A Blind Eye

My work on a memoir about my wife’s and my journey in philanthropy was interrupted by a New York Times article titled The Billionaire’s Backlash Against a Philanthropic Dream.

 

The story began in 2010 when Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett proposed The Giving Pledge, inviting billionaires to sign a pledge to give at least half their net worth to charity, preferably during their lifetimes. It seemed like a noble idea. 40 original signers grew to 250 signers worldwide.

 

It was inspiring to know that at least some of the world’s wealthiest people were committed to using their wealth to relieve suffering and to address the problems that humanity faced, most of which we had created. This was a counterweight to the forces that stepped on the downtrodden, creating inequality, injustice, suffering, and needless death. It was a saving grace in a world marked by conspicuous cruelty and greed.

But over the past two years, generosity stopped being fashionable. Many of the wealthy denizens of Silicon Valley have renounced the Pledge as a charade designed to sanitize excessive wealth and the people who possessed it. Charity had become an inconvenience that interfered with empire building and the quest for power. For some, the money was better spent buying influence with those at the levers of the power to make them even wealthier. It was simpler just to turn a blind eye to the suffering, the ravaging of the environment, and existential risk.

And those on the political right condemned most charitable causes as being too “woke,” a word that has been turned upside down as something to ridicule. Originally shorthand for an awareness of social injustices, the term, for me, encompasses compassion, concern for the suffering of others and a desire to lessen it, basic morality, and adherence to the Golden Rule. How did this become a slur and its adherents outcasts from the halls of power. When did greed, cruelty, and xenophobia become fashionable?

We are at a critical crossroads. Civilization can careen down a road to injustice, inequity, death, and destruction, allowing the rot in government to bleed into the private sector, leaving no succor for the downtrodden and little hope for our collective survival. Or it can recover its moral compass and use its vast resources to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and provide security and comfort for all.

Alligator Alcatraz - A Cruel and Shortsighted Idea

Governor DeSantis is building a detention facility for migrants in the middle of the Florida Everglades that will have a 30 square mile footprint in these wetlands. I’ve watched Fox News personalities exult at the brilliance of this plan and the horrors that migrants would experience if they tried to escape. The cruelty of the plan and of the people who cheer it exceeds the cruelty and persecution migrants fled in their own countries to seek asylum in ours. We should collectively be mortified that this is what our country is becoming.

There is much wrong with this plan. Logistically, it is hard to imagine that the facility will provide humane living conditions or protect detainees from the blistering heat they will encounter in that location. It is also hard to imagine that they will have access to emergency medical care. This facility will likely add to the mounting death toll that the roundup of migrants is exacting.

But it will also create an ecological disaster. The wetlands are a natural filtering system for spillover from Lake Okeechobee and other flooding as water makes its way to the sea. Without filtering, water that spills into the ocean carries concentrated nutrients that feed algae blooms, including Red Tide, which has been a scourge of the Florida coastline. Red Tide causes massive fish kills and kills and endangers coastal mammals including dolphins and manatees, an already endangered population. Red Tide toxins cause respiratory illness that, along with rotting fish in the waterways, drives coastal residents indoors and discourages tourism, the economic lifeblood of the state. Even the birds abandon areas where Red Tide prevails.

Alligators and pythons are more than a metaphor for the security of this facility. They are a metaphor for the cruelty, chaos, and shortsightedness of the way migrants are being treated by the people in power who vilify them.

War and Climate Change

 War is a major contributor to climate change. The early days of the Ukraine war (by November 2022) produced an estimated 80 megatons of carbon emissions (including estimated reconstruction costs), while the first four months of the Gaza war cost around 60 megatons. This is the equivalent of 30 million vehicles’ emissions over one year. Is it any surprise that blowing stuff up damages the environment?

As harrowing as are the costs of war to the combatants, the costs to the world at large are overwhelming. Climate change is a challenge requiring all nations to work together. We must recognize that its threat to all of us is greater than the threats among us and cease hostilities before we can address the common enemy.

The High Cost of Climate Change

While many people consider economic issues like inflation more important than climate change, they are tightly linked. Climate change is driving up the cost of goods and services across sectors. 

Increases in temperatures have an immediate effect upon power bills because of the increased demand on air conditioning. This affects residential power bills, but is also passed on to consumers in the form of increased prices in everything from the cost of restaurant meals and hotel bills to supermarket prices and the cost of manufactured goods.

Increases in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters from hurricanes to forest fires drive up the cost of new construction to mitigate these events as well as the cost of homeowners’ insurance, which may not even be available for disasters like hurricanes in coastal communities. The cost of the disasters themselves is escalating. Whole communities, like Sanibel Island and Ft Myers Beach, FL, have been wiped out. State and Federal governments shoulder much of the cost of rescue, cleanup and reconstruction, which will ultimately increase taxes and the national debt, destabilizing the economy. Depending upon the locations of these disasters, supply chains may be disrupted, driving up prices.

Worldwide increases in heat threaten food production and will inflate food prices. Current examples include the price of olive oil because of unfavorable growing conditions in the Mediterranean and the price and availability of cocoa products. But as previously fertile lands become arid, food staples will also become scarce and more costly. Livestock will be stressed. Some will die. The cost of keeping them alive and thriving will increase. Warming waters will threaten fisheries, killing fish and microorganisms at all levels of the food chain, further depleting already diminished populations. At best, we can expect the cost of all kinds of food to escalate. At worst, we may be faced with famine.

