cover story that the stars had aligned to make 2020 and 2021 the “last, best chance” to keep the world from experiencing the worst impacts of climate change. Temperatures have risen more than 1.1°C since the Industrial Revolution, and the COVID-19 pandemic had unexpectedly opened up new pathways to rethink the global economy to help the world avoid the 1.5°C of temperature rise, long seen as a marker of when the planet will start to experience the catastrophic and irreversible effects of climate change.
Now, 18 months later, the world seems poised to blow it. Governments across the globe have failed to spend big on a green economic recovery. Political leaders from the world’s largest economies have made lofty promises to eliminate their carbon footprints but failed to offer concrete policies to get there. And President Joe Biden’s ambitions for bold climate legislation have been stymied in Congress.
“We’re sort of standing on the precipice,” says Rob Jackson, an earth system science professor at Stanford University and the chair of the Global Carbon Project. “I am loath to say it, but I’m deeply skeptical that we will reduce emissions fast enough to keep global temperatures from rising 1.5°.”
So with two landmark years for the planet—not to mention everyone who lives on it—in the rearview mirror, it’s worth looking at the missed opportunities. But it’s just as important to consider what comes next: missed chances cannot be viewed as an excuse to give up.
Spending money
The most obvious—and perhaps easiest—opportunity to turn the COVID-19 pandemic into progress in the fight against climate change boiled down to dollars and cents. COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdowns shocked the economy, requiring governments to spend trillions to keep the wheels turning. Quickly hard-nosed analysts and idealistic activists alike said governments should focus that spending on initiatives that would foster clean energy and push polluting industries to transform.
This message caught on quickly, and a “green recovery” became a key talking point for heads of government from countries large and small. But, as the pandemic wore on, most of those policies failed to materialize. Only around 3% of the nearly $17 trillion countries have spent on recovery measures have been allocated to clean energy and sustainable recovery, according to an October report from the International Energy Agency. The challenge is particularly stark in developing countries where finding financing for clean energy can be difficult. Other analyses have been more optimistic—but only slightly so. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found in April that 17% of recovery spending would provide environmental benefits while another 17% was negative or mixed. The rest of it was neither, in effect meaning it propped up business as usual.
These numbers present huge challenges for progress on climate. First, building new fossil fuel-based infrastructure locks in a future for oil, gas and coal for decades to come. Countries are unlikely to spend millions on, say, a pipeline only to turn around and shut it down a few years later. Moreover, spending money on infrastructure is for many countries a zero sum game. Once the money is spent, it’s gone, and the opportunity to spend big again may not come back again for years or decades. “We’ve spent a lot of money very quickly,” says Jackson. “We won’t get that money back.”
COP26
Even before the pandemic, 2020 was meant to be a big year for action on climate change. Because of a cycle laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries were supposed to produce new climate commitments ahead of a key conference in Glasgow, Scotland, known informally as COP26.
Organizers of the summit—originally scheduled for the fall of 2020 and held a year later as a result of the pandemic—planned the talks with the hope that, when the summit concluded, country commitments would leave the world with a clear and viable pathway to keep temperature rise to 1.5°C. Two heated weeks of negotiations led to a complicated outcome. If you extrapolate from countries’ promises to eliminate their carbon footprints, temperature rise might be limited to around 1.8°C, according to an analysis from Climate Action Tracker.
Countries committed to “phasing down” coal and eliminating “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies. Perhaps more importantly, countries said they would return next year once again with new policies to bring the world even closer to the 1.5°C. “Despite what I would describe as a fractured international politics more generally, we did have consensus,” says Alok Sharma, the British minister who served as COP26’s president.
But promises don’t mean much without policies to make them possible. Any leader can promise to, say, eliminate its carbon footprint by 2050. But to do so requires concrete policies like deploying clean energy or transitioning to electric vehicles. And, if you add up the real policies that drive enacted by countries by the middle of COP26, temperatures are expected to rise 2.7°C—a big gap from the 1.8°C suggested by the vague promises.
The outcome was better than many expected, but it seems fair to say that much work remains to be done to really put the world on a 1.5°C trajectory. “Is [the agreement] enough to hold global warming to 1.5°?” James Shaw, New Zealand’s climate minister, asked his counterparts at the end of the conference. “I honestly can’t say that I think that it does, but we must never, ever give up.”
Political change
The U.S. is the world’s largest economy and second largest greenhouse gas emitter after China, and so what happens in Washington matters a great deal for global efforts to cut emissions. As president, Donald Trump took the U.S. backward, slashing climate rules and taking the country out of the Paris Agreement, and slowed the rest of the world down at the same time. Biden came to office promising to recommit the U.S. to climate action. He put the issue at the forefront of his domestic and international agendas, and, in April, he made a key promise: to slash emissions by at least 50% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.
The Biden Administration has described its strategy as an “all of government” approach, meaning every agency and official needs to consider how their work can help address the issue. But, despite a swathe of new rules and regulations targeting emissions, the Administration has hinged much of its agenda on a key piece of legislation dubbed Build Back Better.
The spending plan, which passed the House of Representatives in November, contains more than $550 billion in clean energy and climate investment that would promote the adoption of electric vehicles, invest in conservation efforts and provide tax incentives for clean energy. At a macro level, that kind of investment would be transformational. Several independent analyses have shown that when combined with other measures, like tighter efficiency rules for automobiles and another key infrastructure package which Biden signed into law earlier this year, the investment would allow the U.S. to meet Biden’s 2030 target.
Without it, or something of equal scale, the target remains an empty promise. “It’s impossible to get from here to there without these investments,” says John Podesta, the former advisor to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who now works on climate issues, of the role Build Back Better bill plays in meeting Biden’s goal.
But on Dec. 19, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin told Fox News that he would not support the current version of the bill. Because the legislation needs support from every Democratic member of the Senate to pass, Manchin’s statement undermined both Biden’s climate agenda and global climate efforts more broadly. “If we don’t pass this, we basically have lost the war,” Sean Casten, a member of the House of Representatives from Illinois, told me earlier in December. “This is how we actually make sure that the fires, the floods don’t get worse every year.”
What comes next
If all of this sounds depressing, it is. While keeping temperature rise to 1.5°C may still be technically possible, it becomes harder and harder to imagine leaders finding the political will to do so with each passing year. That means an increasing likelihood that we may soon trigger a tipping point that leads to non-linear changes—think of the melting of Arctic permafrost that releases huge quantities of methane, for example, that in turn leads to even faster warming.
Many who work on climate issues are hesitant to admit that critical threshold may already be behind us. Acknowledging that reality is often seen as tantamount to giving up.
But there’s another way to look at it. On a recent panel I moderated, Michael Greenstone, a University of Chicago economics professor who served as the chief economist on Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, ran through his calculations of the damage done by each ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. His conclusion was simple: “Every ton matters.”
No matter how close we are to hitting 1.5°C of warming—or by how much we’ve passed it—every ton of carbon matters, as does every new effort the world makes in reducing the harm being done. The world came up short in 2020 and 2021. In 2022, leaders need to go back to the drawing board.
