Pressure Grows for Biden To Create Civilian Climate Corps

One of the biggest failures of capitalism, particularly the neoliberal version, is the simple fact that there is a lot of work that needs to be done in any society, but that doesn’t generate any profit by itself. Housework is the example with which everyone is at least somewhat familiar. It’s work that absolutely needs doing in every home, but with the exception of paid housekeepers, nobody expects to be compensated for it. Outside of the home, the world is filled with such work, some of which is done, and some of which is not. Infrastructure and its maintenance, pollution cleanup, and ecosystem management also don’t have much to offer in terms of built-in profit making.

People do make a profit off of these things, but it’s generally through government contracts, grants, and donations. Our system is so dedicated to the notion that private, for-profit corporations are the best way to do everything, that we take public resources, and give them to private corporations, so that they can do the work, cut as many corners as possible, and make a profit. The highway system, the power grid, sewage and water systems – all put together with public resources, because there wasn’t a direct profit to be made in setting that stuff up. Likewise the billions that private corporations have made from NASA’s innovations, and from publicly funded medical research.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t get the funding it needs, and the environment is probably at the top of that list. That said, this is something that can be changed, at least in theory. All those public projects have been undertaken within this system, and while I think they were made worse by the fixation on putting everything into the hands of capitalists whenever possible, they still make everyone’s lives better. Public investment is a thing that can be done in the United States, and there’s now an effort to create a “civilian climate corps” to deal with the ever-increasing amount of work that has to be done in response to global warming:

Dozens of Democratic U.S. lawmakers joined more than 50 civil society groups who on Monday implored President Joe Biden to sign an executive order establishing a Civilian Climate Corps that would “put young Americans to work serving their communities” and tackling the planetary emergency.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.)—who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate, and Nuclear Safety—and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) led at least 50 House and Senate Democrats plus independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in a letter urging Biden to act in the face of the worsening climate crisis. They noted that the president’s January 2021 executive order on tackling the emergency mandated a strategy for creating a Civilian Climate Corps within 90 days.

“With deadly heat, dangerous floods, rising seas, and devastating wildfires—including those that ravaged Maui last month—the climate crisis demands a whole-of-government response at an unprecedented scale,” the lawmakers wrote. “Following up on your earlier commitments, existing legislation, and the demands from young people across the nation, we urge you to issue an executive order formally establishing a Civilian Climate Corps initiative to work on key conservation and climate priorities.”

“By leveraging the historic climate funding secured during your administration, using existing authorities, and coordinating across AmeriCorps and other relevant federal agencies, your administration can create a federal Civilian Climate Corps that unites its members in an effort to fight climate change, build community resilience, support environmental justice, and develop career pathways to good-paying union jobs focused on climate resilience and a clean economy,” the letter adds.

Inspired by the best aspects of the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps—which despite the nostalgia it often evokes among progressives, was for men only, racially segregated, and paid just $1 a day—the Civilian Climate Corps has long enjoyed the support of many congressional Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who wanted it included in previous legislation.

Climate, environmental, and social justice groups also support the proposal. On Monday, more than 50 of them sent their own letter to the White House urging Biden to “be as ambitious as possible in tackling the great crisis of our time,” in part by establishing a Civilian Climate Corps “through existing authorities, with existing climate funding, that can coordinate across relevant federal agencies.”

I keep saying that we’re in the age of endless recovery now. Disasters fueled by global warming are getting so big and so frequent that we can’t keep up. Recovery takes years, people get abandoned, and all of that reduces the resources available to actually tackle climate change directly. It’s a destructive spiral, but it doesn’t have to be as bad as it is, and we might even be able to pull out of it, if we actually make it a priority.

A civilian climate corps would be helpful in two big ways. First, it would be a jobs program, which would reduce poverty (a good thing in itself), and strengthen workers’ bargaining power. The second is that if used right, it could dramatically increase our ability to recover from disasters, and to directly address the causes of global warming. I’m sure a lot of the money from this would end up flowing through corporations, which is inefficient in some ways, but it’s also probably the most direct way to convert taxpayer money into new renewable and nuclear power. Beyond that, the corps could be put to work on sea walls, or even on things like getting people out of places, like Miami, that cannot practically be protected for sea level rise.

