A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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One of the fascinating things about climate change is how many seemingly random, unrelated topics wind up being closely connected with climate resilience or policy. A new piece from Eleanor Cummins, published this morning, illustrates this beautifully. It’s about coroners. Eleanor addresses the failures of the U.S. coroner system—an antiquated aspect of criminal justice infrastructure that allows large numbers of death certificates to be signed by officials without a medical degree: |
[Coroners] investigate any death that doesn’t appear natural—a broad category that includes suicides, homicides, and accidents. They may also pitch in with pandemics, natural disasters, and other mass casualty events that overwhelm frontline services. For those who die in a hospital, the majority of death certificates are signed by physicians. But when people begin to die en masse at home, as happened in the early parts of the pandemic, the responsibility falls on coroners and medical examiners.… Unlike medical examiners, who are physicians and, in ideal cases, trained forensic pathologists, the bar for coroners is often much lower. In some states, anyone 18 years or older with no prior felonies may be elected coroner. Once they’re in office, training is patchwork; some jurisdictions require no further education at all. |
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{{#if }} Our writers and editors are bringing you vital reporting, explanation, and analysis to understand the current climate crisis—but they need your help. Here’s a special offer to subscribe to The New Republic. |
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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{{/if}} Such a system has some pretty obvious flaws. And the pandemic, Eleanor points out, has highlighted them: It’s pretty clear, for instance, that the U.S. has been massively undercounting deaths from Covid-19—Eleanor cites the case of one Mississippi coroner who told a local newspaper that he “doesn’t do Covid deaths.” He requires families to prove that the deceased had Covid, and did not attribute a single death in the county to the disease in all of 2021. So what does this have to do with climate change? Well, for one thing, zoonotic diseases like Covid-19 will likely become more common as the world warms. Ideally, it would be good to have an accurate sense of their toll. But also, climate change is probably already causing a lot of premature deaths. “Natural disasters, from hurricanes to wildfires, already kill and disappear thousands each year, posing a challenge for the fractured forensic system. Other, subtler effects, such as heat waves and especially air pollution, are also overlooked,” Eleanor writes. Not having an accurate tally of those deaths can make it harder to advocate for and craft policy that prevents them in the future. Go ahead and read Eleanor’s piece. With climate policy seemingly indefinitely stalled in the Senate, her case for generating accurate data about the cost of inaction feels particularly timely. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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That’s how much of the data on species and biodiversity comes from just 10 (wealthy) countries, as pointed out in a new study this past week. That makes it hard to come up with a serious biodiversity-preserving action plan—something a new editorial in Nature argues is urgently needed. |
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The Interior Department is proceeding with a plan to clean up orphaned oil and gas wells—a huge problem that you can read about here. These sites are known to leak methane, but we don’t even know how much. As part of the new initiative, E&E News reports, the Bureau of Land Management will be “developing a way to track and measure the methane pollution coming from abandoned wells.” |
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Exxon Mobil received some positive coverage Tuesday for announcing a new net-zero emissions goal. In reality, such a goal is meaningless, because the company won’t include emissions from the burning of the products it sells in its greenhouse gas accounting. For more on this, read Kate Aronoff’s piece from last year about how net-zero pledges function as a kind of gambit by fossil fuel companies to avoid regulation. |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
Last week, Liza Featherstone wrote at TNR about how panic over predators—wolves, sharks, bears, and more—leads to bad policy decisions, as well as encouraging exactly the wrong sort of relationship with the environment at a moment when humanity needs to shift toward sustainability. Yesterday, The New York Times published a great piece to read alongside that one. It’s about the wolf “cull” underway in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming right now—disturbing both from a humane perspective (wolves can be lured with bait and outrun with snowmobiles, and even pups can be killed) and from an ecological one, since wolves’ recovery from near-extinction has had well-documented positive effects on the local ecosystem. As Thomas McNamee points out, this “slaughter” of a once-endangered species isn’t even benefiting the ranchers it purports to help anymore: |
Ranchers whose livelihoods the state legislators cite as endangered by wolves are now complaining that elk are eating too much of their grass and raiding their haystacks—too many elk, in the middle of wolf country! The hunting seasons for elk actually are being extended. Wolf depredation on livestock has been minimal. In 2015, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming had 1,602,100 cattle in counties where both cattle and wolves were present; there were 1,904 wolves. They killed 148 cattle: about 0.01 percent, or approximately one out of every 10,000 cows. All three states compensate livestock owners for proven losses to wolves. |
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What Subscribers Are Reading |
Panic over predators sets humans up to have exactly the wrong kind of relationship with the ailing environment. |
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Electric vehicles on their own aren’t enough. |
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