Saturday, 30 May 2020

The coming recession is the best reason to step up the pace of renewables investment.

It will not do to wait until the next power plant announces its closure. Building alternative infrastructure should start now

@frankjotzo

Bodangora wind farm owned by Infigen Energy, in the district of Bodangora near Wellington, New South Wales, Australia

The Covid-19 recession will bring fiscal stimulus on a massive scale. There are high hopes that the recovery will be green but it could be an uphill struggle. A big opportunity for Australia’s governments is to keep the renewable energy revolution going.
There will be pressure to invest in anything that quickly brings back jobs and prosperity, never mind long term, social or environmental goals. A return to the world as it was in 2019 will seem a marvellous goal for the many people whose jobs have gone or whose businesses have faltered. In order to improve the economy relative to pre-Covid, to build back better, will need governments to lead.
The forces pushing the other way are strong. Fossil fuel interests see Covid as a chance to push their barrel, all too evident in the push under way in Australia to increase gas production, regardless of the fact that it would raise greenhouse gas emissions for a long time to come. In the United States, longstanding environmental protection rules have been suspended under the cover of Covid, and Brazil’s government plans to change the rules on the Amazon while attention is on the pandemic. In China, the buzzword is “new infrastructure” but early indications are that new government spending on projects such as rail and telecoms is still overshadowed by building of coal power plants.

Policy documents released last week suggest that Australia’s meagre patchwork of emissions measures is now to be amended a little, but carbon pricing remains unmentionable.
Thankfully renewable energy is now by far the cheapest way to produce electricity from any newly built plants. We’ve seen a huge boom in solar and wind and power. Even the government’s new discussion paper towards its technology roadmap acknowledges that the future is renewables rather than coal, though it also gives a nod to gas.
But the recession could thwart investor appetite in new electricity generation plants. In the east coast electricity market, average wholesale prices are now less than half of what they were a year ago – as a result of lower gas prices, more renewables on the grid, and lower electricity demand. While that is great news for consumers including energy-intensive industry, it dampens the case for new renewables investment. It also puts extra pressure on old coal-fired power plants.
Regardless of the dynamics in the electricity market, it is a sure bet in Australia to rapidly expand solar and wind power, new transmission lines and energy storage. It is what will replace the coal power fleet, power electric cars, and provide the foundation for the energy-intensive export industries of the future.
Governments should now step up and accelerate renewables investment. Large renewable energy zones have been mapped out, and New South Wales already has a plan to deliver three of them. The coming recession is the best possible reason to step up the pace.
Renewable energy projects can be built quickly and they can be scaled up over time. Governments can fund and own renewables generators, or provide long-term fixed-price contracts to companies that build and operate them.
And we urgently need new power lines. The usual way would be a lengthy process to plan, contract and build transmission lines and for private companies to build wind and solar projects. With the recovery stimulus imperative, governments can and should make it happen more quickly.
In parallel, governments need to be ready to support the regions where coal-fired plants will inevitably close down. It will not do to wait until the next power plants in the Hunter and Latrobe valley announce closures on commercial grounds. Building alternative infrastructure and supporting new areas of business should start right now.
The fundamental criteria for economic stimulus that stands the test of time are simple: projects need to be able to start soon, use a lot of local inputs, result in something useful for the long run, and be compatible with a net-zero emissions trajectory.
Expanding renewable energy and the power grid scores high on those criteria. Many other infrastructure projects are attractive, including public transport, retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency, and land restoration.
And we have the chance to lay the foundation for clean export industries of the future, such as renewables-based hydrogen and steel. The obvious way to get started on these is a large public investment program in R&D and pilot plants. The government’s technology roadmap can identify priority investments. This should then quickly be followed by cash.
Governments will take out big loans to get the economy out of the Covid recession. We must be sure to spend it in a way that benefits our society in the future. That means creating better social fabric, more education and infrastructure. And it means helping build up industries that have a strong prospect in a world economy that acts on climate change.
Today’s younger people will be paying the debt back through higher taxes. They should be able to look back at Covid-19 as a time when useful public investments were made that helped protect their future.

• Frank Jotzo is the director of the Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at the Australian National University

The rot in Australian media is already advanced. We need to understand the damage wrought in 2020.

