Ten Years

In an interview with Laura Paddison, Christiana Figueres, lead negotiator for the Paris climate agreement, says the next ten years will be critical for civilization.

It is in this decade that we will either reach a concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that is so dangerous that we will not be able to manage the negative consequences for years to come and the increasingly destructive forces of nature will wreak havoc upon, not just infrastructure and biodiversity, but also on the ability of humans to live on this planet.

Or, the other choice is that we wake up to the fact that during these 10 years we can decisively change the course of those greenhouse gases, we can bring them down to one half of what they are now, and along that journey, we can actually do a lot of good.

We can increase public health, we can increase the quality of urban life, we can increase the comfort and smartness of transportation. And actually, I also think that we can rise as a human species; we can rise to a higher level of consciousness and a higher level of understanding of who we are on this planet.

Save Lives and Save Money

Why does Senator Bernie Sanders have a great chance to be elected President? A study published in The Lancet finds that Medicare for All would be a hugely successful policy.

[W]e calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations. This shift to single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68,000 lives.

Update (January 9, 2021):  A paper published in Health Affairs finds that single-payer health insurance is even more feasible than we thought.

What the researchers find is that most estimates of the effect of universal coverage expansion on healthcare utilization are overblown, adding to a growing consensus that Medicare for All is less costly than previously thought due to lower administrative costs and usage rates that increase only slightly or not at all.

[T]he Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that implementing a single-payer health insurance program in the U.S. would reduce overall healthcare spending nationwide by about $650 billion per year.

Between the CBO's finding that Medicare for All's administrative cost savings have been underestimated and Gaffney et al.'s finding that the effects of universal coverage reforms on healthcare utilization and costs have been overestimated, it is becoming increasingly clear that in addition to saving lives, Medicare for All would be less expensive than previously acknowledged.

Update (June 19, 2022):  A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA finds that single-payer health insurance would have saved lives and money over the first two years of the pandemic.

[F]rom the pandemic’s beginning until mid-March 2022, universal health care could have saved more than 338,000 lives from COVID-19 alone. The U.S. also could have saved $105.6 billion in health care costs associated with hospitalizations from the disease—on top of the estimated $438 billion that could be saved in a nonpandemic year.

Dark Times

Now that Dear Leader has been newly freed of any constraints and with a vicious campaign cranking up, Lucian Truscott gets straight to the point.

There will come a time when we look back on this week as the moment in our history when we finally understood that we have a man as president who is acting like a fascist dictator.

Openly taking vengeance on his enemies means Fuckface is sliding further into dangerous territory.

To call for the imprisonment of political opponents without trial is not playing with rhetoric for effect. It's not political gimmickry. It's not cute. It's not funny. It's not clever. Let's say out loud what it is: It's pure fascism, plain and simple.

Update (February 17):  David Cay Johnston suggests that Speaker Pelosi anticipated von Clownstick's worsening behavior and that Democrats have the opportunity to make Republicans pay a price.

They are tied to [Dear Leader] and cannot easily get a political divorce, thanks to Pelosi’s strategy, without openly saying they made a terrible mistake in failing to convict and remove [him] from office.

Update (February 23):  Heather Digby Parton says Bill Barr "and the president are on a crusade to punish the president's enemies and go easy on his friends". Even giving a briefing about ongoing Russian interference is enough to get you fired and replaced with a loyalist.

Meanwhile, Bob Cesca notes a Daily Beast report in which Dear Leader "offered WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a pardon in exchange for aiding in [von Clownstick's] cover-up of the Russian military's hacking and theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016".

Update (September 24):  We certainly know by now (February in hindsight is part of the "beforetimes") how dark things can get--there's no guarantee anything gets better. In an interview with Chauncey DeVega, Tim Wise offers some advice.

Even with all the horrible things that have happened in such a short time this year, I will tell you that the outcome of this moment is not preordained. If the people in this country who have been ignoring the crises finally wake up and get out of bed and do the moral and good thing, then America's multiracial democracy has a chance of surviving. The problem is that too many of us have been waiting around and not being engaged in the struggle, because they believed that the long march of progress was something guaranteed in America.

Do what James Baldwin said to do: Earn your death. Earn your death by confronting with fortitude and honesty the conundrums of life. Earn your death by the way you live. And that means people need to get off their behinds and do what is necessary to save the United States and the world and the planet from [Fuckface von Clownstick], the Republican Party and the broader right-wing movement.

Record Temperature in the Antarctic

This beats the previous record from nearly five years ago by over one degree Fahrenheit.

[R]esearchers stationed at the Esperanza research station at the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula found that temperatures reached 64.9º Fahrenheit (18.3º Celsius)—the highest temperature logged since scientists began recording the continent’s temperature in 1961.

Update (February 14):  Another (non-continental) temperature record for Antarctica.

The 20.75C [69F] logged by Brazilian scientists at Seymour Island on 9 February was almost a full degree higher than the previous record of 19.8C, taken on Signy Island in January 1982.

Update (February 23):  A satellite image from NASA shows how much melting occurred in just a few days on an Antarctic island.

Permafrost Collapse

A study published in Nature Geoscience finds that "models considering only gradual permafrost thaw are substantially underestimating carbon emissions from thawing permafrost".