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As the Culture Wars Flare Amid the Pandemic, a Call to Speak ‘Science to Power’
A growing number of National Academy of Science members sign a statement decrying the Trump administration’s “denigration of scientific expertise.”
BY JUDY FAHYS Inside Climate News
More than a thousand of the nation’s top scientists say it’s time to speak “science to power,” as Covid-19 deaths top 141,000 nationally and cases continue to rise in 43 states. The scientists are calling on policymakers to restore evidence-based decision-making—especially when it comes to managing life-and-death challenges like the global pandemic and climate change.
More than 1,240 National Academy of Science members have now registered their personal concern about the Trump administration’s denigration of science.
The effort began when 375 academy members signed an open letter in 2016 warning that then-candidate Trump’s threatened withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement would harm American credibility and leadership. Hundreds more added their signatures to a statement posted online in 2018, after President Trump set the withdrawal in motion.
And several hundreds more members have signed the statement in recent weeks, speaking out as public health experts warning about surging Covid-19 cases have been attacked for perpetrating a “hoax” and overstating the seriousness of the disease.
Climate scientist Benjamin D. Santer helped initiate the open letter in 2016 and fielded signatures this spring as the scientific community grew increasingly alarmed about the Trump administration’s handling of climate change and the pandemic.
At a time when a cohesive and science-based approach is crucial, Santer said, the Trump White House has doubled down on attacking the government’s most prominent infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, over his advice to respond more aggressively to Covid-19.
“It’s a teachable moment,” said Santer, who works at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, one of the nation’s 17 national laboratories. “And the hope is that the lesson learned from the last few months is that science matters. Ignore it at your peril.”
The “Statement to Restore Science-Based Policy in Government” was posted by NAS members calling themselves Scientists for Science-Based Policy in 2018. Now, the signatures represent 43 percent of academy members, all of whom emphasize they are speaking for themselves and not for NAS or their institutions.
The online statement notes that the United States is the only nation to have left the Paris Agreement.
“The decision to withdraw is symptomatic of a larger problem: the Trump Administration’s denigration of scientific expertise and harassment of scientists,” the statement says. “The dismissal of scientific evidence in policy formulation has affected wide areas of the social, biological, environmental and physical sciences.”
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Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion campaign for a breakup between big tech and big oil
Employing disparate tactics, the activist organizations want Amazon, Google and Microsoft to stop helping the fossil fuel industry extract more oil and gas.
By Ilana Cohen Inside Climate News
When Sam Kern started working at Google four years ago, she believed she could drive change as an insider. If she could just “get the ear” of the right executives, Kern thought, she could convince them to move the company in a new direction on climate and sustainability.
But over time, Kern said she realized, powerful moneyed interests made that impossible.
Kern, a user experience engineer, described company leaders as “putting up a wall between the business interests and human interests,” even as they seemed to recognize the severity of the climate crisis, which made conversations with them feel emotionally disconnected.
So Kern turned to more direct activism. After becoming involved with the employee group Googlers for Climate Action, Kern joined thousands of tech workers who walked out of their offices during last September’s global climate strike to demand bold climate commitments from their employers. And she didn’t stop there.
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Kern left Google in May and joined the radical climate activist group Extinction Rebellion, which earlier this month launched a digital campaign, bigtechlovesbigoil.com, targeting tech majors Google, Microsoft and Amazon for providing oil and gas companies with cloud computing services, custom artificial intelligence and machine learning tools.
By then, Greenpeace had also launched an effort to stop Amazon, Google and Microsoft from working with Big Oil in ways that help oil and gas companies extract fossil fuels and cause further global warming.
In May, Greenpeace published “Oil in the Cloud,” a report that said the three tech giants had spent years pursuing lucrative deals to supply Chevron, Shell, BP and ExxonMobil with technology to enhance fossil fuel extraction and production. As the paper highlighted, all three tech majors have bold public-facing sustainability commitments, centered around reducing their companies’ carbon footprint and investing in renewable energy.
Elizabeth Jardim, a senior corporate campaigner for Greenpeace USA and the report’s co-author, said she worries that the tech companies could offer the oil and gas industry a lifeline at a time when oil prices have fallen amid the coronavirus pandemic and a growing divestment movement.
“I don’t think these solutions will totally save the oil and gas industry, but they’re certainly helping an industry that should be on the way out to hold on,” said Jardim, who sees the Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion campaigns as complimentary.
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Closing the technology gap will allow parents to opt for online schooling this fall in New Jersey
By Joanna Gagis NJTV News
It was a constant fight for the computer, says fifth grade student Maiholy Peña, who suddenly switched to homeschooling this spring without the technology at home to do her work. It left her scrambling to finish on time. She and her sister are among the thousands of kids in New Jersey at risk of falling into a learning gap called the digital divide.
“Sometimes I wanted to study, my sister wanted to read books and my mother wanted to study English. So it was really stressful,” Peña said.
Newark’s West Side High School Principal Akbar Cook told Senior Correspondent David Cruz on ChatBox that it’s an all too familiar scene for his students.
“I have kids that have multiple siblings in one home and have one device and have no wifi. So then Altice, which is Optimum Online, they said they would give the kids the wifi, but it was just a band-aid because it only was for a certain amount of days. So here you have kids with no means of communicating with their teachers. Even the cell phones, they didn’t even have cell phones. It was just so bad,” he said.
And as districts prepare fall plans, Gov. Phil Murphy’s now giving parents the option to keep kids home for remote learning only. But parents who may want to do this for health reasons, may also not be able due to lack of technology. Recently, the Legislature and governor agreed to fund an effort to close the divide for the roughly 230,000 students in need, many of them in urban districts.