Extract from The Guardian

Opinion

Australian media

Jason Wilson

What happens when local news disappears, and entire communities are left without newsrooms? A bloom of misinformation, fertilised by social media

@jason_a_w

Newspaper headlines are pasted to the side of a newspaper stand in Melbourne

The Northern Age was founded in Townsville in the 1890s – there are conflicting reports of the precise date – in what was still the Colony of Queensland.
It was moved to Ingham, just north of Townsville, then the smaller neighboring town of Halifax, changing its name to the Planter, and perhaps the Northern Planter, before returning to Ingham for good.
From 1904 until last Wednesday, through world wars, depressions, and four Foley Shield championships for the Herbert River Tigers, it was published as the Herbert River Express. Now its current owners, News Corp, have shuttered it for good, along with 111 other community and regional newspapers. The masthead will disappear and its coverage will be folded into the Townsville Bulletin’s website.
No longer a newspaper, the Express will not even have its own URL. Ingham and the surrounding region will no longer have a newsroom of its own.
There’s something to say about media ownership regulations that allow so much civic and cultural heritage to be entrusted to a single, profit-driven entity. But even if News was not always the best custodian of local newspapers, owners can change, unless capacity is lost.

News Corp is not alone in closing papers. Australia is not alone in wondering what to do when local news disappears, and entire communities are left without newsrooms.
We need to understand how advanced the rot already is in Australia, and how much damage has been wrought in 2020 alone.
The Public Interest Journalism Institute tracks Australian newsroom closures in their Australian Newsroom Mapping Project. Their latest data, due to be published next week, paints an ugly picture. According to their research and projects manager, Gary Dickson, in 2020 so far, dozens of newspapers have vanished or been seriously diminished.
In an email Dickson told me that nine mastheads have merged into other properties. Ninety-one papers have ended print editions. One newsroom (10 Daily) has closed entirely. And 20 mastheads have closed (19 News Corp regional newspapers announced on Thursday, and Buzzfeed Australia). Disproportionately, masthead closures have taken place in Queensland.
The pandemic has struck at the news industry in the United States, as well.
US journalism-focused non-profit the Poynter Institute reports that 30 local newsrooms have closed or disappeared in mergers during pandemic lockdowns.
Some, like the Daily Iowegian of Centerville, Iowa, and the Knoxville Journal Express, had been publishing since the Civil War, or earlier.
Elsewhere, Poynter keeps a running list of the newspapers, publishers and broadcasters which have closed, reduced printing days, or shed staff during the Covid-19 emergency.
The carnage is also reaching into world cities which are crucial to the US economy. In Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, the Daily Post will only be printing four days a week. The San Francisco Examiner has cut staff. The New York Post has furloughed or laid off reporters.
Media researchers use a term, “news deserts”, to capture the status of communities that aren’t served by a dedicated print news outlet. Already, by 2018, 171 counties in the US had no newspaper at all; 1,449 had only one, usually a weekly. New figures on news deserts are yet to be calculated, but there are sure to be more of them in the US and Australia.
The term may not be quite adequate because, in a way, it may be overly optimistic.
It’s not quite true that news stops flowing in a town with no paper. Rather, that community loses an institution that, whatever its biases may have been, had ethical and legal imperatives to verify the information that it published.
Inhabitants of news deserts do not suffer from a lack of information. They suffer from a dearth of relevant, factual information about the communities they live in.
The void left by local news might be partly filled by national news outlets — the loss of a newspaper does not mean the loss of a cable subscription or an internet connection. Small town audiences can watch CNN, Fox News or Sky; they can also browse news.com.au or the New York Times.
Of course, those outlets will not cover council meetings, local courts, or local economies. They will not carry wedding or funeral announcements from Tully or Topeka. And national outlets themselves are often far from financially secure.
Moreover, US studies suggest that in the absence of local news, national news can exacerbate the partisan polarisation that contributes to America’s political gridlock, and in turn to its increasing political instability.
The question of the relationship between political attitudes and media consumption can easily become a fruitless chicken and egg discussion. But we do know that when it comes to national media, in many western democracies, people with political differences inhabit distinct informational universes.
The 2019 Reuters’ Institute Digital News Report shows how people with “populist attitudes” in Europe and the US are more likely than non-populists to get their news from television or Facebook, and less likely to get it from print sources.