For all these reasons, climate change should rise to the top of voters' priorities in the coming election, particularly given the stark difference in perception and priorities between the candidates on both state and federal levels. Inflation has been referred to as a “kitchen table issue” because of its immediate perceived effect on well-being. But the inextricable link between climate change and the cost of living, not just for the distant future but for the present should place climate at the center of the table.

Gaza 2023 - How Did We Get Here?

The recent Hamas attacks on Israel is the result of both short-term and long-term determinants, with no solutions in sight. The policies of the Netanyahu government have added insult to the injury of oppressive living conditions that reach back decades if not centuries.

Gaza has never been self-governing and arguably has never been a cohesive ethnic or political entity. Part of the Ottoman Empire until 1918, it was then occupied by Britain for the next 30 years. When the UN recommended the partition of Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish states in November 1947, Israel accepted the plan, but the Arabs rejected it and launched a war of annihilation, which ended in their defeat. They came under Egyptian control from 1948 until June 1967, during which much of its population remained in refugee camps or similar conditions. perpetuating atrocious living conditions that fomented anger and violence, directed mainly at the most recent occupier, Israel. The wish for revenge among the population has fueled a renewed determination to eliminate the Jewish population entirely from the region.

The abandonment of the Palestinians has actually been a collective transgression, both in Gaza and in the West Bank. Why haven’t the nations (Egypt for Gaza and Jordan for the West Bank) of which they were a part before 1967 opened their doors to those in the territories who preferred not to be governed by Israel, instead of relegating them to impoverished refugee camps in a hostile environment? Has the hidden agenda been to leave them as a thorn in Israel’s side, even while ostensibly making peace?

Perhaps a way out, now that Egypt and Jordan are no longer Israel’s sworn enemies, would be for those nations to revisit their commitments to their former citizens and to the establishment of lasting peace in the region. For the West Bank, that might mean Israel ceding the territory not to a Palestinian state committed to its destruction but to Jordan, its partner in peace, to take responsibility for securing the borders and ensuring Israel’s sovereignty over its own land. For Gaza, the solution may require more creativity, given its limited contiguity with Egypt and its location almost entirely within Israel’s boundaries.

Given the concurrent threat of climate change and rising seas, the viability of the Gaza Strip as a place to live might already have a limited future. Creating an alternative, welcoming homeland might provide the most humane solution for a struggling population.

Who is Protecting Children's Lives?

While conservatives have done everything possible to guarantee the rights of fetuses to be born into this perilous world, liberals are dedicated to protecting the lives and welfare of sentient living children.

• By advocating for the rights of all children not to go hungry

• By advocating for the rights of all children to have access to medical care

• By advocating for the rights of all children to live in healthy environments free of toxins and pollution that would threaten their health and cognitive development

• By advocating for the rights of all children to be educated and reach their potential

• By opposing the proliferation of weapons of war on our streets and in our schools. Gun deaths are now the leading cause of childhood deaths, and gun suicides in the US are at an all time high.

• By acknowledging the reality of human caused climate change and advocating for measures to mitigate it. Climate change not only threatens the future lives of children and future generations, it is already claiming countless lives today worldwide with natural disasters, heat waves, drought, famine, and imperiled water supplies.

  
  

When we protect the lives of children and the disadvantaged and improve the environment for every human being and every species of life on the earth, who can that possibly hurt?

Renewable Energy Can Blow Inflation Away

Aside from the crucial role of renewable energy sources in preventing climate change from making our planet uninhabitable, they also have considerable economic benefit. The current inflation crisis brings into focus the need for measures against inflation going forward. Renewables offer a powerful tool to accomplish this.

The causes of inflation are numerous. Not the least of these is energy costs. As the price of fossil fuels rises, the impact hits many areas of our economy. Direct energy costs are passed on to the consumer in the price of gasoline, the price of fuels for heating homes, and the price of electricity, each adding an inflation surcharge to each household’s monthly expenses. These added costs are already mitigated for households owning electric vehicles and those deriving their energy from renewables either directly, for example from rooftop solar panels, or indirectly, via utilities that use renewable energy sources.

The cost of fossil fuels, however, also contributes to the rising cost of consumer goods. Manufacturing goods requires enormous expenditures of energy. And transporting them from the point of manufacture through the various waypoints to final delivery consumes enormous amounts of fuel. Each step adds to the final cost of products.

Once the infrastructure to capture renewable energy is built, the cost of delivering energy becomes vanishingly small and remarkably stable. The episodic shortages, either because of naturally occurring events or the manipulation of supply by entities who control it, that have whipsawed oil prices until now would no longer occur in an economy based largely on renewable energy. Increasingly efficient energy storage systems would eventually meet seasonal demands. And the direct cost of energy to consumers would no longer threaten their security. While the price of goods would still fluctuate somewhat with supply and demand, the added effect of escalating fuel costs would no longer apply.

Climate change itself contributes to inflationary pressures through damaging effects upon crop production, livestock maintenance, forests, and other resources. The scarcity of these resources results in higher prices to consumers for everything from food to manufactured goods. And the destructive power of extreme weather events adds to scarcity and the demand for materials to repair the damage as well as an increased demand for fuels to heat or cool our homes.

Inflation is a political rallying cry that threatens to divide our nation further. But it should also be a wake-up call for those in power to unite in support of legislation designed to mitigate climate change by powering the future of our nation and the world with renewable energy.