What a week. It has been hard to keep up with the breaking news. We’re all concerned for the wellbeing and safety of our families, friends, and communities. I know it’s a tough time for everyone, so I wanted to write to you today and to share some of what I’ve been seeing.
Last week, as businesses and schools began closing in response to COVID-19, I was thinking a lot about those who are most at risk — seniors, those with chronic illness, health care workers, and people without the time or resources to prepare.
Air pollution makes people more vulnerable to respiratory infections; climate change brings people in closer contact with animals that can spread disease.
COVID-19 is finally the monster at the door. Researchers are working night and day to characterize the outbreak but they are faced with three huge challenges.
First the continuing shortage or unavailability of test kits has vanquished all hope of containment. Moreover it is preventing accurate estimates of key parameters such as reproduction rate, size of infected population and number of benign infections. The result is a chaos of numbers.
Writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben says the adaptations we make to fight the COVID-19 outbreak could hold valuable lessons elsewhere — in the efforts to mitigate climate change. 10:56
The Trudeau government should not use the oil-price crash and the economic downturn stemming from a public-health crisis as an excuse to back away from environmental commitments in the upcoming federal budget, warned a coalition of civil society leaders.
Speaking on Parliament Hill on Tuesday, representatives from Indigenous, labour, social justice and other organizations said now was not the time for Canada to shy away from tackling the climate emergency.
IF YOU’VE BEEN spending any time online or watching cable TV, you’ve gotten the message that humanity now faces two grave threats — a novel coronavirus and the crashing stock market — of roughly equal importance.
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court of Ireland has agreed to hear a climate lawsuit against the Irish government, due in part, the court said, to the “degree of urgency” posed by climate change. The decision makes the suit, dubbed “Climate Case Ireland” by the plaintiffs, Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE), one of only a handful of human rights-based climate cases to reach any country’s Supreme Court.