Obviously, this kind of ambitious project will have both ideological and self-interested opposition, from the right wing and from corporate interests that benefit from the status quo, and that don’t want people to see public spending as a real option. I think there are also a number of Democrats, even discounting Manchin and Sinema, who wouldn’t support this. Even so, the Democrats are currently our best bet for making progress here, because with Republicans in charge, there’s zero chance of this going anywhere. To me, that reads like the odds are still against the civilian climate corps going anywhere, but this is one of those situations where an organized working class could put pressure on the people in power.

Looking at responses to the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes and the UAW strike, I think that while we’re not at a point where we can get an actual general strike for climate action, we’re closer to that than we have been at any point in my lifetime. There’s much more support for unions and strikes than I’ve ever seen, and support for climate action keeps rising. A climate corps also has room for the patriotism that infects so much of American society, and I think it’s an easier, clearer goal for non-activists to latch onto, than “end fossil fuel use”. The notion of giving back society isn’t a new one, and it’s well past time that the US stopped treated the armed forces as the only way to “serve your country”.

We’ll see where this goes, but I like the idea, and I hope I hear more about it going forward.

Video: Roblox and Digital Child Labor

One of the projects I was on, when I worked at TERC, was called Building Systems from Scratch. From my perspective, it was an experiment in teaching climate science indirectly.  Kids in the participating schools built simple games using MIT’s Scratch program, all relating to climate change and climate action. Part of the idea was to use something fun and rewarding – learning how to build a simple game – to make it easier to learn about climate science. It turns out that Roblox Corporation looked at the way children like playing and building video games, and saw an opportunity to profit off of child labor. .

I honestly know next to nothing about Roblox. Hbomberguy taught me the history of the “oof” noise in it, and that it was yet another exploitative capitalist corporation, but I didn’t realize just how bad it really was.

The video game industry has come under the spotlight for bad working conditions a number of times in recent years. Companies over-rely on contractors and forced overtime, repeatedly pushing their workers to the breaking point, and justifying all of it because people who go into the industry tend to like developing video games. The work is rewarding, and therefor it’s OK to underpay and over-work people. I think it’s reasonable to pay more for unpleasant work, but that’s never a justification to underpay for the pleasant stuff. Work is work, and people have a right to the products of their labor.

I’ve believed for a while now that capitalists view happiness in workers as a version of the notion of “time theft”. If a worker isn’t grinding every second that they’re being paid for, that means that they’re “stealing” from the company. Likewise, if workers are feeling happy and fulfilled, that’s proof that they could be more exploited. They could be generating more profit for the company, and they’re not, which is just like stealing from the company!

This reasoning seems to be why Roblox has felt justified in  their use of child labor and scrip to become a multi-billion dollar corporation. More Perfect Union has more:

This honestly reminds me a lot of the college football scam, where corporations and colleges make millions off of “student athletes” without paying them, all because it’s supposedly just a fun school activity, and if they’re very lucky, they’ll have a chance to go pro and make some actual money before their bodies give out. Roblox isn’t as brutal as football, but the dynamic seems much the same. The workers aren’t taken seriously, and so their labor doesn’t “count”, even as it’s making a small number of evil adults obscenely wealthy. It’s fucked up to have to say it, but the video is right: Children need labor protections.

Biden Did Another Good Thing

I don’t like saying nice things about Joe Biden. I don’t particularly like the man, and his politics are counter to mine in many important ways. When it comes to a politician, that goes beyond a difference of opinion, his opinion comes with political power. That said, I do like having pessimistic expectations undermined, and while Biden has been far from perfect, he’s done a few things that are unequivocally good, and better than I would have expected from him. His NLRB is one, as I mentioned recently, and now he has revoked a number of oil drilling licenses and protected a large portion of Alaska (equivalent to 1.33 Belgiums) from oil drilling, with a larger area that’s partially protected. Apparently, this is being done in a way that it will be hard to undo, next time the GOP takes power. I wouldn’t say this makes up for things like the Willow Project, but this is a good thing, without question. Beau gives a good summary, and a prediction of outrage and lawsuits from Republicans:

Air Pollution Shows That Segregation Never Fully Ended

 I often run into people (on the internet) who insist that systemic racism, in which the physical, social, and legal infrastructure of the United States disadvantages non-white people in general, and Black people in particular, is no longer a problem. It’s the same disingenuous line of thinking behind the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision that Congress didn’t really mean it when they renewed the Voting Rights Act, and it relies on the pretense that when explicit racial segregation in the letter of the law ended in 1964, that ended racial segregation in every way that mattered. The problem is that under Segregation, the school systems, laws and legal conventions, and the infrastructure itself were all designed to promote and maintain white supremacy.

