COVID-19 Part II: the pandemic and greater threats
The global pandemic is lethal and serious, but by no means the chief threat humanity faces. Far more dangerous in the slightly longer term are climatic disruption due to burning of fossil fuels, and biodiversity loss, caused by global heating and a range of destructive industrial and agricultural activities.
Historically, major economic recessions and depressions are the only events that have shown consistent success at curtailing the otherwise steady rise of greenhouse gas concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere, and enabled nature to recuperate to some degree from the damage modern industrial society has inflicted. One such dip in emissions has accompanied the COVID-19 depression, but it was so short-lived as to not meaningfully affect the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2).
“Even though emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels dropped by as much 17% in April, it was a brief decline,” AP writes, citing NOAA senior scientist Pieter Tans. “Carbon dioxide can stay in the air for centuries, so the short-term reductions of new carbon pollution for a few months didn’t have much of a big-picture effect.”
Indeed, the concentration of CO2 recorded last month at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory is the highest in human history, and likely the highest in three million years.
Worse still, fossil fuel industry pressure groups have capitalized on the difficult economic circumstances of the COVID-19 depression to lobby for further deregulation and lifting of pollution monitoring requirements and enforcement. Governments, particularly those on which the fossil fuel industry wields outsize influence (like the Trump administration, or the United Conservative government in Alberta, Canada), have readily acceded to these demands. It’s hardly a foregone conclusion that the suspended regulatory regimes will be reinstated anytime soon.
The state of the climate, and the prospects of survival for human civilization, are increasingly dire. The danger lies not only in the rising levels of industrial and agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, but also in tipping points beyond which the heating and destabilization of the climate system could become irreversible. Will Steffen, emeritus professor at Australia’s National University and considered the top climate scientist in that country, specializes in the study of these tipping points. In a paper published at the end of last year in the journal Nature, he and his co-authors estimated that nine of the 15 tipping points they identified had already been activated.
As Steffen told Australian independent news site Voice of Action:
The fact that many of the features of the Earth System that are being damaged or lost constitute ‘tipping points’ that could well link to form a ‘tipping cascade’ raises the ultimate question: Have we already lost control of the system? Is collapse now inevitable?
Steffen suggests humanity is already far along the trajectory toward civilizational collapse, which he considers the most likely outcome. Indeed, drastic action in the next six months will be critical to prevent a devastating rebound in fossil fuel emissions as economies reopen.
Many of the consequences of an increasingly disrupted climate system are well understood: droughts, wildfires, searing summer heat, more intense storms (including hurricanes and typhoons), changes in weather patterns that induce famines and rises in preventable disease, gradual sea level rise threatening coastal cities. Barring a massive shift in the current trajectories of emissions and temperature rise, we’re headed for a planet that will be largely unfit for human habitation by the end of this century. Particularly arresting in this time of pandemic, we could also be on the verge of unleashing pathogens that have long been congealed in ice and permafrost.
David Wallace-Wells writes in The Uninhabitable Earth:
There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years — in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.
The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million — about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.
The combined challenges of climate change and ecological degradation, including rapid loss of biodiversity, seem overwhelming. Yet despair is hardly an acceptable option. If there’s even a remote prospect of averting catastrophe, we have a moral duty to future generations to collectively pursue it.
Any realistic solution to the climate emergency will necessarily involve stopping further development of fossil fuel extraction and transport infrastructure, heavy investment in renewable technology, radical changes to the lifestyles of the wealthy and middle classes in advanced industrial societies and the energy and agricultural infrastructure that support them, and deployment of technology on a mass scale to remove carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. States, and particularly those presiding over high-income economies with sovereign currencies, will need to spearhead this project.
However, if their response to COVID-19 is any indication of how they’re likely to tackle global heating and ecological degradation, then clearly, humanity’s collective salvation depends on supplanting the ruling elites of our time from all positions of political influence. We can’t count on their rational self-interest to save us either; with few exceptions, they’ve eschewed reasonable preparatory and mitigatory steps, perhaps calculating (plausibly) that their own relative wealth and privilege would insulate them from risk to their lives and buy them time. It seems at least as likely that the elites and their billionaire patrons will abandon this planet to its fate than pull their weight to salvage this one, as we collectively slouch beyond the event horizon of corporate capitalism’s black hole.