Bearded vultures, blue whales and crocodiles in Cambodia also saw their population numbers grow.
The new Netflix film Don’t Look Up is a star-studded allegory about climate change. The world faces a clear and imminent threat, and the question the movie poses is: Will we be able to overcome the narrow self-interests of politicians, the business community, and individual nations to defeat the threat we collectively face? Will too many people around the world be too gullible and passive to demand the right actions from their leaders?
In the case of the film, it does not give away too much to suggest that doing the right thing is a challenge. The film is not just a parable about our inertia when it comes to the ever worsening, nearly irreversible climate crisis—it is a reminder that the idea that the planet will effectively unite in the interest of self-preservation is itself a romantic myth.
The coronavirus pandemic has shown that bona fide global cooperation is more fanciful and out of reach than ever.
It was a very different sort of Hollywood product, President Ronald Reagan, who—with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev—helped promote this fantasy of an enlightened global community. During a 1985 summit in Geneva, their conversation took an odd turn. As reported by Gorbachev himself, “President Reagan suddenly said to me, ‘What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?’” Gorbachev responded, “No doubt about it.” Reagan replied, “We too.”
Our modern experience with shared existential threats tells another story.
The climate crisis is, of course, one part of the tale. The ancient Greeks contemplated whether deforestation or draining swamps might impact rainfall. But warnings that humans could cause global warming by producing carbon dioxide have themselves been around a long time. Nineteenth-century scientists understood the concept and, in 1896, Svante Arrhenius published the first paper explicitly warning of this threat.
We know the rest of the story. Although today there is very nearly universal agreement among scientists that global warming is real but that its consequences are likely to be severely disruptive—costing billions of dollars and threatening millions of lives—the governments of the planet Earth have moved far too slowly. In just this past year, we effectively exceeded the warming targets set during the Paris 2015 climate talks, we have seen record-breaking heat, faster sea-level rise, shrinking polar ice caps, and devastating weather… and still the COP 26 talks in Edinburgh produced underwhelming results.
Here in the U.S., Sen. Joe Manchin and his GOP allies blocked major new funding for climate programs—and he actively defended the fossil-fuel interests so prominent in his home state of West Virginia. We could be on a path to sea levels rising as much as seven feet by the end of the century and right now it seems unlikely we’ll be able to reverse those trends.
Other climate-related existential threats—from lack of water to famine—have more typically produced conflict than cooperation between neighboring states. Making matters worse is that most of our international institutions were designed to be weak—to let big countries like the U.S. have their way, to support the initiatives of a rich few states, and not to be able to impose their will on individual countries in an effective way. As a result, many responses to global threats are either weak or ad hoc.
But it’s not just climate. Another existential threat we have faced for almost eight decades is that posed by nuclear weapons. We know that nuclear warfare would be horrific, and that a nuclear exchange by superpowers like the U.S. and Russia or China could destroy the planet. While we have had arms agreements and efforts to contain the spread of such weapons, look at the headlines. Iran is nearing the capacity to manufacture nuclear warheads. North Korea reminds us regularly it has joined the nuclear club. Israel and India got such weapons half a century ago. Pakistan did in 1998.
Today, there are more than 13,000 nuclear warheads known to exist worldwide, almost 12,000 of which belong to the U.S. and Russia. What’s more, we have let some key arms agreements lapse in recent years, and have made precious little progress on the big, bold ideas that enlightened self-interest (or common sense) might dictate, like eliminating nuclear weapons altogether. What’s more, there have been proponents, such as former President Trump, of investing in “smaller”—which is to say more usable—nuclear weapons, which would increase the risks we face. In other words, more than three-quarters of a century after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the threat of nuclear catastrophe remains and, in many respects, it is getting worse.
And you’ll be very disappointed if you think we’ve got good global mechanisms in place to address next-generation threats from cyber to AI-empowered weapons to biowarfare.
COVID-19, of course, is another menace that has defied cooperation for nearly two years of death and despair.
For all the rhetoric about the need for global solutions, the response of the international community to containing the spread of the pandemic has been woefully inadequate. The U.S. has committed over 1 billion doses to the international community, but the need is perhaps 11 times that. Even those commitments are slow in delivery and distribution. Nations, including the U.S., have been careful to build vaccine, testing, and PPE stockpiles before sharing with other countries.
The result has been major outbreaks in the developing world, where estimates are that the poorest countries may not receive the vaccine until 2023. Only a tiny percentage of people in those countries have received even one dose of vaccine. While vaccinating half the world’s population is not an accomplishment to be minimized, the reality is that 40 countries have vaccinated less than a quarter of their populations. Other issues like export bans, production levels, intellectual-property barriers, and supply-chain blockages are solvable, but are often gummed up by industries or politicians acting just like those in Don’t Look Up do: based on self-interest, ignorance, or a toxic combination of both.
The result of course, has been the emergence of new variants in the undervaccinated parts of the world that ultimately affect the whole planet and prolong the pandemic. For Americans, the short-sightedness of government leaders is familiar. While the Biden Administration has done a remarkable job in getting Americans vaccinated, they have faced resistance at every step of the way from red-state governors who seem willing to sacrifice their own people in order to pander to the leaders of their party and the most extreme elements of their base. The vaccine and the know-how to contain the disease are available everywhere. But people living in counties that voted for Donald Trump are almost three times as likely to die of COVID-19 as those in areas that voted for President Biden.
There you have it in microcosm. If the U.S. can’t get its act together to combat a disease that has infected more than 50 million Americans and has killed about 825,000, how can we expect the planet earth to do any better? You would think survival mattered enough to look past our differences. Apparently not.
Higher life forms elsewhere in the universe will no doubt look at this and see it as an invitation, Reagan and Gorbachev had it wrong. We’re not a planet that is likely to come together to put up much of a fight against alien invaders.
Last summer’s drought shrivelled crops in Western Canada. Vast swaths of prairie — typically bright with golden stalks of wheat and yellow canola flowers in bloom — faded to brown. The worst in 60 years , it shrunk national wheat production by 38.5 per cent ; canola by 35.4 per cent.
Almost all of the agricultural land on the Prairies (99 per cent) was still abnormally dry or in moderate to exceptional drought as of Nov. 30, according to the Canadian Drought Monitor . And Canada isn’t alone in experiencing a prolonged 2021 dry spell. Brazil faced the worst drought in nearly a century, causing coffee crops to fail and power costs to soar. Antarctica was the only continent unaffected by an otherwise worldwide drought .
“We really are witnessing the water crisis play out in real time,” says Kirsten James, director of water at sustainability nonprofit Ceres . “When you dive into where the impacts are, and the biggest users of water resources and some of the biggest polluters of water resources as well, you really start to hone in on the food industry, and specifically, their agricultural supply chain.”
Drought is poised to become “ the next pandemic ” if countries don’t take urgent water management action, according to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction . Though people have been living with it for millennia, “human activities are exacerbating drought and increasing the impact,” Mami Mizutori, the UN secretary general’s special representative for disaster risk reduction, told The Guardian .
