Hello from Paris! And Europe! Where our collective fates are more intertwined than a ball of rubber bands. There’s global warming, of course, which respects no national boundaries. In fact I saw a graph somewhere that showed that the countries which had done the most to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, specifically those in western Europe, were being the hardest hit this summer by awful temperatures and wildfires.
Then there’s the Russian agression in Ukraine. Moscow marked their five-month anniversary of the war by signing an agreement brokered by Istanbul and the UN to allow grain to be exported from Ukraine, but immediately bombarded the port of Odessa that it will need to pass through.
While Africa and the Middle East have been suffering the most from the global grain shortage, some of it was meant for Western Europe, like the gas that may or may not be allowed to flow down the pipeline come cold weather. Even if you don’t think that there will be Russian soldiers marching down the Champs Elysées anytime soon, we’re beginning to feel the consequences. French and German citizens are being warned to expect a winter with shortages and belt-tightening somewhat reminiscent of World War II.
In the long-term though, one important effect of the war is how it’s consolidated Putin’s power. A couple weeks ago, the Wilson Institute, a centrist thinktank, published, “Putin’s Use of War in Ukraine to Tidy Up Loose Ends at Home,” to explain at least some of the benefit of the war for the autocrat, even if he didn’t get the quick victory he expected.
This in turn, creates its own political ripples, since Putin’s become a role model for aspiring autocrats and populists from both the right and left. In France, Mélenchon has been a big supporter of Putin ( article in French). But let’s not forget the ever present Le Pen family whose extreme right party accepted a juicy Russian loan.
Both contingents made big strides in the latest parliamentary election.
In Italy, just this week, the popular Italian PM Mario Draghi was forced to resign after a successful plot engineered by Putin-pal Silvio Berlusconi. A favorite to replace him is rising post-fascist star, Giorgia Meloni, head of the Fratelli d’Italia party, who’s busy networking with autocrats and far-right politicians across the globe, including “Le Pen in France (whose niece is also building an international network of neo-facists), Orban in Hungary and some Republicans in the US.”
Giorgia Meloni, too, was long a Putin-supporter, though she’s actually denounced his attack on Ukraine. Speculation is that she’s just posturing to make her party seem less radical. Who knows what she’ll do if she’s installed as PM?
What I’m sure of, is that the more blatantly authoritarian Putin gets, the more emboldened and enthusiastic his power-hungry cronies. And the victory of each Putin-ally does nothing but fracture the EU, one of the last bastions anywhere of basic democratic ideals.
So, yeah, things are getting unbearably interesting here in Europe.
When Identity Politics and Global Warming Collide
During last week’s more or less global heat wave, several publications across the world churned out articles about the effect of heat on the human body, which, spoiler alert, is not good.
Le Monde for instance reported that “high temperatures can cause headaches, confusion and slow motor function, especially in the elderly.” That’s the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. They reminded us that in France, the 2003 heat wave caused 15,000 deaths.
In that cesspool Twitter, misguided Wokesters of all races rushed to denounce these pieces as racist, tweeting responses like, “They should have said it was the effect of heat on the white body.” After all, they themselves had a very nice vacation in the broiling Caribbean. Or their grannies in India never had a problem with the heat.
There were so many of them and they were all so bizarrely sure of themselves, so smug. So pitiless. So ignorant, too. For the last few years I’ve been watching films and reading articles like this 2019 piece from The Guardian about how hundreds of migrant workers die of heat stress every year in Qatar.
In a television documentary, I watched last year, I particularly remember how one of the worst things faced by those who were obliged to work outside in brutal heat was how crystals began to form in their urine, leading to kidney stones and pain almost too extreme to bear. (An informative piece about kidney stones and the heat.)
Heat deaths are a growing problem in the U.S., too. This 2021 piece from NPR proved at least 384 workers died from environmental heat exposure in the last decade, and predicts worse to come.
The count includes people toiling in essential yet often invisible jobs in 37 states across the country: farm laborers in California, construction and trash-collection workers in Texas and tree trimmers in North Carolina and Virginia. An analysis of federal data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the three-year average of worker heat deaths has doubled since the early 1990s.
Reading these idiots on Twitter, I thought about how most of the agriculture workers in the U.S. and “guest” workers dying in the Gulf States weren’t white. And how what matters anyway in a heat wave isn’t skin color. It’s whether you have air conditioning. If you’re healthy. If you’re working outside and are allowed to knock off during the hottest part of the day. If you have access to water.
The most important variable, though, is whether or not you’re considered disposable. That definitely has something to do with racism. No one cares about migrant workers. But the elderly are just as insignificant. In France in 2003, over 80 percent of the victims were 75 years and older. Of those, many lived alone, had pre-existing conditions, and as Wikipedia suggested, had either:
never faced such extreme heat before and did not know how to react or were too mentally or physically impaired by the heat to make the necessary adaptations themselves.
The French were particularly shocked about how many older people died alone, their relatives and neighbors finding them days and weeks later after returning from their own vacations. Horrified by the deaths, France put in place a policy to protect vulnerable citizens. By 2019 France reportedly managed to cut the death toll by 90% during heat waves.
The lesson I learned is that while global warming itself often seems (or is) an insurmountable challenge, some of its effects can be countered by acts as simple as knocking on your neighbor’s door and making sure they’re sitting in front of a fan and are drinking water. Protecting outside workers isn’t particularly complicated either. What they need are constant access to water and time off during the hottest part of the day. The only real obstacle to saving them is their invisibility, and our indifference.
To end with something cheerful…
That’s it for this time.