Data from the UK suggests that when “populists” do consult print sources, they strongly favour tabloid newspapers such as the Sun. In the US, “populists” gravitate to Fox News and websites such as Breitbart, neither of which offer dedicated local news reporting, and each of which, far from seeking to tamp down on political polarisation, have incorporated it into their business model.
For all the flaws of national media, a worse alternative exists for newspaperless towns. News deserts may provide particularly hospitable soil for a bloom of mis- and disinformation, fertilised by social media.
Social media is already outstripping embattled local outlets as a source of news for many people in many countries. To the extent that local newspapers still exist, evidence suggests that their reach as a news medium is smaller than that of social media, and has been for some time.
In Australia, again according to the Reuters News Institute report, the nationwide weekly reach of local newspapers was just 20%; regional news networks Win and Prime7 just 10%; whereas 36% said they got news from Facebook.
In the US, local newspapers had a 20% weekly reach, and local newspaper websites 10%, but 39% of people said they got news from Facebook.
The trouble with that is that Facebook and other social media companies are not liable for the torrent of disinformation that cascades across their platforms, and they have only intermittently devoted attention and resources to cleaning up their act.
This reluctance to take on disinformation has had serious consequences, large and small. Facebook has been used to organise genocidal attacks on minorities in countries such as Myanmar. It has been connected with a rise in vaccine hesitancy, which may yet cruel our chances of defeating the coronavirus. It has been an effective platform for extremist groups around the world.
Groups or pages devoted to local communities are prey to the conspiracy thinking, fake news, and polarisation that affects every other part of Facebook. And in the absence of a local newsroom, there’s no obstacle to disinformation taking hold.
The coronavirus emergency has dramatised this. In the US, people have poured into state capitals to demonstrate against pandemic precautions derived from the advice of public health experts. Antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists have been front and centre at the events. Facebook has played a crucial role in allowing the anti-lockdown movement to organise at a local level. And frequently people are coming to state capitols from the same rural areas where newspapers have been supplanted by cable news and partisan websites.
This perfect informational storm has driven the US slightly mad. Its effects have been fractal. Shattered local news ecosystems have made local communities easy prey for ideologues and grifters; at the same time, a polarised national media landscape makes any resolution of the country’s abiding problems difficult to envision.
Now the storm is settling in over Australia.
There are no easy answers to the collapse of the business model for news. It may be that we need to think about journalism beyond the institution of the newsroom, and beyond the profit driven model of independence. It may be that we need to regulate social media companies more forcefully.
The consequences of the collapse of local news are not confined to the communities most directly affected. When local community ties are broken, when citizens come to mentally inhabit closed partisan worlds, nations are torn asunder.
The people of Ingham may be mourning the Herbert River Express, but really all of us should.

Jason Wilson is a columnist for Guardian Australia

Asio seeks expanded powers saying more spies are operating in Australia than during cold war.

Extract from The Guardian

Australian security and counter-terrorism

Intelligence agency wants right to question children as young as 14, claiming Australians are being radicalised at a younger age

Daniel Hurst

@danielhurstbne

A key Australian intelligence agency says it needs expanded powers to question suspected foreign spies and their helpers, because there are more currently operating in the country than at the height of the Cold War.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Asio) has also defended a proposal to gain the power to quiz children as young as 14 over terrorism matters, saying the agency holds significant concerns about the trend of Australians being radicalised increasingly early in life.
A bill introduced to parliament this month would expand Asio’s existing powers to subject people to compulsory questioning – which it has used 16 times since 2003 but only for terrorism-related intelligence gathering.

The bill would remove more intrusive detention powers that allow a person to be held for up to seven days for questioning of up to 24 hours during that time – a highly controversial measure that Asio says it has never actually used.
At the same time, though, the reach of the compulsory questioning power is to be extended beyond terrorism to include espionage and acts of foreign interference along with politically motivated violence.