The food industry uses more than 70 per cent of the world’s water, which is being increasingly depleted and polluted, Ceres highlights in its new report, Feeding Ourselves Thirsty .
Food companies are in a unique position, James highlights: They rely on water to run their businesses but also contribute to the stress and pollution of this vital resource. “It sort of comes at it from both sides of the coin: They need to be part of the solution to survive as a business but also to ensure that we have freshwater resources in perpetuity.”
If food companies want to succeed in this environment, it's time for them to build a new paradigm around the value of water and really act on it.
According to Feeding Ourselves Thirsty , food companies are not acting quickly enough to mitigate water risks. The report analyzed the water management of 38 food companies and, with an average score of 45 out of a possible 100 points, found that the industry is largely unprepared for a water-scarce future.
Scientists have forecasted more frequent, severe and longer-lasting droughts , which will only complicate the food industry’s “precarious relationship to water,” says James. “The latest science and research is really showing us that the time for urgent action is now and the private sector needs to play a key role.”
Ceres evaluated companies in four industries considered especially vulnerable to water risks: agricultural products, beverages, meat and packaged foods. Packaged foods (54) and beverages (53) had the highest average scores with the top 10 performers falling into these categories.
The Coca-Cola Company (90), Anheuser-Busch InBev (83) and Unilever (83) scored the highest overall. Though it’s worth noting that Coca-Cola was recently named the top plastic polluter for the fourth straight year and Unilever rounded out the three biggest polluters in Break Free From Plastic’s 2021 brand audit report , highlighting how food companies may perform well in water management but not in other areas of sustainability.
“These issues can’t be thought of in silos and plastic pollution is obviously a critical water pollution issue,” says James. “So, we definitely encourage companies to think holistically about these issues.”
Cattle
As in previous editions of Feeding Ourselves Thirsty, which Ceres has released every other year since 2015, the meat sector lagged behind with an average score of 18 points. Photo by Robyn Beck /AFP via Getty Images
As in previous editions of Feeding Ourselves Thirsty , which Ceres has released every other year since 2015, the meat sector lagged behind with an average score of 18 points. James attributes this trend to a lack of focus on water management in agricultural supply chains.
“What a lot of folks don’t realize is that it’s actually the feed for animal agriculture that leads to a lot of the water impacts,” she says. “It’s really important for (meat companies) to look at their direct operations and manage pollution there, and obviously, water use. But also, it’s really critical that these meat companies are looking at that agricultural supply chain because the feed is a really big piece of that pie.”
Though the report found that food companies are largely unprepared for future freshwater shortages, there have been improvements, James highlights.
Since 2017, the number of companies explicitly considering sustainability increased by 44 per cent for a total of 79 per cent. In 2019, 33 per cent of companies tied executive compensation to water performance goals; that number has since risen to 53 per cent, a 60 per cent increase.
“We are seeing signs of progress and the trends are heading in the right direction. But we aren’t getting there fast enough to match the scale of the water crisis,” says James. “If food companies want to succeed in this environment, it’s time for them to build a new paradigm around the value of water and really act on it.”
The report found a number of critical areas where improvements are needed, such as performing robust water risk assessments (including water quality) — “the very first step of starting to manage water risk” — which less than half (18) of the companies had done. Only nine of the 38 implemented water use reduction targets and 12 provided support for farmers growing ingredients in high-stress water basins .
James sees supporting producers in at-risk watersheds as “a key best practice” too few companies are focusing on: “It’s really critical to their really honing in on where their money matters most and where their support matters most.”
Though the report shows great room for improvement, Beth Hooker, director of water and agriculture resilience at Ceres, finds the amount of educational and financial support encouraging.
“Eighty-seven per cent of companies are providing educational support to farmers and that’s up from 70 per cent in 2019,” says Hooker. “To me, that’s very exciting. In terms of thinking about how we affect change, these are large companies that have a really large environmental footprint.”
The latest edition of Feeding Ourselves Thirsty had a greater focus on the ways food companies are supporting farmers, Hooker highlights.
As examples of companies making progress, she notes Danone (ranked seventh in the report with a score of 77), which provided funding to almond growers in California for regenerative agriculture practices as part of the Ceres/WWF AgWater Challenge , and Nestlé (ranked fourth with a score of 80), which has committed to sourcing 50 per cent of its key ingredients through regenerative agricultural methods by 2030 and identified 14 raw materials that could pose high environmental and/or social risk.
“It’s important for consumers to understand which companies are really making an effort and put their dollars behind that, if that’s a strong ethic for them,” says James. “We’ve seen that companies respond to what consumers are asking for and what employees of the companies are asking for, and what their values are. So, we think consumers are really a key stakeholder in encouraging companies to continue on this journey.”
Most of us are familiar with the story of the passenger pigeon, so numerous in the late 1700s that flocks of billions of birds darkened the sky for hours as they passed. Humans exterminated them in a little over 100 years, the last wild passenger pigeon being shot in 1901. In contrast, few have ever heard of the Rocky Mountain locust, but its story is similar. Once very common, swarms would occasionally erupt from their core range in the eastern Rocky Mountains, spreading eastward across the Great Plains. In 1875, a particularly large swarm of this grasshopper was estimated to contain perhaps 12.5 trillion individuals, possibly the most common organism ever witnessed by man. Within just 28 years it was extinct, the last one being recorded in 1902. The cause of this most dramatic of extinctions is unclear, but it seems that the core breeding ground of this species was river valleys in Montana and Wyoming, where the locust laid its eggs in sandy soils. These areas were fertile and easily cultivated, so were among the first settled and ploughed by farmers, destroying the eggs of the insect.
The contrast between public awareness of the fate of the passenger pigeon and that of the Rocky Mountain locust reflects a more general bias. We tend to identify with and care about large creatures (mammals and birds in particular), while paying little or no attention to the much smaller creatures, the insects and their kin. Children are often fascinated by insects, but sadly they usually grow out of this, and the first reaction of many teenagers or adults to anything that buzzes or scuttles near them is likely to be an attempt to swat it or stamp on it. Even the common names we give insects, such as “bugs” and “creepy-crawlies,” reflect this negative attitude.
I fell in love with insects when I was just 5 or 6 years old. I never grew out of my childhood obsession, and I have been lucky enough to make a career out of studying their often weird and wonderful lives. My mission is to persuade others to care for and respect them, for we all need insects, whether we know it or not. The 1.1 million known species of insect comprise more than two-thirds of all known species on our planet. Insects pollinate roughly three-quarters of the crops we grow, including most of our fruit and vegetables, such that many of us would starve without them. They also pollinate the large majority of wildflowers; recycle dung, leaves and corpses; help to keep the soil healthy; control pests; and much more. They are food for numerous larger animals such as most birds, freshwater fish, frogs and lizards. Ecosystems would grind to a halt without insects.