The cost of the shambolic official response to this pandemic has been tens of thousands of avoidable deaths and rising. In the case of the climate and ecological crises, we can reasonably expect a death toll in the billions.
A geopolitical death spiral and liberalism’s great contradiction
The stunning failure of many capitalistic societies to deal responsibly with COVID-19 contrasts very unfavourably with the efforts of traditionally state socialist countries, even ones that have progressively embraced elements of the capitalist market system following the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Vietnam, a global south nation still cleaning up from the toxic legacy left behind by imperialist aggressors, has arguably outperformed any other country on earth in its response to the pandemic, closing its border with China without delay, isolating a small number of domestic infections, and offering modest support to workers to help them comply with precautionary lockdowns. The country has yet to record a single COVID-19 death.
Venezuela and Cuba, both subject to crippling economic sanctions spearheaded by Washington, have managed to cope relatively well with the crisis, thanks in no small part to mutual cooperation. Havana has dispatched some of its world-renowned doctors abroad, including to Italy, providing a measure of relief to overburdened medical systems.
For all the flaws of its initial response to the pandemic, its continuing, authoritarian suppression of information, and a chronically underfunded system of health care provision, China has overcome the disadvantage that always redounds on country zero, mobilizing resources rapidly and on a remarkable scale to both combat its domestic epidemic and support foreign countries’ efforts.
It would be hard to overstate the depths of displeasure with these developments of Washington officialdom, both the Trump regime and the nominal “opposition” Democrats.
The pandemic crisis has arrived in a geopolitical climate of extraordinary hostility among the great powers. Trump has spent much of his presidency sabre-rattling against Moscow and more so Beijing, continuing and intensifying Obama-era initiatives to both “modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal and “pivot to Asia,” progressively abandoning arms control treaties on flimsy pretexts, carrying on increasingly provocative military exercises in eastern Europe and the South China Sea, and obtaining (with significant help from the “opposition”) world-historic military budgets.
For most of his presidency, the Democrats have used the bogus Russiagate scandal to caricature Trump as too soft on Russia and insufficiently aggressive at asserting U.S. imperial interests, effectively goading him into an even more confrontational posture. As the pandemic continues to surge, the president and the Democratic nominee are now competing over who can be more uber-hawkish toward China, and more harshly incriminate the Asian country for COVID-19 and its economic and social fallout around the world.
This messaging campaign contrasts sharply with the assessment of officials in the World Health Organization and medical experts who’ve praised China’s response.
Despite the impression given in mainstream media, the medical community has effusively lauded Beijing’s “leadership” and “commitment to transparency,” in the World Health Organization’s words. “I have never seen the scale and commitment of an epidemic response at this level in terms of all of government,” said the organization’s Chief Executive Director for Health Emergencies, Michael Ryan, “The challenge is great, but the response has been massive and the Chinese government deserve huge credit.” Likewise, the editors of The Lancet, the world’s most prestigious medical journal, published a statement saluting the “diligent,” “effective” and “rapid” Chinese response and “strongly condemn conspiracy theories” pushed by U.S. officials like Senator Tom Cotton, that the virus’ origin was man-made.
Trump, his cartoonishly boorish secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and their far-right allies have repeatedly accused Beijing of manufacturing the novel coronavirus in a laboratory, an allegation for which they’ve naturally provided no evidence.
Both political arms of the Washington establishment, citing concerns for human rights and the rule of law, effusively supported the ostensible pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, and loudly indict China with human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in the Chinese region of Xinjiang. Meanwhile, the administration has imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court and its employees to evade accountability for U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, and protect Israel, a crucial imperial outpost for Washington in the Middle East, from any reckoning over its own war crimes, apartheid policies, and violent oppression of Palestinians. The U.S. has also antagonized the WHO in the midst of a global pandemic, alleging that the organization is manipulated by China, notwithstanding that most of its funding comes from Washington and its allies. The Trump regime began by slashing funding to the organization and has since announced its intent to withdraw altogether.
To condemn the flagrant inconsistency of Washington’s affinity for human rights and the rule of law is to miss the point. There is in fact a clear, unified logic beneath all this posturing.