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Hazardous waste treatment plant developer Elcon withdraws application for facility in Fairless Hills, Bucks County, Pa
By Frank Kummer Philadelphia Inquirer
Israel-based Elcon Recycling Services has withdrawn its application to build a large facility in Falls Township that would have processed up to 210,000 tons of liquid chemical waste annually for recycling, according to a notice the company filed Thursday.
“The current business climate, including the impacts of COVID-19, has forced Elcon to reevaluate its plans for expanding its hazardous waste treatment business into the United States,” Zvi Elgat, the company’s CEO, said in a withdrawal letter to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
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Elcon’s plan to build a U.S. plant had been met with years of stiff resistance from officials and residents in the Bucks County township.
“The withdrawal of Elcon’s applications for a proposed project in Falls Township is a win for both local residents and the environment,” State Sen. Steve Santarsiero (D., Bucks) said in the statement. “I have been opposed to Elcon’s proposal from the beginning. … Today’s announcement is a victory in a hard-fought battle, led by concerned residents, to protect the health and safety of our entire community.”
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N.J. coronavirus deaths increase to 15,730 with 177,887 total cases as outbreak continues to slow
By Brent Johnson and Matt Arco | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
New Jersey’s death toll from the coronavirus rose to 15,730 on Thursday, with 177,887 total cases in a little less than five months — though the outbreak here continues to slow, with the Garden State standing alone as the only state in the U.S. that has seen its number of new cases drop the last two full weeks.
Officials reported 23 new confirmed deaths and 344 new cases in the state. Of the total deaths, 13,810 are lab-confirmed and 1,920 are considered probable.
Only four of the newly reported deaths happened in the last five days, Gov. Phil Murphy said. The rest happened earlier and have only recently been confirmed.
New Jersey’s case numbers in recent days have been skewed not only by a nationwide delay in getting test results thanks to a surge in cases across the country but also by a reporting issue with Quest private lab test results. Health officials said they have been working through that backlog, which was initially estimated at 15,000 tests.
“We continue to work to get updated data,” Murphy said Thursday during an unrelated news conference in Long Branch.
The state’s daily positivity rate — the percentage of residents who test positive in one day — was 2.88% on Sunday, the date with the most recent available data.
“The good news is: Over 97% of people tested on Sunday tested negative,” Murphy said. “And we hope that continues to be the case, if not even better.”
The state’s rate of transmission — a key figure officials are using to determine how to further lift restrictions — remained steady at 0.9, below the key benchmark of 1.
When the transmission rate is below 1, that means that each new case is spreading to fewer than one other person and the outbreak is declining. Still, Murphy cautioned Wednesday that the testing result lag could affect the current transmission rate.
Thursday marks the 15th straight day New Jersey has reported fewer than 50 new deaths in one day.
There were 869 people being treated for confirmed or suspected coronavirus cases across 70 of New Jersey’s 71 hospitals Wednesday night, according to the state’s coronavirus dashboard. One hospital did not report data.
That’s down from 873 on Tuesday and down significantly down from the state’s peak in mid-April, when there were more than 8,000 patients.
Of those hospitalized Wednesday, 152 were in critical or intensive care and 73 were on ventilators. There were 75 coronavirus patients discharged from hospitals Wednesday.
New Jersey, a densely populated state of 9 million residents, ranks second among U.S. states in total COVID-19 deaths and fifth in total cases.
Nearly half of New Jersey’s COVID-19 deaths have been residents or staff members of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. At least 6,864 of the state’s lab-confirmed deaths have come from those facilities.
The total number of coronavirus cases in New Jersey is cumulative and does not reflect the thousands of residents who have recovered. More than 31,800 residents in the state have recovered from the virus, according to Johns Hopkins University.
There have now been more than 1.8 million COVID-19 tests administered in the state.
COUNTY-BY COUNTY NUMBERS
- Bergen County: 20,133 cases (31 new), 1,771 confirmed deaths (263 probable)
- Hudson County: 19,289 cases (14 new), 1,319 confirmed deaths (175 probable)
- Essex County: 19,198 cases (35 new), 1,847 confirmed deaths (247 probable)
- Middlesex County: 17,442 cases (14 new), 1,184 confirmed deaths (212 probable)
- Passaic County: 17,214 cases (27 new), 1,082 confirmed deaths (156 probable)
- Union County: 16,297 cases (16 new), 1,168 confirmed deaths (175 probable)
- Ocean County: 10,074 cases (28 new), 942 confirmed deaths (70 probable)
- Monmouth County: 9,748 cases (37 new), 751 confirmed deaths (100 probable)
- Camden County: 7,910 cases (29 new), 509 confirmed deaths (55 probable)
- Mercer County: 7,869 cases (14 new), 565 confirmed deaths (43 probable)
- Morris County: 7,016 cases (7 new), 674 confirmed deaths (153 probable)
- Burlington County: 5,502 cases (16 new), 427 confirmed deaths (41 probable)
- Somerset County: 5,094 cases (12 new), 472 confirmed deaths (78 probable)
- Atlantic County: 3,169 cases (12 new), 225 confirmed deaths (15 probable)
- Cumberland County: 3,100 cases (6 new), 141 confirmed deaths (13 probable)
- Gloucester County: 2,894 cases (25 new), 193 confirmed deaths (7 probable)
- Warren County: 1,296 cases (1 new), 155 confirmed deaths (14 probable)
- Sussex County: 1,259 cases (4 new), 158 confirmed deaths (37 probable)
- Hunterdon County: 1,102 cases (1 new), 70 confirmed deaths (56 probable)
- Salem County: 843 cases (2 new),76 confirmed deaths (5 probable)
- Cape May County: 767 cases (5 new), 81 confirmed deaths (5 probable)
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