It should thus be of concern to all of us that insects are in decline. Every year there are slightly fewer butterflies, fewer bumblebees — fewer of almost all the myriad little beasts that make the world go round. Estimates vary and are imprecise, and many insects, particularly those in the tropics, are simply not being systematically counted by anyone, but the data we do have overwhelmingly suggest a pattern of decline. For example, in Germany, the biomass of flying insects fell by 76 percent in the 27 years to 2016. In the U.S., monarch butterfly numbers have fallen by 80 percent in 25 years. In the U.K., butterflies have halved in abundance since 1976, when I was 11 years old. These changes have happened in our lifetimes, on our watch, and they continue to accelerate.
My youngest son is now 11; he is growing up in a world where butterflies are half as common as they were when I was his age. How many butterflies will his children ever see?
The famous American biologist Paul Ehrlich likened loss of species from an ecological community to randomly popping out rivets from the wing of a plane. Remove one or two and the plane will probably be fine. Remove 10, or 20 or 50, and at some point, that we are entirely unable to predict, there will be a catastrophic failure, and the plane will fall from the sky. In his analogy, insects are the rivets that hold ecosystems together.
What is driving the decline of insects? There are many factors, but clearly the industrialization of farming, particularly the move toward large-scale monoculture cropping dependent on a blizzard of pesticides is playing a major role. In 1962, three years before I was born, Rachel Carson warned us in her book Silent Spring that we were doing terrible damage to our planet. She would weep to see how much worse it has become. The problems with pesticides and fertilizers Carson highlighted have become far more acute. Some of these new pesticides, such as neonicotinoids, are thousands of times more toxic to insects than any that existed in Carson’s day. The U.S. in particular has an especially gung-ho attitude to pesticides, with U.S. farmers accounting for nearly 20 percent of all global use. About one-quarter of the pesticides used in the U.S. are now banned in the European Union due to concerns over risks to human or environmental health. The U.S. allows several pesticides now banned in China and Brazil, neither of which is famed for its sensitive approach to environmental protection.
The Rocky Mountain locust may be extinct, but other grasshoppers are still common in the same area, and occasionally there are outbreaks that spill out into surrounding states. The grasshoppers eat grass, competing with livestock and hence impacting ranchers. One such outbreak occurred in the summer of 2021, prompting the federal government to fund aerial spraying of about 1 million acres of rangeland in Montana and neighboring states with an insecticide, diflubenzuron. Those responsible for this decision argue that the chemical does little harm to other insects, but this is clearly nonsense, since elsewhere the same chemical is applied commercially to kill various butterflies, moths, beetles, flies and termites, and it is highly toxic to bumblebees. The chemical is even toxic to many plants. So what is the collateral damage from this carpet-bombing of the landscape? There are tens of thousands of native insect species in Montana; this spraying will kill untold trillions of individual insects (including monarch butterfly caterpillars). This in turn will impact the functions that these insects perform; fewer pollinators for crops and wildflowers, fewer insects for birds to eat. Grasshoppers and other insects are an essential protein source for chicks of many birds such as the endangered greater sage grouse. In turn, the birds help to keep the grasshoppers in check. If the birds decline further, along with other natural enemies of the grasshoppers, future outbreaks will be worse, and more insecticide will be sprayed. It is a self-defeating war on nature that can never be won. I find myself wondering if the crop duster pilots play “Ride of the Valkyries” on their cockpit radio, while muttering “I love the smell of insecticide in the morning.”
Pesticides are not the only problem insects face in the modern world. Ongoing habitat loss — particularly of tropical forests — and the spread of invasive species and non-native insect diseases are all taking their toll. Light pollution attracts countless night-flying insects to bash themselves to death on artificial lights, and disrupts the ability of insects to judge day length and emerge from hibernation at the correct time of year. Many soils have been degraded, rivers choked with silt and polluted with chemicals or simply so much water extracted that they run dry. Climate change, a phenomenon unrecognized in Rachel Carson’s time, is now threatening to further ravage our planet. The recent failure of COP26 to achieve any meaningful international progress on tackling climate change means that in the future, insects will have to cope with more frequent droughts, wildfires, floods and storms. It is death by a thousand cuts.
Our planet has coped remarkably well so far with the blizzard of changes we have wrought, but we would be foolish to assume that it will continue to do so. A relatively small proportion of species have actually gone extinct so far, but almost all wild species now exist in numbers that are a fraction of their former abundance, subsisting in degraded and fragmented habitats and subjected to a multitude of ever-changing man-made problems. We do not understand anywhere near enough to be able to predict how much resilience is left in our depleted ecosystems, or how close we are to tipping points beyond which collapse becomes inevitable. In Paul Ehrlich’s “rivets on a plane” analogy, we may be close to the point where the wing falls off.
Abstract
Growth in fundamental drivers—energy use, economic productivity and population—can provide quantitative indications of the proposed boundary between the Holocene Epoch and the Anthropocene. Human energy expenditure in the Anthropocene, ~22 zetajoules (ZJ), exceeds that across the prior 11,700 years of the Holocene (~14.6 ZJ), largely through combustion of fossil fuels. The global warming effect during the Anthropocene is more than an order of magnitude greater still. Global human population, their productivity and energy consumption, and most changes impacting the global environment, are highly correlated. This extraordinary outburst of consumption and productivity demonstrates how the Earth System has departed from its Holocene state since ~1950 CE, forcing abrupt physical, chemical and biological changes to the Earth’s stratigraphic record that can be used to justify the proposal for naming a new epoch—the Anthropocene.
Since the 1960s, the extent of open ocean with low oxygen has increased by roughly the area of the European Union. More than 500 low-oxygen sites have been identified in coastal waters. These “dead zones” can cause mass killings of fish and are contributing to climate change. But the problem starts on land, with chemical pollution. This film looks at how this pollution can be tackled, so the ocean can get its breath back.
When a health-care system crumbles, this is what it looks like. Much of what’s wrong happens invisibly. At first, there’s just a lot of waiting. Emergency rooms get so full that “you’ll wait hours and hours, and you may not be able to get surgery when you need it,” Megan Ranney, an emergency physician in Rhode Island, told me. When patients are seen, they might not get the tests they need, because technicians or necessary chemicals are in short supply. Then delay becomes absence. The little acts of compassion that make hospital stays tolerable disappear. Next go the acts of necessity that make stays survivable. Nurses might be so swamped that they can’t check whether a patient has their pain medications or if a ventilator is working correctly. People who would’ve been fine will get sicker. Eventually, people who would have lived will die. This is not conjecture; it is happening now, across the United States. “It’s not a dramatic Armageddon; it happens inch by inch,” Anand Swaminathan, an emergency physician in New Jersey, told me.