In its Nuclear Posture Review and National Defense Strategy, both released in 2018 and endorsed by the bipartisan National Defense Strategy Commission, Washington identified “great power competition,” i.e. a global contest for power and influence against traditional adversaries Russia and China, as its chief military and geostrategic priority, replacing the “war on terror.” The combined output of think tanks, academia, and the press reflects this thematic shift.
This fixation on “great power competition” is rooted in Washington’s own desire to maintain the unchallenged global hegemony that it secured for itself after World War II, and reaffirmed after the Soviet Union collapsed. It is the consensus view of Washington planners, regardless of political party, that this hegemony is a global public good, a centralized power apparatus upholding what’s alternately described as the “rules-based” or “liberal” world order. Put simply, Washington is deeply invested in a set of global relations premised on its being the lone, dominant superpower, and is unwilling to relinquish that status.
Yet no meaningful semblance of a liberal world order squares with the indefinite global military and economic dominance of a single country. In a liberal world order of more or less open commerce, those countries or societies in a strong position of comparative advantage will tend to prevail. While national hegemonism requires an abiding commitment to uphold the status of one’s own country, liberal international trade regimes don’t play favourites; they simply reward national economies that outcompete rivals in areas like innovation and cost of production. Facing the rise of China, Washington has become more assertive in privileging national hegemonism and protectionism over its (always flawed) commitment to liberalism. This would likely be true regardless who presently occupied the office of president.
For decades, U.S. and western-based corporations have exploited China as a repository of cheap labour to facilitate production for U.S. and other western consumer markets. Incidentally, the offshoring of production to China and low-wage jurisdictions was itself a factor in the stagnation of U.S. workers’ incomes; to roughly maintain the living standards to which they’d been accustomed, U.S. employees were forced to work more hours and rely on relatively cheap goods manufactured in China and distributed by the likes of Walmart. This aspect of neoliberal globalization eventually yielded grievances Trump exploited to capture the presidency in the first place, by campaigning on so-called economic populism.
China’s role as workshop of the world was acceptable to the U.S. power elite, but its more recent emergence as a bona fide economic and technological rival of the U.S. is not. This accounts for an escalating new cold war between the U.S. (along with its satellite states) and China; an increasingly hostile climate for Chinese nationals in technical fields in the U.S., Australia, and other U.S.-aligned states; a largely inauthentic conflict over the potential role of Chinese tech giant Huawei in the development of 5G wireless infrastructure; politically motivated lawfare prosecutions, including the high-profile extradition case of Huawei senior executive Meng Wanzhou; and an acrimonious soft power war between China and the Washington bloc.
Washington’s drive to scapegoat China for COVID-19 is both an extension and escalation of this conflict, as is its affected concern for Hong Kongers and Uyghurs. Trump may be more bombastic and openly mendacious in his anti-China fulminations than his Democratic Party “opponents,” but the perspective they reflect is bipartisan. Influence campaigns to sell the public on greater hostilities against China are being spearheaded by elements of the news media in countries including the Five Eyes and Germany. Washington is also siding with India in a deadly border dispute with China, centred in the Ladakh region.
Ruling elites in all the Five Eyes countries, with the collaboration of legacy media, are aggressively stoking anti-China sentiment in their domestic populations. British prime minister Boris Johnson has also recently ordered Huawei’s expulsion from the country’s 5G network, and proposed the formation of a “D10” alliance, featuring the G7 plus Australia, South Korea, and India, for the express purpose of antagonizing Beijing.
This organized demagogy inflicts a heavy cost. Anti-Asian racism in many western societies has lately been inflamed by it; people who bear no conceivable responsibility for the spread of COVID-19 are being targeted with racist animus, hate crimes, even acts of physical violence. The cost could become extreme in the medium- to long-term should the U.S.-China cold war erupt into a hot war.
There is no persuasive evidence that the novel coronavirus was manufactured as a biological weapon. But it is currently being exploited as one, particularly by Washington, which has squeezed among other countries Iran, Syria, and Venezuela, precluding them from importing medicines to alleviate both the effects of COVID-19 and an excess death toll from the burden the pandemic has imposed on national health care systems of the targeted countries. The administration is also stepping up a long-running attempted strangulation of Cuba, now trying to sabotage the country’s medical internationalism. With the blessing and direct assistance of Washington, London, and their allies, a Saudi-led coalition of states is inflicting an extreme health crisis on the long-suffering civilian population of Yemen, in the name of undermining Iran’s strategic position in the region.