The bill would enable the attorney general to approve questioning warrants directly without the involvement of a judge – an easing of the hurdles the agency faces in the current law.
“The threats posed today by espionage and foreign interference operate at a scale, breadth and ambition that has not previously been seen in Australia,” Asio says in a submission to the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security, which is reviewing the proposed laws.
“Espionage and foreign interference are affecting parts of the Australian community previously untouched by such threats, even during the Cold War.
“There are more foreign intelligence officers and their proxies operating in Australia now than at the height of the Cold War, and many of them have the requisite level of capability, the intent and the persistence to cause significant harm to our national security.”
The submission builds on Asio’s recent warnings about the heightened threat of foreign interference. The home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, said earlier this year that the nations included China, Iran and Russia.
Dennis Richardson, a former defence department and Asio chief, has also previously warned China was “very active in intelligence activities directed against us” including in the cyber realm but also keeping “a watchful eye inside Australian Chinese communities” and deploying other soft-power levers.
According to the new submission – which doesn’t name any particular countries – Asio investigations have discovered foreign interference operations directed at government and industry figures, the media, members of diaspora communities and commercial investment decision-makers.
Australia’s military modernisation program is one of the “attractive targets for espionage by foreign states seeking to gain an advantage to the detriment of Australia’s security and prosperity”.
Asio says it has also seen foreign states “seeking to monitor and control the activities, opinions and decisions of sections of the Australian community in a way that impinges on freedom of speech, association and action”.
It is understood Asio regards the compulsory questioning power as “another tool in our toolbox” to target espionage and foreign interference.
While it often needs to monitor such activities covertly, it says there may also be a need to disrupt activities and seek information through direct questioning. Australia would want to gain an understanding of the damage done, including what had been provided to a foreign adversary and the potential flow-on effects.
It is believed that in some cases the security services may not mind if the questioning of a suspected spy prompted the country involved to rapidly extract the person from Australia, because disrupting the threat may be Asio’s top goal. But the legislation would provide the ability for authorities to seize a person’s passport and travel documents if required.
While people would not be “detained” as such, the bill would allow the person to be searched for safety reasons and to ensure they did not destroy evidence or tip people off. If they fled they would be committing an offence and the police could be called.
Asio has indicated the extended questioning power could also be useful in addressing the growing threat posed by neo-Nazis and rightwing extremists.
It is understood there was some discussion within the agency of potentially extending the compulsory questioning power to all of Asio’s security responsibilities – which also include sabotage, acts promoting communal violence, and serious threats to Australia’s borders. However, a decision was made to limit the reach to threats that can cause significant harm: espionage and acts of foreign interference and politically motivated violence including terrorism.
In its submission, Asio says the terrorist threat remains unacceptably high, with three counter-terrorism disruptions in the past year: two cases motivated by Islamist extremism, and one by extreme rightwing ideology.
Since May 2015, it says, one terrorist attack – the murder of NSW police employee Curtis Cheng by a 15-year-old shooter – and three disrupted plots have involved teenagers under the age of 18. Asio is worried “that vulnerable and impressionable young people will continue to be at risk of being ensnared in the streams of hate being spread across the internet by extremists of every ideology”.
The agency argues it is not asking for “a fishing licence” to question minors. In those cases the attorney general has to be satisfied the person poses a direct threat of committing politically motivated violence – not that they merely know someone else planning an attack. The attorney general must also weigh up the child’s best interests.
The bill would also allow Asio to use tracking devices with internal authorisation in certain circumstances, rather than requiring a warrant. Given the trend towards lone actors or small groups using easy-to-acquire weapons, Asio argues surveillance teams need flexibility to move quickly.

Critics say the bill represents a further widening of national security powers. The dean of law at the University of New South Wales, George Williams, argues aspects of the bill – including the ability to question 14-year-old children – were “troubling” and a case of “overreach”.

Scott Morrison's National Cabinet must keep its eyes on JobKeeper as coronavirus damage worsens.

Analysis

7.30

By Laura Tingle

Posted 1hour ago, updated 1hour ago

National Cabinet to permanently replace COAG

It has taken the greatest threat to our health and economic wellbeing to make it happen, but Friday's decision to make the National Cabinet a permanent feature of the way Australia is governed is potentially one of the most significant outcomes of the crisis.