In this surge, COVID-19 hospitalizations rose slowly at first, from about 40,000 nationally in early November to 65,000 on Christmas. But with the super-transmissible Delta variant joined by the even-more-transmissible Omicron, the hospitalization count has shot up to 110,000 in the two weeks since then. “The volume of people presenting to our emergency rooms is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before,” Kit Delgado, an emergency physician in Pennsylvania, told me. Health-care workers in 11 different states echoed what he said: Already, this surge is pushing their hospitals to the edge. And this is just the beginning. Hospitalizations always lag behind cases by about two weeks, so we’re only starting to see the effects of daily case counts that have tripled in the past 14 days (and are almost certainly underestimates). By the end of the month, according to the CDC’s forecasts, COVID will be sending at least 24,700 and up to 53,700 Americans to the hospital every single day.
This surge is, in many ways, distinct from the ones before. About 62 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, and are still mostly protected against the coronavirus’s worst effects. When people do become severely ill, health-care workers have a better sense of what to expect and what to do. Omicron itself seems to be less severe than previous variants, and many of the people now testing positive don’t require hospitalization. But such cases threaten to obscure this surge’s true cost.
Omicron is so contagious that it is still flooding hospitals with sick people. And America’s continued inability to control the coronavirus has deflated its health-care system, which can no longer offer the same number of patients the same level of care. Health-care workers have quit their jobs in droves; of those who have stayed, many now can’t work, because they have Omicron breakthrough infections. “In the last two years, I’ve never known as many colleagues who have COVID as I do now,” Amanda Bettencourt, the president-elect of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, told me. “The staffing crisis is the worst it has been through the pandemic.” This is why any comparisons between past and present hospitalization numbers are misleading: January 2021’s numbers would crush January 2022’s system because the workforce has been so diminished. Some institutions are now being overwhelmed by a fraction of their earlier patient loads. “I hope no one you know or love gets COVID or needs an emergency room right now, because there’s no room,” Janelle Thomas, an ICU nurse in Maryland, told me.
Here, then, is the most important difference about this surge: It comes on the back of all the prior ones. COVID’s burden is additive. It isn’t reflected just in the number of occupied hospital beds, but also in the faltering resolve and thinning ranks of the people who attend those beds. “This just feels like one wave too many,” Ranney said. The health-care system will continue to pay these costs long after COVID hospitalizations fall. Health-care workers will know, but most other people will be oblivious—until they need medical care and can’t get it.
The Patients
The patients now entering American hospitals are a little different from those who were hospitalized in prior surges. Studies from South Africa and the United Kingdom have confirmed what many had hoped: Omicron causes less severe disease than Delta, and it is less likely to send its hosts to the hospital. British trends support those conclusions: As the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch has reported, the number of hospitalized COVID patients has risen in step with new cases, but the number needing a ventilator has barely moved. And with vaccines blunting the severity of COVID even further, we should expect the average COVID patient in 2022 to be less sick than the average patient in 2021.
In the U.S., many health-care workers told me that they’re already seeing that effect: COVID patients are being discharged more easily. Fewer are critically ill, and even those who are seem to be doing better. “It’s anecdotal, but we’re getting patients who I don’t think would have survived the original virus or Delta, and now we’re getting them through,” Milad Pooran, a critical-care physician in Maryland, told me. But others said that their experiences haven’t changed, perhaps because they serve communities that are highly unvaccinated or because they’re still dealing with a lot of Delta cases. Milder illness “is not what we’re seeing,” said Howard Jarvis, an emergency physician in Missouri. “We’re still seeing a lot of people sick enough to be in the ICU.” Thomas told me that her hospital had just seven COVID patients a month ago, and is now up to 129, who are taking up almost half of its beds. Every day, about 10 patients are waiting in the ER already hooked up to a ventilator but unable to enter the ICU, which is full.
During this surge, record numbers of children are also being hospitalized with COVID. Sarah Combs, a pediatric emergency physician in Washington, D.C., told me that during the height of Delta’s first surge, her hospital cared for 23 children with COVID; on Tuesday, it had 53. “Many of the patients I’m operating on are COVID-positive, and some days all of them are,” Chethan Sathya, a pediatric surgeon in New York, told me. “That never happened at any point in the pandemic in the past.” Children fare much better against the coronavirus than adults, and even severely ill ones have a good chance of recovery. But the number of such patients is high, and Combs and Sathya both said they worry about long COVID and other long-term complications. “I have two daughters myself, and it’s very hard to take,” Sathya said.
These numbers reflect the wild spread of COVID right now. The youngest patients are not necessarily being hospitalized for the disease—Sathya said that most of the kids he sees come to the hospital for other problems—but many of them are: Combs told me that 94 percent of her patients are hospitalized for respiratory symptoms. Among adults, the picture is even clearer: Every nurse and doctor I asked said that the majority of their COVID patients were admitted because of COVID, not simply with COVID. Many have classic advanced symptoms, such as pneumonia and blood clots. Others, including some vaccinated people, are there because milder COVID symptoms exacerbated their chronic health conditions to a dangerous degree. “We have a lot of chronically ill people in the U.S., and it’s like all of those people are now coming into the hospital at the same time,” said Vineet Arora, a hospitalist in Illinois. “Some of it is for COVID, and some is with COVID, but it’s all COVID. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter.” (COVID patients also need to be isolated, which increases the burden on hospitals regardless of the severity of patients’ symptoms.)
Omicron’s main threat is its extreme contagiousness. It is infecting so many people that even if a smaller proportion need hospital care, the absolute numbers are still enough to saturate the system. It might be less of a threat to individual people, but it’s disastrous for the health-care system that those individuals will ultimately need.
Other countries have had easier experiences with Omicron. But with America’s population being older than South Africa’s, and less vaccinated or boosted than the U.K.’s or Denmark’s, “it’s a mistake to think that we’ll see the same degree of decoupling between cases and hospitalizations that they did,” James Lawler, an infectious-disease physician in Nebraska, told me. “I’d have thought we’d have learned that lesson with Delta,” which sent hospitalizations through the roof in the U.S. but not in the U.K. Now, as then, hospitalizations are already spiking, and they will likely continue to do so as Omicron moves from the younger people it first infected into older groups, and from heavily vaccinated coastal cities into poorly vaccinated rural, southern, and midwestern regions. “We have plenty of vulnerable people who will fill up hospital beds pretty quickly,” Lawler said. And just as demand for the health-care system is rising, supply is plummeting.
The Workers
The health-care workforce, which was short-staffed before the pandemic, has been decimated over the past two years. As I reported in November, waves of health-care workers have quit their jobs (or their entire profession) because of moral distress, exhaustion, poor treatment by their hospitals or patients, or some combination of those. These losses leave the remaining health-care workers with fewer trusted colleagues who speak in the same shorthand, less expertise to draw from, and more work. “Before, the sickest ICU patient would get two nurses, and now there’s four patients for every nurse,” Megan Brunson, an ICU nurse in Texas, told me. “It makes it impossible to do everything you need to do.”
Omicron has turned this bad situation into a dire one. Its ability to infect even vaccinated people means that “the numbers of staff who are sick are astronomical compared to previous surges,” Joseph Falise, a nurse manager in Miami, told me. Even though vaccinated health-care workers are mostly protected from severe symptoms, they still can’t work lest they pass the virus to more vulnerable patients. “There are evenings where we have whole sections of beds that are closed because we don’t have staff,” said Ranney, the Rhode Island emergency physician.