“America first” and the vaccine race
There’s an even starker contradiction between a liberal world order and unilateral hegemony in the area of warfare and defence procurement. Trump has been mocked during much of his presidency for his “America first” doctrine and emphasis on shifting advanced industrial production to the U.S., away from China and even allied states. From the bourgeois economic perspective of efficiency in the allocation of resources, it makes little sense indeed to impose “national security” tariffs on, for example, imports of steel and aluminum, both feedstock components rather than advanced manufactured goods. But from at least one perspective, there is a sinister method to Trump’s madness: a country that produces its own raw industrial materials can’t be subjected to wartime blockades that impede armaments production.
Similar “America first” geostrategic thinking guides Washington’s approach to vaccine development: the regime’s goal is to secure a coronavirus vaccine for the U.S. (and particularly the national elite) rather than the world public, and further, to monopolize the proceeds for corporate America. Trump’s reported attempt in March to poach a German firm researching coronavirus vaccines was a clear signal in this direction.
There is broad (at least rhetorical) international consensus that a COVID-19 vaccine, once developed, should be widely distributed and available for little to no cost. Many states are already actively cooperating in joint vaccine development efforts. This contrasts starkly with the attitude of Washington and London, as expressed at a conference in May of the World Health Assembly, the UN forum that governs the WHO:
Donald Trump launched a new vaccine war in May, but not against the virus. It was against the world. The United States and the UK were the only two holdouts in the World Health Assembly from the declaration that vaccines and medicines for COVID-19 should be available as public goods, and not under exclusive patent rights. The United States explicitly disassociated itself from the patent pool call, talking instead of “the critical role that intellectual property plays” — in other words, patents for vaccines and medicines.
The U.S. delegation expressed concern that international pooling of patents, as part of a collective effort by the world’s countries to procure an effective, low-cost vaccine would “send the wrong message to innovators” — in other words, compromise the ability of corporations to profiteer from patents on vaccines or treatments.
This points to another irrational barrier to vaccine development and distribution beyond the geopolitical one: rather than cooperate on a rational division of labour in pursuit of humanity’s collective interests, medical research teams around the world work in relative or complete isolation from each other. Much of their effort has been funded by corporate entities seeking to monopolize vaccines and treatments and charge exorbitant prices for access — an outcome likely to effectively deny most of the world’s population treatment for, or inoculation against, the COVID-19 pandemic.
Not only is this morally obscene; it also implies an extreme sacrifice of macroeconomic efficiency in pursuit of microeconomic superprofits. Consumers who have reason to fear the virus will cut back spending, and workers’ output (the engine of profit) will be undermined by both illness and additional precautions required to avoid viral transmission, which inevitably slow down production. Yet another deep contradiction gnaws at capitalism’s bones.
Other key financiers of the vaccine development effort include the Foundation of Bill Gates — incidentally, himself a notorious beneficiary of intellectual property monopolies extended thanks to corporate lobbying of the U.S. Congress, public-sector technology research migrated to the private sphere, and lax enforcement of antitrust law in the neoliberal era.
Value judgements of Gates or the executives of the corporations funding the vaccine drive are beside the point: democracy and social justice are incongruent with a system that subjects the welfare of billions to the caprice of a few plutocratic “philanthropists,” profiteers, and social engineers.
The project now underway is development of a vaccine that may not confer lasting immunity, on an expedited timescale virtually without precedent — as little as a few months. There is immense temptation for firms to cut corners in pursuit of commercial advantage, or to develop and patent a vaccine in the public interest before a U.S. firm creates one and claims a monopoly on the profits. Once again, the public’s health and safety are in the hands of a set of institutions that manifestly hold the public in contempt.
In Part III of this series, I’ll discuss the dystopic future tech firms and the state institutions linked to them have in store for us, and the most important reason for optimism: a rising rebel spirit in the population as evidenced by the anti-racist uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd.
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