On Covid and climate we can achieve change - but we're running out of time (Robert Reich)

[discocrisco01]

On Saturday morning I met a friend for breakfast at a local diner. We weren’t sure whether to sit outside because of the surging Delta variant of Covid, or inside because stinging smoke from wildfires consuming northern and western California had spread into the Bay Area.

Our small dilemma is a microcosm of what many Americans are going through or will be soon. The combination of multiplying Covid variants and mounting environmental damage is making the air dangerous to breathe, inside or out.

What to do? Clean air is the quintessential public good. It’s supposed to be free, abundant and safe. Few Americans alive today have ever before worried about microscopic particles containing deadly infections or deadly bits of carbon.

And yet largely because we’ve taken it for granted, and therefore as a society didn’t pay enough attention to public health or to the disintegrating environment, the air we breathe is no longer safe. We now need to rely on masks, air filters and other devices to protect our lungs. And it’s far from clear how long this will go on or if and how it will ever end.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/22/covid-19-climate-crisis-wildfires-air-smoke-carbon-robert-reich

[marie999]

1. I think that Covid will be contained to a certain degree with annual boosters.

Forget climate change. The world as a whole will not do anything meaningful to even slow it down. Eventually, the human population will be low enough for the earth to heal itself enough for humans to survive.