Every part of the health-care system has been affected, diminishing the quality of care for all patients. A lack of pharmacists and outpatient clinicians makes it harder for people to get tests, vaccines, and even medications; as a result, more patients are ending up in the hospital with chronic-disease flare-ups. There aren’t enough paramedics, making it more difficult for people to get to the hospital at all. Lab technicians are falling ill, which means that COVID-test results (and medical-test results in general) are taking longer to come back. Respiratory therapists are in short supply, making it harder to ventilate patients who need oxygen. Facilities that provide post-acute care are being hammered, which means that many groups of patients—those who need long-term care, dialysis, or care for addiction or mental-health problems—cannot be discharged from hospitals, because there’s nowhere to send them.
These conditions are deepening the already profound exhaustion that health-care workers are feeling. “We’re still speaking of surges, but for me it’s been a constant riptide, pulling us under,” Brunson said. “Our reserves aren’t there. We feel like we’re tapped out, and that person who is going to come in to help you isn’t going to, because they’re also tapped out … or they’ve tested positive.”
Public support is also faltering. “We once had parades and people hanging up signs; professional sports teams used to do Zooms with us and send us lunches,” Falise told me. “The pandemic hasn’t really become any different, but those things are gone.” Health-care workers now experience indifference at best or antagonism at worst. And more than ever, they are struggling with the jarring disconnect between their jobs and their communities. At work, they see the inescapable reality of the pandemic. Everywhere else—on TV and social media, during commutes and grocery runs—they see people living the fantasy that it is over. The rest of the country seems hell-bent on returning to normal, but their choices mean that health-care workers cannot.
As a result, “there’s an enormous loss of empathy among health-care workers,” Swaminathan said. “People have hit a tipping point,” and the number of colleagues who’ve talked about retiring or switching careers “has grown dramatically in the last couple of months.” Medicine runs on an unspoken social contract in which medical professionals expect themselves to sacrifice their own well-being for their patients. But the pandemic has exposed how fragile that contract is, said Arora, the Illinois hospitalist. “Society has decided to move on with their lives, and it’s hard to blame health-care workers for doing the same,” she said.
The System
In the coming weeks, these problems will show up acutely, as the health-care system scrambles to accommodate a wave of people sick with COVID. But the ensuing stress and strain will linger long after. The danger of COVID, to individual Americans, has gone far past the risk that any one infection might pose, because the coronavirus has now plunged the entire health-care system into a state of chronic decay.
In Maryland, Milad Pooran runs a center that helps small community hospitals find beds for critically ill patients. Normally, it gets a few calls a night, but “now we’re getting two an hour,” he told me. In Swaminathan’s emergency room, “we routinely have 60 to 70 people who are waiting for six to 12 hours to be seen,” he said. Other health-care workers noted that even when they can get people into beds, offering the usual standard of care is simply impossible. “Yes, sure, if you’re the patient who puts us at 130 percent capacity, you still technically get a bed, but the level of care that everyone gets is significantly diminished,” Lawler said. Some doctors are discharging patients who would have been admitted six months ago, because there’s nowhere to put them and they seem temporarily stable enough.
To be clear, these problems are not affecting just COVID patients, but all patients. When Swaminathan’s friends asked what they should be doing about Omicron, he advised them about boosters and masks, but also about wearing a seat belt and avoiding ladders. “You don’t want to be injured now,” he told me. “Any need to go to the emergency department is going to be a problem.” This is the bind that Americans, including vaccinated ones, now face. Even if they’re unconcerned about COVID or at low personal risk from it, they can still spread a variant that could ultimately affect them should they need medical care for anything.
These conditions are contributing to the moral distress that health-care workers feel. “This pandemic is making it almost impossible to provide our best care to patients, and that can become too much for some folks to bear,” Ranney said. A friend recently told her, after seeing a patient who had waited six hours with a life-threatening emergency, “How can I go back tomorrow knowing that there might be another patient in the waiting room who might be about to die and who I don’t know about?”
From outside the system, it can be hard to see these problems. “I don’t think people will realize what’s happening until we fall off that cliff—until you call 911 and no one comes, or you need that emergency surgery and we can’t do it,” Swaminathan said. The system hasn’t yet careened over: “When the trauma patients, the cardiac arrests, or the strokes come in, it’s a mad shuffle, but we still find a way to see them,” said Kit Delgado, the Pennsylvania emergency physician. “I don’t know how sustainable that’s going to be if cases keep rising everywhere.”
Measures that worked to relieve strain in earlier surges are now harder to pull off. Understaffed hospitals can hire travel nurses, but Omicron has spread so quickly that too many facilities “are pulling from the same labor pool—and if that pool is sick, where are the reinforcements?” Syra Madad, an infectious-disease epidemiologist in New York, told me. Hospitals often canceled nonemergency surgeries during past surges, but many of those patients are now even sicker, and their care can’t be deferred any longer. This makes it harder for COVID teams to pull in staff from other parts of a hospital, which are themselves heaving with patients. Brunson works in a cardiac ICU, not a COVID-focused one, but her team is still inundated with people who got COVID in a prior surge and “are now coming in with heart failure” because of their earlier infection, she said. “COVID isn’t done for them, even though they’re testing negative.” Hospitals aren’t facing just Omicron, but also the cumulative consequences of every previous variant in every previous surge.
Newer solutions are limited, too. Joe Biden has promised to bolster hard-hit hospitals with 1,000 more military personnel—a tiny number for the demand. New antiviral drugs such as Pfizer’s Paxlovid could significantly reduce the odds of hospitalization, but supplies are low; the pills must also be taken early on in the disease’s course, which depends on obtaining rapid diagnostic tests, which are also in short supply. For people who get the drugs, “they’ll be great, but at a population scale they’re not going to prevent the system from being overwhelmed,” Lawler said. So, almost unbelievably, the near-term fate of the health-care system once again hinges on flattening the curve—on slowing the spread of the most transmissible variant yet, in a matter of days rather than weeks.
Some experts are hopeful that Omicron will peak quickly, which would help alleviate the pressure on hospitals. But what then? Ranney fears that once hospitalizations start falling, policy makers and the public will assume that the health-care system is safe, and do nothing to address the staffing shortages, burnout, exploitative working conditions, and just-in-time supply chains that pushed said system to the brink. And even if the flood of COVID patients slows, health-care workers will still have to deal with the fallout—cases of long COVID, or people who sat on severe illnesses and didn’t go to hospital during the surge. They’ll do so with even less support than before, without the colleagues who are quitting their jobs right now, or who will do so once the need and the adrenaline subside. “Right now, there’s a sense of purpose, which lets you mask the trauma that everyone is experiencing,” Pooran said. “My fear is that when COVID is done with and everything does quiet down, that sense of purpose will go away and a lot of good people will leave.”