In case it is unclear to anyone, that doesn’t just mean that white people tend to get better results from the system, it also means that Black people are actively pushed down. The police play an major role in that, from brutalizing and terrorizing communities, to forcing people into the prison system, to literally stealing peoples’ money. The school systems are still mostly segregated as well, and combine with the cops to form the infamous “school-to-prison pipeline. And as for where Black people live, the ground, air, and water in Black neighborhoods that were set up under Segregation is far more likely to be poisoning them, every day of their lives. The go-to example for this is probably the fact that race is a major factor in determining your lead exposure, but air pollution is probably next on the list.

I talk about air pollution a lot, because it’s a way in which we all pay a terrible price for the world being run the way that it is. It screws with us in all sorts of nasty ways, which is why there have been successful efforts to reduce it. Unfortunately, there’s a pattern in the success of those efforts. If you’ve been paying attention to the theme of this post, you’ll see this coming – Black communities don’t seem to be seeing the same benefits:

Fine particulate matter, also known as PM2.5, consists of particles or droplets smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, or 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair. While some PM2.5 in the environment comes from natural sources, such as wildfires, the majority of particulate matter pollution in the U.S. is the result of human activities, including emissions from vehicles, power plants, and factories.

The small size makes PM2.5 harmful for human health, said Kai Chen, assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health and senior author of the study.

“When you inhale such small particles, they can get into your lungs and some smaller particles can even get into the blood stream and circulate around the body,” said Chen. “That can impact your heart, which leads to a lot of the cardiovascular disease we see today.”

Environmental efforts including the 1963 Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) National Ambient Air Quality Standards for PM2.5, established in 1997, have helped bring down PM2.5 levels throughout the United States. This, in turn, has yielded benefits to human health. But it has remained unclear whether these health benefits are distributed equitably across racial and ethnic groups.

“We know that some minorities, especially Black and Hispanic people, are exposed to higher levels of PM2.5 than white people,” said Chen. “In our study, we wanted to go further and assess vulnerability to PM2.5 across different groups and see how that relates to mortality.”

The researchers took pollution and mortality data from over 3,000 US counties, and found that mortality linked to air pollution decreased in white, Hispanic, and Black populations, but the decrease was not evenly distributed.

However, the ratio of mortality rates between white and Hispanic people and between white and Black people hardly changed between 2001 and 2016. Mortality rates for Hispanic people were 1.37 times higher than white people in 2001, increasing to 1.45 times higher by 2016. Mortality rates for Black people were 4.59 times higher than white people in 2001 and 4.47 times higher in 2016.

“Air pollution reduced and that reduced exposure for everyone, which is very good news,” said Chen. “But Black people still experience a higher burden because they are more vulnerable and at higher risk of mortality.”

The findings, he says, underscore that the public health burden of air pollution differs across racial groups and that should help inform policy design going forward. The EPA, U.S. lawmakers, and local governments should consider not just the overall population as they develop policies to improve air quality, but also high-vulnerability groups in particular.

“Poor air quality imposes a substantial burden on Black Americans, with greater exposures and greater vulnerability,” said coauthor Harlan Krumholz, the Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine. “We have identified another way that the structure of our society contributes to cardiovascular health disparities. The study demonstrates that the excess mortality among Black people is not just derived from traditional risk factors, but likely also to the increased exposure to poor air quality based on where they live.”

That burden isn’t theoretical, either. It affects fetal development, brain function, cardiovascular health, respiratory health, and all of that means higher stress levels, a harder time coping with a white supremacist society, and higher medical bills. If you don’t get your money stolen by your boss, or by cops, you get it taken through poor health, simply because you were born Black. The higher mortality also imposes a financial burden, because dying is a big expense all by itself.

