Last week was a bad one for Andrew Cuomo. Maybe he knew in advance it was coming, and tried to finesse the damage through the resumption of indoor dining in New York City. I don’t know (although it was telling that SNL featured Governor Cuomo’s announcements about COVID-related re-openings, but made no mention – on “Weekend Update” – about his choice to hide the deaths of thousands of elders, many of which were caused by his own bad policies).
Anyway, the resumption of indoor dining is probably a bad idea, but maybe less bad than it seems, as the logic in this interesting Twitter thread suggests – key takeaway: “In summary, I think the most logical explanation for falling COVID cases is: strong ongoing behavioral limitations + heterogeneous mixing + rising population immunity.” It’s a quick but illuminating read.
With any luck, the governor’s malfeasance with respect to the spread of COVID-19 in long-term care facilities will undermine his iron grip on power in New York State, and perhaps ease our path to preventing him from gutting NYC’s landmark climate legislation from 2019. On the front, I encourage you to read this letter, and, if you live in New York, to call all of your elected officials, including the governor, to express your support for Local Law 97 and your opposition to Part R of the proposed executive budget. New York needs a Green New Deal and real climate action in our city and state are long overdue.
In other climate related news, Bank of America has declared “Climate Is Next Race for Global Supremacy” and “this decade’s most important theme”; the Delhi police arrested a 21-year-old climate activist for sharing materials circulated on Twitter by Greta Thunberg; air quality in NYC’s subway system is bad (this has been an open secret for some time); fossil fuel companies have tricked many of us into loving gas stoves (which is one reason why our indoor air quality at home is so often bad as well); shocker, a decade on, fracking has not benefited fracking communities; and climate finance and climate risk are suddenly all the rage. Go figure.
As the above evidences, my thoughts are a bit scattered this evening; I’m adjusting to the reality in which climate crisis is being taken seriously at nearly every level of US society, but fundamentally, I remain optimistic that the pandemic is winding down in the US while climate action is ramping up, and will, indeed, be a defining “theme” of the decade ahead.
Climate / Change 