Once again, CBS journalists are taking a pandemic that has killed 315,000 people worldwide and are using it as an example of how humans destroy Earth. In a 13 minute segment on Sunday’s 60 Minutes, reporter Jon Wertheim linked global warming to “mother nature “hissing” at us: “I will not be ignored!” He also promoted the ideas of an environmentalist professor who wants no new coal plants, get rid of planes and force car companies to make hybrids.
Wertheim, who is actually a sports journalist, opened the segment by lecturing, “The real reckoning of our age, maybe of our lifetimes, is not whether we will prevail over the virus. It’s whether our respect for science and our collective will--so muscular during the crisis--will prevail when we reboot and rebuild.” He connected the corona pandemic to climate change and disasters, warning that “mother nature” was “starting to clear her throat”:
Looking back, Mother Earth was starting to clear her throat and make herself heard. Australian bushfires were ravaging the continent. Earth had registered its highest temperatures since records began.
Continuing the comparison, Wertheim described the Earth as sounding like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, suggesting all of this is the planet saying, “I will not be ignored.”
Do we reimagine health care, now that we’ve seen how easily systems stress and lock out so many? And what about the gulfs between rich and poor? Maybe the biggest decision of all, now that the planet has essentially hissed, ‘I will not be ignored,’ how do we confront the climate emergency?
Wertheim talked to Professor Bill McKibben. In the segment, the Middlebury College professor casually attacked capitalism:
We’ve spent the last 7500 hundred years really fixated, in our country and increasingly around the world, on economic growth as the reason for all being. And, you know, for the most part, that’s where there, at least for a while, that worked out pretty well. Lot of people were pulled out of poverty, whatever else. But we’ve begun to sense the limits of that too. That’s why the temperature keeps rising.
Who is McKibben? In 2011, he started 350.org, a group that has the following as goals:
No more new coal-fired power plants anywhere.
Quickly close the [coal-fired power plants] already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they're supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.)
Making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way U.S. automakers made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II.
Making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.
Of course, none of that was mentioned on 60 Minutes. Instead, Wertheim showcased the upside to the pandemic’s mass death and destruction of the economy:
And it’s like this from Shanghai to Secaucus, by circumstance and not design, a glimpse of life with fewer fossil fuels. And already the clean and quiet surroundings have found favor with wildlife. What does that tell you about the Earth’s ability to rebound and snap back?
(Side note: Almost all of Wertheim’s background is in sports. He’s the executive editor at Sports Illustrated. Why is he CBS’s expert on global warming?)
CBS, as well as other media outlets, have repeatedly pushed the “silver lining” to the deadly coronavirus.
A partial transcript is below. Click “expand” to read more.
60 Minutes
5/17/2020
7:40:00 PM ET
JON WERTHEIM: It was precisely one hundred years ago that, coming off the one-two punch of World War I and the Spanish flu, Warren Harding popularized a phrase and ran for President on the slogan "Return to Normalcy." He won the election, but there was no normalcy. There was a roaring and rambunctious decade that ended with a Depression. The same principle applies today. We might speak achingly of our pre-COVID existences, but life has changed abruptly, profoundly and irretrievably. We will, instead, go hurtling into a new era. The real reckoning of our age, maybe of our lifetimes, is not whether we will prevail over the virus. It’s whether our respect for science and our collective will--so muscular during the crisis--will prevail when we reboot and rebuild.
Let’s start with a thought exercise: It’s New Year’s Eve heading into 2020, a number, ironically, associated with perfect vision and clarity. What’s your response that night upon being told that soon there will be no live sports or concerts or Broadway shows? That Grand Central Station at rush hour will look like this? That toilet paper might be more valuable than crude oil? That by spring, there will be food lines on the streets of New York, and more than three hundred thousand people worldwide will have died tragically? Looking back, Mother Earth was starting to clear her throat and make herself heard. Australian bushfires were ravaging the continent. Earth had registered its highest temperatures since records began. Icebergs and glaciers melted, popsicles in the Sun; there were floods and droughts; and swarms of locusts descending on Africa. Bill McKibben was one of the early climate change whistleblowers, so to speak. Ever since, he has been issuing warnings on the danger of ignoring science.
