Part One:
We speak with Joshua Keating, senior editor at Slate focusing on international affairs. This is a presidency that is built to keep people out of the country, not to govern it. The result is the disease continues to spread with no end in sight, and that American citizens are now global public health pariahs.
We discuss the turnaround among nations, regarding their policies to protect their people from COVID-19 and the up-and-down results: from outbreaks to flattening the curve to “reopening” the society to new spikes again. Earlier this year, Britain got hit hard and the US/Trump belittled them and shut off their access to entering our country. Now the opposite is true: Britain just prohibited entry to the international COVID pariah countries including Rwanda, Brazil and the United States. We, on the other hand, have the highest number of COVID cases on the planet and Dr. Fauci is predicting enormous further spikes.
At the same time, Trump is using the pandemic as an excuse to shut down immigration especially for people of color. The president pretends to be acting in order to protect the safety of the American public from COVID-19. But in actual fact, he has shut down the asylum protections entirely, which conforms fully with his administration’s consistent actions to restrict and slow down the asylum process and to impose punishing policies on the vulnerable families who have fled violence in their home countries in search of the protection of asylum in the US.
Part Two:
We talk to Mark Serreze, a climate scientist and Director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, about the increasing frequency of Arctic heat waves. They are becoming so extreme that, recently, temperatures in Siberia rose to 100 degrees. Yes, 100 degrees – that’s hot even for beach weather.
The Arctic heat waves follow a disturbing pattern. They could produce irreversible results that threaten our planet at an existential level. In addition to ice caps and glaciers melting – resulting in seas rising – the heat in the Arctic is thawing the permafrost. When it was frozen solid, the permafrost was able to support heavy buildings with no problem; it would take a sledgehammer to crack the surface.
But once the permafrost melts, the buildings are left standing on spongy moss. This is what happened to an oil refinery in May, resulting in tons of oil spilling into a river, causing a great deal of environmental damage. Even worse, once the permafrost melts, the damage may be permanent: it is unlikely to refreeze sufficiently.