This is why reparations are needed. The systemic injustices “of the past” were literally built into the foundations of the United States as it exists in the present. Money was spent, and time and energy invested in creating an uneven playing field, and it will require at least as much investment to unmake those systemic injustices, let alone repair the damage that has been done to the Black community in America. The harm is ongoing, and it will not stop until we actually commit to making it stop.

Video Games, Bat Brains, and the Social Landscape

I find social dynamics, in humans and in other animals, to be very interesting. More than that, I find the way that humans study and think about social dynamics to also be interesting. I started writing this post because I mis-read the headline of a study (we’ll get to that later), and became invested in making my pre-emptive tangent about video games relevant.

The image shows three Skritt at the entrance to a cave, one in the foreground, one in the mid-ground, and one in the background. They are rat-like humanoids, wearing bits of armor, and carrying swords and staves.

The image shows three Skritt at the entrance to a cave, one in the foreground, one in the mid-ground, and one in the background. They are rat-like humanoids, wearing bits of armor, and carrying swords and staves.

One of my favorite fantasy “races” is a species called Skritt, from the game Guild Wars 2. They’re generally introduced to the player as a nuisance – small, rat-like humanoids who seem to have a compulsion to steal from others, but while they can speak, they’re… not very bright.

Until you get a few of them in a room together, at which point, their speech becomes clearer, and their thoughts more direct.

It turns out that the reason Skritt are everywhere, since the rise of the dragon Primordius drove them out of the depths, is that while they have individual identity, they also have a collective intelligence. They communicate with each other, constantly and almost subconsciously, using hyper-sonic squeaks, and if you get enough of them together, they all become genius-level smart. In many ways, a Skritt alone is no Skritt at all.

This feels like a fantasy application of the concept of a hive-mind, the fictional trope inspired by eusociality – the kind of super-organism arrangement most commonly associated with bees and ants. The concept largely focuses on an in-born caste system, with “queens” doing all the work of giving birth, non-reproductive workers, and a few males who exist to fertilize the queens and not much more. These organisms also tend to build themselves homes – and colonies, termite mounds, bee hives, and so on.

The prime example of a non-controversially eusocial mammal is the naked mole-rat, which lives and works collectively, and has one “queen” doing all the reproductive work. It actually has counterpart in Guild Wars, called the Dredge. They don’t have the “hive mind” setup that the Skritt do, but they are very explicitly designed after an American view of the USSR. Having been previously enslaved to the Dwarves, they are now mostly governed by a “dictatorship of the moletariat”, and they have cities like Molensk and Molengrad. They are a collective, but have a more human approach to things.

The image shows a Dredge NPC from Guild Wars 2. It's humanoid, with the head of a naked mole-rat. Its eyes are squinted shut, and it has protruding incisors , with its mouth closing behind them. It's wearing a brown jumpsuit, and pauldrons. It's holding a gun-like device that appears to have a tuning fork for a barrel.

The image shows a Dredge NPC from Guild Wars 2. It’s humanoid, with the head of a naked mole-rat. Its eyes are squinted shut, and it has protruding incisors , with its mouth closing behind them. It’s wearing a brown jumpsuit, and pauldrons. It’s holding a gun-like device that appears to have a tuning fork for a barrel.

I find this a little amusing, as well, because in developing their social rodent groups, they made the actually eusocial one less so, and more like humans.

Humans (and Dredge) seem to exist at the edge of the word’s definition, since we’re very clearly a social species that divides labor, works collectively, and so on, but we don’t really have the kind of reproductive arrangement that you find in bees and mole-rats. From that perspective, I suppose the Skritt would likewise not be eusocial, because their hierarchies and divisions are societal – formed through voluntary or coincidental association, not physiological. The hive-mind is just an additional aspect of what they are.

E.O. Wilson proposed the idea of human eusociality, based on our collectivity and our divisions of labor, but to me that seems like a rather superficial conflation, born of a lifetime obsession with ants. I have the utmost respect for Wilson and his work in ecology, biogeography, and science communication, but I have to disagree on this subject. I think there’s a way in which it makes intuitive sense – after all, termites and ants build cities just like we do – but the complexities of our social interactions – and those of most other social species – are different from the complexities of truly eusocial organisms.