Of course, that national leaders talking sensibly to each other about issues in which they have a mutual interest was ever a problem seems quite bizarre in these current times.

But it has been, and was increasingly becoming, the biggest roadblock to anything sensible happening by way of innovation in the way government works in Australia.

The non-functional nature of federal-state relations was often mentioned as standing in the path of "reform" by business groups.

But it has been more than that. It's not just things like tax reform that have been hampered by federal-state frictions: almost anything you care to think about — schools and health funding, infrastructure are just a few of the obvious ones.

Whether the good feeling continues of course, well who knows, but we just have to hope that a grouping of politicians, who have all had a positive re-enforcement loop telling them that doing good policy and behaving like grown ups is a political winner, will get quite a lot done before things inevitably turn a little more sour.

The Prime Minister said on Friday that the National Cabinet "will be driven by a singular agenda, and that is to create jobs".

"It will have a job-making agenda. And the National Cabinet will drive the reform process between state and federal cooperation to drive jobs."

And that will no small task. Somewhere between getting over the shock of those early pictures of long Centrelink queues, and last week's revelation that there aren't nearly as many people on the JobKeeper scheme as first thought, the extent of the collapse in the job market seems to have faded from view a little in recent weeks.

This is a problem because, if anything, things are going to get worse.

A fight over the spoils

Mr Frydenberg says it is "welcome news" the scheme will not cost the Government as much as expected.

When it was revealed last week that "only" 3.5 million people were receiving the wage subsidy JobKeeper, rather than the 6 million forecast — and that its cost as a result had dropped from $130 billion to "just" $70 billion, a few things happened.

There were the obvious howls about how could Treasury have gotten a number so wrong. The Opposition had a field day, as any pragmatic group of politicians presented with such an opportunity would, with observations such as that this was an error you could see from space, and questioning the Government's competence to run things.

It also immediately began a bun fight over the "spoils": how to spend the $60 billion that wouldn't be spent on JobKeeper.

But there seemed to also be a tendency to see the lower JobKeeper numbers as a signal that things weren't as bad as thought in the labour market.

Like most things at the moment, however, it is more complicated than that.

It is certainly the case that the worst-case scenario on which the original JobKeeper numbers were based, presumed, rather shockingly, that more than half of the private workforce could lose their jobs in that black week when the economy started to shut down in earnest.

It is true that things haven't been that bad: mining, manufacturing and construction are three sectors that had been included in the worst-case scenarios but have kept operating so far.

Labor ridicules the JobKeeper reporting error

The path out is complicated

It is worth understanding what the "new improved data" we have on JobKeeper tells us about the labour market, particularly in conjunction with the much expanded data now being collected and rapidly released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, because it tells us how complicated a return to higher levels of work will be.

The first thing to keep in mind is that JobKeeper is not a direct proxy for the number of people who would otherwise be unemployed. Under the "one in, all in" nature of the scheme, a business has to give JobKeeper to all its employees, which means it will be paying for people who it might otherwise have had to sack, but also people it would not have let go.

A simple example: if your business has suffered a 30 per cent fall in revenue — making it eligible for the scheme — you might in normal circumstances sack 30 per cent of your staff. JobKeeper helps you keep them on, but also all your other staff too.

So not all the 3.5 million now believed to be getting JobKeeper would otherwise have lost their jobs.

This is a reflection of several different things happening in the current labour market which make it a story not just of the sudden mass unemployment we sometimes imagine.

Jeff Borland of the University of Melbourne says the measured fall in demand for labour — which is at levels sharper than the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s and the greatest since the Great Depression — have been driven four different ways.

Some people have actually lost their jobs. There has been a big increase in the number of employed people who worked zero hours (the JobKeeper effect). There has also been an increase in under-employment, and then there has been a significant number of people just pulling out of the labour force altogether.

Borland says about 43 per cent is due to people now working zero hours; 32 per cent have withdrawn from the labour market; and 18 per cent are working less hours, with just 6.8 per cent being a straight case of job losses.

A lot of that withdrawal from the labour force, or the people now working zero hours represent women.