There’s a plausible future in which most of the U.S. enjoys a carefree spring, oblivious to the frayed state of the system they rely on to protect their health, and only realizing what has happened when they knock on its door and get no answer. This is the cost of two years spent prematurely pushing for a return to normal—the lack of a normal to return to.
In the near future, economic collapse, environmental disaster, and social upheaval are pretty much guaranteed. In fact, it has already started.
The catastrophes can’t be stopped as long as solutions focus on getting powerful people to fix problems. No matter what decisions are made, the issues will persist because solving a crisis doesn’t have anything to do with getting people to care.
The problem lies in the system which prevents us from making the necessary changes to fix the very threats to undo it.
First world modern civilization is based on some form of capitalism.
Sure, alternative economic and political systems exist around the globe, but those take a back seat to big brother’s bully capitalism. Even a relatively milder form of political philosophy such as democratic socialism is painted as a threat. Better alternatives are always demonized in toxic capitalism for the sake of protecting the system.
Even if you are a cheerleader for free markets, recognizing the problem only requires acknowledging the dynamic at work.
Capitalism exploits, expands, and requires endless growth to sustain itself. It encourages competition which rewards greed, promotes uncaring and cruel treatment of workers, and fosters imperialistic policies. It is not benevolent, kind, or conscientious towards those inside or outside the political system.
People aren’t the focus — profit is. Therefore, the solution to every problem lies in the ability of someone to make a buck no matter how deeply they care about the issue. This is the key and the major obstacle toward progress.
Challenges are not addressed because it is good for the public, or makes long-term sense. Fixes are sought if someone thinks they can get rich. A crisis is only addressed because it is preventing business from earning or the solution helps others to make more money. Roads and sidewalks aren’t built to serve a community, only developers. New traffic signals aren’t located to benefit drivers, but to make it easier to access big businesses, while pedestrians are expected to walk a quarter-mile to cross a street safely.
We accept this way of doing things because we live within this system and are forced to participate.
Let’s give credit where it is due. Capitalism is extremely efficient and highly successful under ideal circumstances. The path to success demands mirroring those same esurient qualities endemic to the system — whether you are a CEO, business owner, or politician. Dissent is not tolerated and will be swiftly punished by the loss of prestige and position. The climb to the top is often painstakingly slow and arduous, but the descent into poverty is a free fall. And one bad bet means risking your ability to live indoors and eat.
Capitalism is unforgiving. Its hostages in the business world survive from one quarter to the next. The system grows stronger as long as resources are abundant — whether it exploits oil, cheap labor, or capital.
But in a decline, competition for dwindling resources increases. Complex problems arise requiring personal selflessness, cooperation, and foresight. In that environment, capitalism will always fail. It simply won’t allow for a pivot to something better, to sacrifice for the greater good, or to prepare for the future. Instead, it doubles down on “lean and mean” until wealth inequality and resource depletion becomes so great that no further progress can be made and everything breaks down. It is akin to yeast in a bottle, gobbling up everything and replicating until the fuel is gone and everything dies.
That is where we are now. Everywhere you look, capitalism is breaking down and we are running headlong toward catastrophe.
Climate change is not driving this. Simply put, no one profits from reducing CO2. Yet. The environmental collapse is the result of a system which exploits resources until they are gone.
We know how to address all our most pressing problems but capitalism does not reward solving them unless it comes with a barrel of money.
COVID-19
As an example, China had greater success dealing with the pandemic than the West, despite having a much larger population. Taking precautions such as forcing everyone to stay home, closing businesses, and restricting air travel would have stopped the spread of COVID.
We had a solution, but our capitalist system was more important than millions getting sick and dying. Above all else, the economy must continue to grow, so precautions are more lax now than when COVID wasn’t as deadly. Despite knowing this policy will kill more workers, force more seniors to retire, and keep parents at home — thereby threatening the system further, this sacrifice is demanded for short-term monetary gain.
In 2020 alone, insurance companies contributed $125 million to federal political candidates on both sides of the aisle.
Even though universal healthcare would insure the future survival of the workforce which in turn keeps capitalism alive, it was not implemented because there is no way for insurance companies to profit from this move. Those organizations are the big donors of political campaigns.
Conversely, capitalism will not allow for short term economic suffering even if millions benefit or even survive. The problem is the system and the insatiable hunger for more which assures our demise.
Capitalism can’t solve the problems created by capitalism.
But capitalists always try to find a way as everything crumbles around them. The constant focus on profit and short-term returns does not reward solutions where no money can be made — even if it insures the continuation of the very system itself.
This is why politicians oppose policies which would address pressing public concerns, because they are part of the system.
An exercise in labor
Take the issue of the ongoing labor shortage problem.
Currently, there are 10 million job openings and 42 states that don’t have enough applicants to fill available roles. This is the result of decades of political policies that placed the needs of business above those of the worker.
It worked great until it didn’t.
Millions of workers are resigning jobs for a slightly better wage, leaving many employers in a lurch, some which are crucial to the operation of the country. The Great Resignation undermines the financial health of entire industries — especially transportation and shipping which is crucial to the supply chain.
Job hopping is becoming more common place as capitalism drives up prices for basic necessities, requiring a higher income to survive. Most people earning a comfortable lifestyle won’t leave a good job to earn $1 an hour more — but folks are now so desperate for an additional $40 a week that they are incentivized to quit. Many workers hate this practice, but the system which suppressed wages for decades forces them to earn more by moving to higher paying positions.
The mass exodus takes place even though employees realize their departure may very well cause the failure of the business. Although employers may go under, taking down even more jobs, workers will still jump ship. The system has thrust them into survival mode, focusing their energies on immediate gains while sacrificing long term stability.
This is the dynamic of the system. It forces participants to abandon their morals in the name of remaining competitive, to serve their most pressing needs while ignoring the consequences of those decisions.
The Great Resignation could have been avoided if wages hadn’t been allowed to stagnate. It has been more than a decade since Congress raised the minimum wage, allowing it to become a crisis and then still refusing to address the pay disparity.
Corporations could have invested in their workforce, but did not because of the available supply of labor was another resource to be exploited. They could extract more profit from their workers by paying less and thereby remain competitive. Politicians had opportunities to strengthen laws allowing for unions and reining in the worst practices, but there was no incentive to do so. Elections are decided by money, not votes. The system rewarded their obeisance with campaign donations.
Despite politicians recognizing that keeping wages low threatens the future of the labor market — and therefore the system — corporations used their wealth to influence public policy to further strengthen their stranglehold on labor.
During the pandemic, the problem became impossible to ignore. The solution of more than doubling the woefully inadequate federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour would have stabilized the situation — at least temporarily. More importantly, it would have eased the frenzy in the labor market and slowed the job hopping, possibly keeping many more seniors from retiring early, and allowing parents to afford daycare. But the proposal failed because in order to survive in the system, politicians need the backing of wealthy corporations and donors who still demand suppression of wages.
