“In 2009, a patient in Japan developed a fungal infection on their ear. The highly transmissible Candida auris fungus had been previously unknown to science but within a few years, cases started emerging in Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and South Africa.” (1/x) wired.com/story/fungi-cl…
“Scientists assumed that the spread was due to human travel, but when they sequenced the cases, they were surprised to find that these strains weren’t closely related at all.”
“Instead, scientists were seeing multiple, independent infections of an unknown fungal disease, emerging around the world, all at the same time.”
“About a third of people infected with Candida auris die from the infection within 30 days, and there have now been thousands of cases in 47 countries. Some scientists think this sudden boom in global cases is a harbinger of things to come.”
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Last week, I published a long essay about the grotesque, unconscionable, and yet entirely normalized costs of air pollution—10 million deaths a year. Reducing fossil fuel alone won’t solve the problem. Wildfire is a rapidly growing source. A thread (1/x). lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/…
"In 2020, wildfire accounted for more than half of all air pollution in the western U.S.—meaning more particulate matter infiltrated the lungs of Americans living in those states from out-of-control burning of forest than from all other human and industrial activity combined."
"By midcentury, those fires are expected to at least double, possibly grow sixfold, and conceivably more..."
On Wednesday, @LRB published a long essay of mine on the brutal effects of air pollution, which kills ten million a year. But beyond the moral horror, air pollution offers strategic and conceptual lessons for climate, as well. A long thread (1/x). lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/…
@LRB First, that brutality, which cannot be overlooked. Ten million deaths a year is one hundred million a decade, four hundred million in my lifetime. And the costs to human health and human flourishing extend well beyond the lives lost.
These are numbers so large they demand that we utterly reorder our moral picture of the world we live in today, recalculating our accounting of the brutality of the present and the intuitive discounting of status-quo suffering in the developing world that likely undergirds it.
"As carbon dioxide emissions have surged by 50 percent in 60 years, to nearly 40 billion tonnes worldwide, the Amazon has absorbed a large amount of that pollution—nearly two billion tonnes a year, until recently." phys.org/news/2021-11-a…
"But humans have also spent the past half-century tearing down and burning whole swathes of the Amazon to make way for cattle ranches and farmland."
"As a result, the Amazon as a whole is now a net carbon source, mainly because of humans setting it on fire. And even subtracting emissions caused by fires, the southeastern Amazon is now a net carbon emitter."
“We read the hullabaloo about an ‘energy crisis’ as one in a series of ongoing struggles to define the political and intellectual terrain on which we make sense of climate change and our unrelenting march into a future defined by it.” newstatesman.com/ideas/2021/11/…
“Paradoxically, it is because climate change is a permanent state that the politics of it have tended to focus outsized attention on events, whether disasters or summits, which offer discrete moments of action and attention in the face of an otherwise amorphous problem.”
“But as Gramsci knew well, it is the interim stretches that are crucial in determining how moments of acute struggle shake out.”
“In November, the authorities in Delhi closed schools and colleges indefinitely, suspended construction work, and shuttered half of the local coal plants after an episode of ‘toxic smog.” Life under the cloud of air pollution in India, a thread. (1/x) lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/…
“Throughout the city, particulate matter hangs around in offices, lobbies and private homes, even those with air purifiers. It often gets so thick it interferes with air travel. More remarkably, it has interrupted train travel, the smog making it impossible to see the tracks.”
“Taxi drivers have filtration systems sit shotgun to process the particulates that sneak in. Pedestrians can’t escape it, which is one reason that, on especially smoggy days, living in Delhi is the equivalent of smoking several packets of cigarettes.”
Air pollution kills an estimated ten million people each year. But it does much more than that, too. A long thread on what it means that more than 90 percent of the world's population is breathing dangerously polluted air. (1/x) lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/…
"Here is just a partial list of the things, short of death rates, we know are affected by air pollution. GDP, with a 10 per cent increase in pollution reducing output by almost a full percentage point, according to an OECD report last year."
"Cognitive performance, with a study showing that cutting Chinese pollution to the standards required in the US would improve the average student’s ranking in verbal tests by 26 per cent and in maths by 13 per cent."