Our social landscape is fascinating and complex, and I think there’s plenty of reason to see us as having a form of collective intelligence, but like the Skritt and the Dredge, we’re more akin to most other social mammals.

There’s one comparison that I think should be made more often. Wolves obviously come up, because of our long historical relationship with them, and apes because of our visual and evolutionary similarity. What I would like to see more of, especially in fantasy settings, is bats.

The image shows a group of around 10 Egyptian fruit bats roosting on a cave ceiling. They're all clustered together on the left half of the picture, looking down at the camera with their eyes

The image shows a group of around 10 Egyptian fruit bats roosting on a cave ceiling. They’re all clustered together on the left half of the picture, looking down at the camera with their eyes “glowing” from the flash. Their fur is a dark gray, and looks very soft. Their faces are a bit rat-like, and very cute.

We’ve known that most bats are social for a long time. All it takes is to see a few of them roosting in a barn, a tree, or a cave, and it’s clear that, while they don’t seem to build anything together, or to hunt as a group, they are nonetheless social creatures. The biggest bat colony in the world has an estimated 20 million individuals, putting it ahead of the entire New York City metro area in terms of population. I would posit that when you have that many individual creatures living together, social dynamics will evolve, and will be complex and varied. Based on what I understand about evolution, it would be impossible for things to go any other way. That being the case, what are bat societies like?

There’s plenty of information out there from observing bat behavior, but that gives us limited insight into how the bats themselves see the world. It may seem a bit silly (especially coupled with a discussion of fantasy games), but if we’re considering whether social animals have societies, then wouldn’t it be important to get the bats’ perspective in some way?

The problem is, how do you study this sort of thing? Bats are rather famous for their ability to fly, and interacting with animals (including humans) tends to change their behavior, making it difficult to study their “natural” activities. Not only that, but bats are on the long list of animals with whom we cannot verbally communicate. How could we possibly know how they see things?

Well, we depart from the realm of fantasy, and enter the realm of what was very recently science fiction. Modern technology has gotten to the point where scientists are able to read bats’ minds, to a limited degree, and it turns out that they don’t just maintain a geographical map of their roosting sites, they also maintain a social map:

In the new study, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, used wireless neural recording and imaging devices to “listen in” on the hippocampal brain activity of groups of Egyptian fruit bats as they flew freely within a large flight room — often moving among tightly clustered social groups — while tracking technology recorded the bats’ movements.

The researchers were surprised to find that, in this social setting, the bat’s place neurons encoded far more information than simply the animal’s location. As a bat flew toward a landing spot, the firing of place neurons also contained information about the presence or absence of another bat at that spot. And when another bat was present, the activity of these neurons indicated the identity of the bat they were flying toward.

“This is one of the first papers to show identity representation in a non-primate brain,” said study senior author Michael Yartsev, an associate professor of bioengineering and neuroscience at UC Berkeley. “And surprisingly, we found it in the hub of what was supposed to be the brain’s GPS. We found that it still acts as a GPS, but one that is also tuned to the social dynamic in the environment.”

This is the headline I mis-read, by the way. I thought, for a moment, that this was about learning about bat communication and neurons, rather than bat navigation. Back to the actual study, this makes sense, right? We form internal social maps of the world, associated places with people, with feelings, and with activities and experiences. It stands to reason that other creatures – especially other mammals – would do something similar, and that it would be detectable in the brain.

Due to the complexity of the experiment, Forli initially had doubts about whether allowing groups of bats to fly and interact freely would yield results about the neural basis of collective behavior. He was concerned that the movements of the bats and their social interactions might be too random to uncover robust relationships between their neural activity and their behavior.

So he was pleasantly surprised when the bats spontaneously established a handful of specific resting spots within the flight room and followed very similar trajectories when traveling among them. The bats also showed strong preferences for flying toward specific “friend” bats, often landing very close to or even on top of each other.

“We found that if you put together a small group of bats in a room, they would not actually behave randomly, but would show precise patterns of behavior,” Forli said. “They would spend time with specific individuals and show specific and stable places where they liked to go.”

These precise patterns of behavior allowed Forli to identify not only the neural activity associated with different flight trajectories, but also how the neural activity changed depending on the identity of the bat present at the target location and the movements of other bats.