Thousands of businesses and entire industries are now failing because the system would not allow for the control of wages — even when this was in the best interest of the economy. This sort of model depends on a ready supply of cheap labor that is no longer a resource to exploit. Employers would have to look at other methods to extract profit. Because they have built their operation on this premise, they are unable to pivot to paying higher wages. Had employers been forced to adapt to small incremental increases over the past decade — or even three, the Great Resignation would not have occurred. Again, because people earning a comfortable lifestyle will not leave a job for $1 an hour more.
If Congress acted now to raise wages, any solution would drive under even more marginal businesses that follow this model — which is most of them. So the disruption in the labor market will only increase until the system collapses. Only the strongest industries will survive — for a while.
All workers, businesses, and politicians are forced to compete for survival. Even if they recognize that their actions will inevitably lead to the failure of the system, there is no alternative.
Do or die now and forget the future.
Climate change
Capitalism will never save the environment because there is no profit in it.
Climate change is a problem that only costs, has no immediate return, and requires extreme sacrifice. Potential solutions demand incredible hardship of a great many people without a promise of immediate success, averting only the most dire consequences in the distant future when most people will be dead. Activists aren’t fighting for the best future, but for the barest means of survival of the human species. Still, their efforts are rejected.
Even if millions of people are willing to consume less, the system demands their participation. They must continue to consume because the alternative is homelessness and starvation.
The problem is the same for politicians.
Those in power continue to obstruct progress on catastrophes in order to save themselves. Every participant will continue on this path of survival until the system collapses — even while everyone is aware that their actions are leading to their own demise.
The problem isn’t people. It is not a lack of will by our politicians. It’s not about individual selfishness. Participants in capitalism are merely acting in their own best interest because that is what the system demands.
We are experiencing the logical conclusion to a failing empire that no one can escape. And the only thing that will fix it is the complete and utter death of capitalism so that something better can be built in its place.
Collapse is inevitable, but also necessary. It is the only way we can replace the toxic system we have now.
A record spike in COVID-19 cases due to the Omicron variant is causing a nationwide worker "sickout," disrupting businesses ranging from grocery stores to airlines.
The past few weeks have been "hellacious," Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian said in a Thursday conference call with stock analysts and reporters. The executive said 8,000 of his employees have contracted COVID-19 in the last four weeks alone — about 10% of the carrier's workforce — a toll that contributed to more than 2,200 cancelled Delta flights since December 24.
Although a precise count of the number of employees who are out sick or quarantining is hard to come by, about 5 million Americans could be isolating due to COVID-19 at the peak of Omicron, according to Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics. That could reflect about 2% of the nation's workforce forced to stay home due to illness, he added.
Some employers report taking a harder hit. Stew Leonard Jr., chief executive of supermarket chain Stew Leonard's, said about 8% of his staff was out sick or quarantining last week. That affects what shoppers find on store shelves.
"That's the highest we've ever had," he told CBS MoneyWatch. "What we are doing is the same as every other business — you have to limit your product line."
Leonard added, "Like I talked with my bakery director, and she said, 'I make a great crumb cake, and I also make a great apple crumb cake, but when I'm short on people I'm not able to make the apple crumb cake.' You'll get crumb cake, just not the apple crumb cake."
COVID-19 cases are averaging almost 1 million a day nationally based on a seven-day moving average, the highest number since the pandemic began in early 2020, according to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. That may even be an undercount, given that many people with COVID-19 are taking at-home rapid tests and likely not reporting positive results to their local health authorities.
"We don't know the exact number where cases will peak, but it's looking like it'll already be into the millions to some extent," Hunter said. "That is big enough to have some noticeable impact on the broader economy."
The latest worker shortages are compounding earlier pandemic problems, including supply-chain disruptions and shortages of some services.
During a conference call this week, one CEO of a consumer packaged goods company said the business was cutting production lines by 20% to cope with high numbers of absent workers, according to Andrea Woods, a spokeswoman for the trade group Consumer Brands Association. Because the call was off the record, she said she wasn't able to share details about the company.
About 75% of consumer packaged goods companies in a recent survey said they had experienced an increase in absenteeism due to positive COVID-19 tests or exposure to someone with the virus, Woods added.
"We are still dealing with a massive driver shortage — 80,000 and counting — with one truck available for every 16 loads. Omicron only intensifies that problem," she said. "Absenteeism in warehouses is resulting in late shipments, and retailers don't have the employee base to restock shelves."
That's clear to shoppers across the nation, who are often encountering empty shelves — as well as higher prices due to the highest rate of inflation in nearly 40 years.
"Most people are going to get COVID"
But there are other impacts beyond shortages of bread and other grocery items. Most alarmingly, about 1 in 5 U.S. hospitals are experiencing critical staff shortages, according to Becker's Hospital Review, citing January 9 government data.
Transportation services in cities and regions across the nation have also been disrupted. In New York City, home to the nation's largest mass transit system, three subway lines were suspended earlier this month due to worker illnesses that caused a staffing shortage. School children in Greensboro, North Carolina, also have been directed to take public buses after Omicron caused school bus drivers to call in sick.
"Right now, we need to focus on continuity of operations for hospitals and other essential services as this variant sweeps through the population," Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said in a Senate hearing on Tuesday. "Most people are going to get COVID," she added.
The surge in employee absences because of the virus strain comes as many businesses are already struggling to find workers. Think of it as a runner recovering from a broken leg who starts jogging slowly again, then sprains their ankle.
"The labor market before Omicron started was incredibly tight — employers had to pull out all the stops to hire," noted Luke Pardue, an economist at payroll services company Gusto. "With employees being unable to work, that is adding to the tightness."
A mass sickout could dent the economic recovery, with consumers fearful of going out to stores, restaurants or bars due to the higher risk of illness. Workers in service-related jobs in some big cities are already seeing a reduction in hours that will impact their families, especially employees who don't get sick pay, according to Gusto.
For instance, the average weekly hours in January for workers in service-sector jobs in New York City is tracking at about 21 hours, down from about 27 hours a year earlier, Gusto found. Nationally, the share of total hours taken as sick leave or paid time off has risen from 0.4% to 5.2% during the past two weeks, according to Gusto's data.
"Uncertainty is spreading across the country," Pardue said.
Peak Omicron?
Some signs suggest the latest COVID-19 wave may be easing, including declining infection rates in Africa, where Omicron was first detected, and in London, where the variant quickly became the dominant strain. That could signal Omicron has already peaked in some parts of the U.S.
Leonard of Stew Leonard's said the percentage of workers out sick at his grocery chain has declined to 6% this week, from 8% last week. Still, he hesitates to predict what things might look like in a few weeks. Last year, after the vaccines were rolled out, he said he believed "it was going to be smooth sailing."
He added, "If you asked me for my prediction, I have been wrong so many times already."
In the meantime, Leonard said his company has changed its policy about unvaccinated workers who have to quarantine, who he said make up the bulk of his absent staff. Starting February 1, those workers won't receive sick pay.
"We said that's fair, because the unvaccinated people in the store end up creating more work for their coworkers," he said.
It's more of an endemic now. Most people are not being hospitalized.
