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In the past week, I’ve watched friends and acquaintances struggle to process news of the delta variant’s rapid spread across the United States. People who follow Covid news and research for a living saw this coming: They knew that the low vaccination rates across the country and the world would enable new variants to evolve, threatening plans to reopen society and end the pandemic. Dr. Eric Topol nailed it when he told Melody Schreiber at the beginning of last month that “the delta variant story is going to be played out largely in July and August, at the latest. It’ll be over all the country, dominant, in the next two weeks.”

But a lot of people—understandably—didn’t see this coming. They knew about the variants in the abstract but trusted various signs this spring, including from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local authorities as they dropped masking requirements, that society was more or less reopening for good. Now, as mask mandates are reinstated and the autumn looks less certain, many are both frustrated and deeply shaken. The vaccines were developed! They work! These were incredible scientific feats. How is it possible that we, as a country and society, couldn’t stick the landing?

Many health and climate writers have reflected on the parallels between Covid-19 and climate change. As Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote for The New Republic last March, “My climate grief and my grief about the coronavirus pandemic feel devastatingly similar. Both crises represent tectonic shifts in the way the world works.” But she also identified “the maddening, infuriating parallel of watching the Powers That Be ignore the science and neglect their duty to protect the public, leaving us all to fend for ourselves—to fight this overwhelming and overpowering menace through our own ‘individual actions.’”

In the last few weeks, this connection has felt particularly acute, as the delta variant and Congress’s bipartisan infrastructure package become the top stories in the nation. The bipartisan bill contains unprecedented levels of climate spending that absolutely every climate reporter knows are still way below what’s needed to avoid catastrophe. As TNR’s Kate Aronoff wrote this morning, the bill is simultaneously a high-water mark and “a complete abdication of responsibility.”

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Kendra Pierre-Louis, who reports and produces Gimlet Media’s “How to Save a Planet” podcast, put it particularly well.

Both climate policy and Covid policy feature a couple of devastatingly obvious low-hanging fruit that really rich national governments just can’t seem to pick off the tree. Ketan Joshi, who penned a great piece for TNR this spring about a Dutch court’s ruling against Shell, identified one of the climate examples:

Where the long fight against Covid-19 is concerned, vaccine mandates—with exceptions made for people with serious medical conditions that preclude them from getting the shot—seem similarly obvious. And yet we keep punting.

Frustration is clearly building—over our inaction on climate change, over our inability to take the measures needed to end the pandemic for good, and more. Finding productive outlets for that anger could make all the difference, going forward, between progress and chaos. As mentioned last week, that’s the focus of Liza Featherstone’s new fortnightly column for TNR. I have a feeling you’ll like this week’s edition, which examines the all-too-human tendency to replace our anxiety about one overwhelming thing with anxiety about something else.

—Heather Souvaine-Horn, deputy editor

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Stat of the Week

That’s the amount of money that multinational pipeline company Enbridge has paid, via an escrow account, to local law enforcement and fire departments to reimburse them for expenses related to its Line 3 project, including responding to protesters, according to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission.

Good News

A survey published this week confirms that a rare chameleon scientists feared might be extinct still exists in dwindling areas of low-elevation rain forest in southern Malawi. Deforestation remains a serious threat.

Bad News

Thawing permafrost could release much more methane than previously thought—not only the gases stored in frozen wetlands but also, according to a new study, gases currently trapped in limestone formations.

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

Finding climate history in the river bottom

Researchers are taking advantage of an otherwise devastating drought to uncover oak trees long submerged in the mud of the Red River, which spans from northern Minnesota to the Canadian border. They’re studying their rings in order to understand hundreds of years of climate history and better prepare for the severe weather ahead:

The information in the growth rings of these old trees can also provide some practical data.

St. George said many communities are preparing for the worst case floods based on little more than a century of data collected by observing river levels.

“And so I think if we’re honest with ourselves, that information doesn't give us a very firm picture of what a very big, very rare flood is,” said St. George.

“A lot of communities are trying to prepare against the 100-year flood, or the 200-year flood, or the 500-year flood, based on only about a century or so of real measurements of the river. And so it’s really tough for us to come up with an accurate estimate of worst-case scenario, when our understanding of the river itself is fairly shallow.”

Dan Gunderson | MPR News