“By recording just a handful of those neurons from this brain structure, we can really know what the bats were doing in their social space,” Yartsev said. “We could find out if they were going to an empty location or to a location where there were other individuals, which is really surprising.”

Later in the article, Yartzev points out that most research into animal neuronal activity has been done on immobile creatures, which may tell us which bits of their brains relate to certain stimuli, but clearly can’t tell us much about the animal’s experience of the world. This study faces similar problems – it’s still captive bats in an alien environment – but it clearly gives us a much better insight into insight into how bats see and think about the world.

The world is filled with fantasy races derived from some form of “what if this animal, but more human” thought process. While it would require magic to get rat-people like the Skritt, the more we learn about the real world, the clearer it becomes that we’re not actually that different from the animals around us. They also form relationships, and opinions about each other. They also choose where to go and what to do, based on who they think they’re likely to encounter. They’re not just like us, but…

They’re just like us – for real.

Beau of the Fifth Column on Hurricane Idalia, Evacuation, and Hurricane Tips

Hurricane Idalia is hammering the southeastern US right now, and Beau of the Fifth Column just put up a video that I think is worth checking out if you’re in the storm’s path. Disasters like this are partly because of the storm itself, but a lot of the harm to people comes more gradually in the days that follow, as the storm damage is compounded by other problems like floodwater contamination, carbon monoxide poisoning from generators run indoors, and people injuring themselves trying to clean up downed trees or navigate downed powerlines. This video has a good overview of hurricane prep and survival, for those who might need it, as well as a reminder that evacuation is often the correct response:

 

European Wildcat Project Looking for Supporters

Last April, I wrote about the ongoing effort to save the Scottish Wildcat. Today, I want to make you aware of an upcoming project to save the wildcats of mainland Europe. While there’s some debate over subspecies, these are the same species of wildcat as the ones in Scotland, and so they face pretty much the same threats – habitat destruction, interbreeding with feral cats, and disease from feral cats being the big ones. Even so, the degree to which these are problems varies across Europe, which is why it’s great that the European Wilderness Society is gearing up to do an awareness-raising campaign, starting in September of 2024, combined with an effort to collect information:

European Wilderness Society is currently working on a new LIFE project proposal – this time about the European wildcat. The main goal of LIFE Wildcat is to support and strengthen population development of the European wildcat across Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic. The status of the wildcat is already unfavourable; and one of the main threats to it are roadkills and human infrastructure that destroys the cat’s habitat.

Therefore, the project has the following objectives:

  • Analyse habitat and connectivity features on landscape level for improved settling and dispersal of European wildcat
  • Identify hotspots for anthropogenic mortality risks
  • Survey of the degree of hybridisation
  • Boost population development in sparsely occupied yet suitable habitats through reintroduction
  • Centralise European wildcat data from current and previous efforts for a better and more coherent conservation approach
  • Increase awareness on political and public levels for conservation efforts directed to European wildcat

To achieve these objectives, the project partners will:

  • Train key stakeholder groups on necessary conservation techniques
  • Protect key areas that provide suitable habitats for European wildcats
  • Develop a map of habitat connectivity across project focus countries
  • Identify roadkill hotspots and promote mitigation measures to reduce mortality risks
  • Contribute to the establishment of a self-sustaining wildcat population in Austria
  • Create a centralised data repository for EU-wide coordinated conservation activities

The project would start in September 2024 and last for 6 years.

They say they’re still looking people and organizations to sign statements of support, so if that sounds appealing or important to you, check them out at the link above!

The photo (uploaded to Wikimedia commons by Lviatour) is of a European Wildcat sitting on a rock and staring intently at the camera. Its got grey fir with hints of brown, and faint black stripes. Its tail has bolder black stripes, and a black tip. Its fur looks thick and soft, and its face is stripey. Its eyes are a pale blue-green.

The photo (uploaded to Wikimedia commons by Lviatour) is of a European Wildcat sitting on a rock and staring intently at the camera. Its got grey fir with hints of brown, and faint black stripes. Its tail has bolder black stripes, and a black tip. Its fur looks thick and soft, and its face is stripey. Its eyes are a pale blue-green.