And the data also shows the complexity of arrangements people are making in individual workplaces, also reflected in further ABS data on the number of businesses where people are taking paid or unpaid leave.

National Cabinet must keep eyes on JobKeeper

There are some interesting questions remaining around why some businesses couldn't or didn't apply for the scheme, as well as the well-aired and serious questions about all those workers who were not eligible for it in sectors like the arts and hospitality.

Some businesses have just chosen not to get involved in the JobKeeper scheme for reasons of their own, but the fact that one-in-10 businesses have reported seeking additional funds from banks, other businesses or their personal reserves reinforces the fact that the whole country isn't just relying on assistance from the Government to get by.

In fact, the ABS says just 55 per cent of businesses are accessing wage subsidies, while 20 per cent have renegotiated rents, and 16 per cent have deferred loan repayments.

Within all these arrangements are, inevitably, a lot of businesses that have just been holding on, hoping they could survive the lockdown, but fearing what comes next.

Which makes the significance of the trajectory of withdrawal of JobSeeker, and other forms of government assistance, that much greater, and a subject on which all the minds in National Cabinet will undoubtedly be focused.

Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.

Friday, 29 May 2020

James Hansen - Sophie's Planet #8: Chapters 11 & 12 (Weather Prediction & Ozone)

Fig. 11.1. Dr. Robert Jastrow

26 May 2020

James Hansen

Dr. Robert Jastrow was brilliant, with an intellect and drive that attracted some of the world’s top scientists to advise NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Two of these towering figures were Jule Charney and Vern Suomi. What good fortune to witness their discussions! They were pioneers in the use of the space program to benefit people on Earth.

I was heavily invested in planetary studies, with an experiment under construction for Pioneer Venus, and a proposal to be written for the Galileo Jupiter mission. It would require three big pushes to alter our course, to cause us to look back at the home planet. Here are the first two, for fact checking (Chapters 11 & 12 of Sophie’s Planet).

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/SophiePlanet/Planet.Chapters11+12.pdf

I opened a Twitter account @DrJamesEHansen, (https://twitter.com/drjamesehansen), but will minimize interactions until the book is finished.

Fig. 12.1 Chart used for 1975 research proposal to Rasool and Hunten.

As 100,000 die, the virus lays bare America's brutal fault lines – race, gender, poverty and broken politics.

Extract from The Guardian

The New York Stock Exchange in Manhattan in March, a week after New York put its lockdown in place. Photograph: Jordan Gale/The Guardian

100,000 dead in the US

The US’s brutal fault lines – of race, partisanship, gender, poverty and misinformation – rendered it ill-prepared to meet the challenges of Covid-19

by Ed Pilkington

In one of the rare expressions of empathy that Donald Trump has displayed during the course of the coronavirus pandemic, he talked earlier this month about the disease claiming so many lives it was “filling up Yankee Stadium with death”.
Now the death toll from Covid-19 stands at almost twice the capacity of the Yankees’ home stadium, and has reached another booming landmark: 100,000 deaths.
A country that prides itself on its exceptionalism can now without ambiguity claim that title for its experience of the virus. The United States stands head and shoulders at the top of the world league table of confirmed cases, as well as the total number of deaths.
There will be much to analyse in coming years about how the US responded to this contagion, including how many lives have been lost needlessly as a result of Trump’s maverick response.

Already one lesson of the pandemic is clear: America’s deep and brutal fault lines – of race, partisanship, gender, poverty and misinformation – rendered the country ill-prepared to meet the challenges of this disease. The ravages of Covid-19 have revealed the deep cracks in the glittering facade of the richest and most powerful nation on Earth.

Racial disparities

Covid-19 is supposed to be an equal-opportunities killer. It willingly ravages the lungs of any American, regardless of their skin color or visa status.
But as America passes the 100,000 death mark, it has become abundantly clear that the pandemic amounts to a racial disaster of stunning proportions. Figures compiled by APM Research Lab from 40 states show that African Americans are being killed at almost three times the rate of white people.
Black Kansans are seven times more likely to die from the virus than white Kansans. In Missouri, Wisconsin and Washington DC the ratio is six times.
Such grotesque distortions are most visible in New York City, that giant laboratory test into virulent racial inequity. Data released this week showed that when the city’s zip codes are ranked according to highest death rates, eight out of the top 10 have majority black or Latino populations.
None of the 10 are in wealthy, largely white Manhattan.

