Gov. Abbott Willing to Sacrifice Our Children

Gov. Greg Abbott is doing his best to sacrifice the life of your child or grand-child. By issuing an order banning local governments from passing mask mandates Abbott has willfully chosen to sacrifice the lives and health of the children of this state. You may hear plenty of “its might right” talk coming from Republicans and especially Libertarians who don’t want to wear a mask in public but they’re wrong.

Isn't your right to drive drunk? Shouldn't parents be able to decide whether or not to use a car seat for infants and toddlers? Why can’t paint companies and gasoline refiners use lead in their products like they used to? The answer is public health; we all have a right to life and health that cannot be subordinated to the right of an individual to just do as they please. That’s why government must have the power to mandate public mask wearing and should use it at this critical time. In fact the U.S. Constitution makes that very point in the preamble which states: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Here in Texas the weekly number of new, confirmed cases of COVID-19 is now greater than it was last year at this time. Hospital capacities in ICU’s all over the state are again near peak levels and deaths are again on the rise. As parents, children, and teachers prepare for the new school year its incumbent on school boards and administrations to look out for the best interests of those children. It’s important that they consider the best available information.

At the request of the North Carolina legislature Duke University researchers tracked COVID-19 transmission in North Carolina K-12 schools across 100 school districts, 14 charter schools, 160,549 school staffers, and more than 864,515 students attending in-school instruction.  The researchers, Dr. Kanecia Zimmerman, associate professor of pediatrics at the Duke University School of Medicine, and Dr. Danny Benjamin, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Duke Health wrote; "We have learned a few things for certain. Although vaccination is the best way to prevent COVID-19, universal masking is a close second, and with masking in place, in-school learning is safe and more effective than remote instruction, regardless of community rates of infection."

Dr. Benjamin stressed the efficacy of universal in-school masking in an interview with PBS News Hour stating "What we found was despite having extremely widespread COVID in the communities in North Carolina, if universal masking is in place, the chances of one child infecting another is less than 1 percent," he said. Voluntary masking, on the other hand, is about as useless as universal masking is effective. "Having a voluntary mask policy is like having a no-peeing section of a pool or a no-smoking section on an airplane," Dr. Benjamin explained. "That's absurd."

Given their constitutional duty to promote the general welfare, in this case public health, it is necessary for all levels of government to have the ability to impose mask mandates as appropriate in order to protect the lives and health of our children whether some parents are smart enough to understand that or not. Gov. Abbott’s presidential ambitions are insufficient cause to sacrifice our precious children’s health or lives.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - August 18, 2021

Gulf Stream Collapse Catastrophic

Last week climate scientists reported that the Gulf Stream has become unstable and is nearly total collapse. You might remember that the Gulf Stream is the ocean current that sends warm water from the Gulf of Mexico north up the east coast and across the northern Atlantic to western Europe which moderates the winters there. The Gulf Stream is a part of what scientists call the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and it also sends cold but less salty water southward deep in the ocean. If this circulation of warm and cold water should fail as it appears ready to do it could threaten our entire civilization.

The AMOC affects the climate of the east coast of North America as well the coasts of northwestern Africa and Western Europe. Its failure would cause rising sea levels on the U.S. Atlantic coast, threatening numerous cities. That failure could also wreak havoc on the world’s food supply, due to its effect on rainfall from South America to India and West Africa. Just as concerning, would be the effect on the Antarctic ice sheets and the Amazon rainforest which are already in trouble.

Climate scientists aren’t ready to predict when such a catastrophe will occur just that we’re approaching a tipping point and they don’t know how much more it will take to get there.  Given the unknowns the only thing to do is keep CO2 emissions as low as possible in order to minimize overall climate change. Every little bit of CO2 added to the atmosphere further increases the likelihood of this extremely high-impact event occurring.

More than 30% of jobs in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are in agriculture; the way of life of these works revolves around fairly stable climate systems doing what they’re expected to do most of the time. Climate change tossing that out the window by amplifying existing weather patterns of dry spells, then heavy rainfall, then dry spells. Rainfall is becoming either increasingly abundant or in desperately short supply, relative to longtime averages. It’s a classic case of feast or famine and right now, rural farming families across Central America are starving. Some are even taking their families and leaving their homes. Not because they want to but because they have to in order to survive.

If you think immigration is a problem now, wait until severe drought conditions go on for decades in Central and South America as has happened in millennia past and brought down civilizations like the Maya and Aztecs. More than 140 million people across three regions of the world; Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, could be displaced by 2050 due to foreseeable climate impacts like sea-level rise, extreme heat, drought, and crop failures caused by changing farming conditions. That’s not counting those displaced by hurricanes and flooding.

One of the most important reasons I wanted to see Democrats return to the White House and control of Congress was the difference in climate policy between the two parties. I was thrilled when President Biden returned the U.S. to the Paris Climate Accord though I’m frustrated that congress still hasn’t enacted legislation and budgets to actually get moving on our commitments. The longer we wait the higher and steeper a hill we’ll have to climb to get the world out of trouble. It’s past time to act decisively.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - August 11, 2021