Global Warming Cripples Panama Canal

When people in the United States talk about refugees from south of the border, they’re often framed as “economic refugees”. Much of the time, this is part of a broader effort to de-legitimize their claim to asylum, and it generally ignores why their home countries might be having economic troubles (the U.S. has often played an outsized role in devastating countries in South and Central America). It also ignores another problem primarily caused by outside forces – global warming.

See, the ways in which global warming is harming poor countries in the “global south” rarely actually make the news in the US, so far too few people are aware that one of the biggest things that Central American refugees are fleeing is drought. Just as parts of the US have now been in a state of semi-permanent drought for what feels like over a decade now, Central America has been far, far too dry, but instead of being part of the United States, these countries spent the last few decades being under attack by the United States. This is why, incidentally, the refugees are willing to try to cross a border where they know government agents are trying to kill them – the alternative is starvation, and the horrible choices made to avoid starvation. Advocates for climate action have been warning for ages that global warming would drive a refugee crisis, and it has been doing just that for years now.

That drought is also, now, having a consequence that I did not foresee, even though I should have.

The Panama Canal is running out of water:

Remember the chaos that ensued in 2021, when a cargo ship got stuck, blocking passage through the Suez Canal?

Now, a massive flotilla of ships is currently stuck in the world’s worst traffic jam at the Panama Canal — and the end of this new watery pile-up could be at least a few weeks away.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the famous human-dug canal has more than 200 ships waiting to pass through it as its transit continues to be stymied thanks to the worst drought it’s experienced in a century.

The 50-mile-long canal, as the report notes, relies on rainwater to replenish it. When it doesn’t rain enough, the authorities that control the canal have to reduce traffic through it to conserve water, and those that are allowed through have to pay higher fees to do so.

Daily traffic is currently capped at 32 ships, which is down from the prior average of about 36 when there’s enough water for the canal — which uses more than 50 million gallons of water per day — to operate at full capacity.

I really should have seen this coming, because one of my favorite nonfiction books is The Tapir’s Morning Bath, which follows the strange adventures of the scientists on Barro Colorado Island, which was formed when a big section of land was flooded, as part of building the Canal. Writing this, I think I want to see if I can find out what research has been coming off of that island, because I’m willing to bet they’ve got things to say about climate change ecology. I guess I had two points in bringing up this book. The first is that you should all read it, and the second is to emphasize that the Panama Canal is not like the Suez Canal. The Suez is saltwater all the way through, and with the exception of one saltwater lake, it’s a straight canal dug by people.

Panama has some of that, of course, but a huge chunk of the “canal” is a sprawling, man-made lake:

The image shows a map of the Panama Canal. Points of interest are labeled from the Atlantic entrance in the northwest corner of the image (#1) to the Pacific entrance in the southeast corner of the image (#16). The points between list locks, to raise and lower the ships, straight canals, and the turns needed to navigate Gatun Lake. Barro Colorado Island is in the middle, with four marked turns for the ships to navigate around it. From the image, it's clear that the lake, which covers between one third and one half of the width of Panama's isthmus at that point, is part of the local watershed, and a big part of the region's ecosystem.

The image shows a map of the Panama Canal. Points of interest are labeled from the Atlantic entrance in the northwest corner of the image (#1) to the Pacific entrance in the southeast corner of the image (#16). The points between list locks, to raise and lower the ships, straight canals, and the turns needed to navigate Gatun Lake. Barro Colorado Island is in the middle, with four marked turns for the ships to navigate around it. From the image, it’s clear that the lake, which covers between one third and one half of the width of Panama’s isthmus at that point, is part of the local watershed, and a big part of the region’s ecosystem.

As the drought worsened last month, canal administrator Ricaurte Vásquez Morales said during a press event that traffic restrictions may remain in place until the end of the year and added that it will cost the canal an estimated $200 million in lost revenue.

Beyond the regulatory and financial concerns associated with this massive backup, Vásquez Morales suggested that the drought also illustrates one of the biggest existential threats facing the canal as well.

“We have to find other solutions to remain a relevant route for international trade,” he said during the July press summit. “If we don’t adapt, we are going to die.”

Hey, that’s what I’ve been saying! We have all the technology, resources, and knowledge to deal with the climate crisis, but if we don’t use it – if we don’t adapt to what’s happening – we are going to die.