A woman waits for a bus near a coronavirus testing site in Brooklyn.

In an election year, that would suit Trump very well. What better way to deflect attention from his administration’s dire handling of the pandemic than to swing the spotlight on to the dead themselves?
Decades of segregation, decrepit housing, joblessness, stress, police brutality, poor hospitals, lack of health insurance, failing schools – these are also relevant factors that the White House tends to gloss over. So too is the discrimination in access to testing and treatment for coronavirus that has increased the chances that black people contract and then die from the disease.

"America has become a failed social experiment, a decayed empire that is unable to meet the basic needs of its people"
Cornel West, the Harvard philosopher, activist and writer, argues that you have to dig deeper to find the source of such disproportionate fatalities. “The virus encounters deeply racist structures and institutions already in place, against the backdrop of wealth inequality, a militarized state and a commodified culture in which everybody and everything is for sale,” he said.
For West, the pandemic has revealed nothing less than the country’s demise. “America has become a failed social experiment, a decayed empire that is unable to meet the basic needs of its people.”

Partisan wounds

When the US has endured past attacks by stealthy enemies – Pearl Harbor, say, or 9/11 – there has been some effort from the White House down to rally the nation around a common defense. Not so this time.
When Americans are asked about key policies relating to coronavirus, such as when lockdown should be eased and economies reopened, their answer is starkly partisan. A survey by the University of Chicago found that 77% of Democrats want lockdown restrictions to remain in place for as long as needed to protect health, while only 45% of Republicans take that view.
“Politics more than economics is dividing Americans,” the Chicago researchers concluded.
Trump has adopted a similar partisan stance. Instead of acting for the nation as a whole, he has favored party political point scoring ahead of November’s presidential election.

Mike Pence listens as Donald Trump speaks during a coronavirus taskforce briefing at the White House.

Republican states such as Florida have received all the emergency medical supplies they requested from federal government. Democratic ones have gone short-changed.
Trump admitted he rebuffed the calls of Democratic governors who “don’t treat you right”. He threatened financial penalties against Democratic states trying to make absentee voting easier during the pandemic.
To Kamala Harris, the former Democratic presidential candidate, such moves indicate that the president is “worried about the outcome of the upcoming election rather than the safety of people”.
Harris, a US senator from California, told the Guardian that for many citizens, especially African Americans, the consequences of such partisan posturing “are life and death. In a matter of months, 100,000 Americans have died. That’s more than 40 times those who died in Pearl Harbor.”

"This is a moment where we all – regardless of our position or title – must come together to lift the American people up"
Among the 100,000 victims, there are partisan fissures, too. It is no surprise that Democratic parts of the country have suffered greatly as they include the big cities such as New York and Chicago where the virus has struck most aggressively.
Across the US, Reuters has reported, counties that voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election have recorded 39 deaths from Covid-19 per 100,000 residents, three times the rate of counties who went for Trump.
For Harris, it doesn’t matter what party a victim supports. “We must remember that each death is one too many. This is a moment where we all – regardless of our position or title – must come together to lift the American people up.”

A nurse stands outside NYU Langone hospital in New York.

The gender divide

In New York City, men are dying at almost twice the rate of women. Yet in every other aspect of this epic contagion, the load is being borne by women. Most of the frontline health workers, including nine out of 10 nurses, are female, putting them in the thick of the storm.
Then there’s the tidal wave of US unemployment: 55% of the jobs lost last month were held by women.
Within the lockdown at home, women are also shouldering the burden, whether they are one of the 80% of single-parent families in the US who are headed by women or are in a heterosexual relationship and taking on the lion’s share of homeschooling. That’s before you consider the normal imbalance in childcare and household chores that has intensified.
Rebecca Solnit, the influential writer whose book Men Explain Things to Me gave rise to the phrase “mansplaining”, pithily summed up the impact of the pandemic for American women. “Everything wrong with life at home got a lot wronger,” she said.

A mother assists her daughters with homeschooling in New Rochelle, New York.

“Whether it’s the rise of domestic violence and the withering away of escapes from it, the way that the sudden requirement of parents across the US to become homeschoolers fell primarily on women, and that heterosexual men living with women are still far from shouldering their fair share of domestic labor.”
Solnit pointed to the contradiction that while most face masks are being voluntarily sewn by women, men are far more likely to refuse to wear the protective items on grounds they show “weakness”. Displays of reckless masculinity start at the top – Trump recently toured a mask-making factory in Arizona without wearing a mask.
Solnit offered the Guardian a couple of remedies for the pandemic of men behaving badly during the pandemic. “Divorce may be one treatment in some cases,” she said, “feminism liberally applied across all parties the only known cure.”

Inequality

Coronavirus in America is a disease of the poor. That’s the view of the Rev William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign.
“People are being forced to work, putting profit over protection,” he said. “This pandemic will highlight how poverty – and our willingness to let people remain in it – presents a clear and present danger for all of us.”
Barber, a leading voice on the scourge of income inequality which saw 41 million people officially living in poverty even before the virus made landfall in the US, also pointed out that coronavirus is a disease that benefits the rich. “Billionaires have made nearly $500m while essential workers have not even been given guaranteed health care, a living wage or a water supply that is protected from being shut off,” he said.

Free food is distributed at the Spring Creek Towers in the East New York neighborhood.

As with race, the fault line of inequality is glaringly obvious in New York City, where more than 21,000 of the 100,000 have died. Many low-income New Yorkers in the outer boroughs are obliged to risk their lives by turning up for work every day, branded as “essential workers”, while Manhattan’s wealthy neighborhoods have become virtual ghost towns after their residents fled to vacation homes.
It will take time for the full extent of mortality among low-income Americans to be known, but anecdotally it is clear the poorest counties have been hit hardest. That’s evident in southern states such as Louisiana and Alabama where low-income people have been dying in high proportions through a combination of lack of health insurance, hospital closures and policies pursued by southern governors that have exposed vulnerable citizens to danger.
There is nothing new in any of this for the beleaguered souls now feeling the full force of the virus’s wrath. But coronavirus has made an old story newly visible, as the endless lines at food banks now attest.

Misinformation

The infodemic of misinformation that has battered the country over the past four months starts with the misinformer-in-chief: Trump.
From the start of the crisis, the president has shown disdain for the facts. On 27 February, the day the country first mourned a death from Covid-19, he predicted the virus “will disappear” like a “miracle”.
He has gone on to spread unfounded claims that coronavirus started in a Chinese lab. He also promoted untested and potentially life-threatening treatments, including disinfectant and the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which he revealed he is taking himself – against the advice of his own administration.
Trump’s embrace of untruths has emboldened peddlers in misinformation, including sellers of bleach as a miracle cure. And it has imperiled lives. A man in Arizona died, and his wife was hospitalized, after they took chloroquine phosphate – used to clean fish tanks.

Demonstrators hold a ‘Rolling Car Rally’ in front of Connecticut governor Ned Lamont’s home in Hartford.

All that forms part of an unparalleled wave of misinformation that has swept the US. “I have never seen so much of this stuff,” said Claire Wardle, director of First Draft, a nonprofit that tackles misinformation worldwide.
Early on in the crisis, rumors that lockdown would see the government impose martial law began to circulate through closed-messaging apps and texts. Over the last six weeks there has been an explosion of conspiracy theories on social media, epitomized by the Plandemic documentary, which claimed a cabal led by Bill Gates were exploiting the virus to seize power.
Wardle has been surprised how quickly conspiracy theories have erupted into the mainstream. “You have high school friends and mums and aunts who would never normally share this material now on it.”
Wardle sees the vast proliferation of misinformation as a result of deep uncertainty about the pandemic, combined with a paucity of quality information following the collapse of the US news industry, which has itself been accelerated by the virus’ economic impact.
Bad information cost lives. It can encourage states to reopen their economies precipitously and lure individuals to drop their guard and expose themselves to the virus.

Wardle said: “Historians are going to look back on all of this and have a much clearer idea of how misinformation led to real-world harm – and death.”