BILL MCKIBBEN: One of the things that’s so important here, I think, is that we’re being reminded that physical reality is real.
WERTHEIM: What do you mean by that?
MCKIBBEN: We tend to forget that the physical world still is in charge. I’ve spent, you know, thirty years trying to get people to understand that physics and chemistry matter, that you can’t spin them. They don’t negotiate. They’re not going to compromise with you. You have to do what they say.
WERTHEIM: Same goes for biology. On New Year’s Eve, a Chinese government website made quiet reference to pneumonia of an unknown cause, clustered near a market in Wuhan. It was, of course, the coronavirus.
MCKIBBEN: Biology just doesn’t care. It doesn’t care that it’s causing a recession, you know. It’s not going to back off because it’s an election year. I mean, it just doesn’t give a fig about any of that, you know? So you have to respect that, and that’s hard for us because we’re kind of used to a world where, you know, we run everything that there is to run.
…
WERTHEIM: If microbes have the ability to create a rupture in the lives of billions, we humans have our own powers and evolutionary advantages--our intelligence, empathy, and our ability to cooperate. It’s hard to conceive of another time in human history when, worldwide, the best minds of our generation were all fixated on solving the same riddle, scribbling on the same blackboard, sharing data and sharing screens. And it is precisely this spirit that will determine how the aftermath of COVID-19 transforms us and shapes our future. Do we reimagine health care, now that we’ve seen how easily systems stress and lock out so many? And what about the gulfs between rich and poor? Maybe the biggest decision of all, now that the planet has essentially hissed, ‘I will not be ignored,’ how do we confront the climate emergency? It’s been the life-work of the environmentalist Bill McKibben, who is also a distinguished scholar at Middlebury College. You see a real way to use this catastrophe as opportunity?
MCKIBBEN: Well, what choice does one have, really, in a-- in a crisis but to try and-- and make something useful of it? I mean, the dumbest thing to do would just be to set up all the pins in the bowling alley one more time exactly the same way. Here we are, where Robert Frost, you know, lived for the last forty years of his life, in the woods of Vermont and wrote many of his great poems. Maybe his most famous poem is about the ‘two roads diverging in the wood,’ you know. Maybe it’s sort of time to think about taking the slightly less travelled one.
WERTHEIM: What-- what does the less travelled road look like here?
MCKIBBEN: We’ve spent the last 7500 hundred years really fixated, in our country and increasingly around the world, on economic growth as the reason for all being. And, you know, for the most part, that’s where there, at least for a while, that worked out pretty well. Lot of people were pulled out of poverty, whatever else. But we’ve begun to sense the limits of that too. That’s why the temperature keeps rising.
WERTHEIM: Look no further than what’s happened during this crisis. The shutdown to industry has offered a glimpse of what collective response can look like. Arundhati Roy’s India is home to seventeen of the world’s twenty-five most polluted cities; and not coincidentally the world’s fastest growing major economy. What is it normally like in Delhi?
ROY: Well, normally it is dystopian, you know, especially in the winter months. Sometimes that smog is not just outside your house, it’s inside your house, inside the rooms, you know. So that’s how terrible Delhi is. And suddenly, we’re just seeing blue skies.
WERTHEIM: And it’s like this from Shanghai to Secaucus, by circumstance and not design, a glimpse of life with fewer fossil fuels. And already the clean and quiet surroundings have found favor with wildlife. What does that tell you about the Earth’s ability to rebound and snap back?
MCKIBBEN: Well, maybe we still have a window to-- to take a step back. And if we do, maybe the Earth will meet us halfway.
WERTHEIM: And when people say we need to get this economy restarted, we need to jump back on planes, this climate change, that can wait. What do you say?
MCKIBBEN: Well, it obviously can’t wait. You’ve got to pay attention to reality or else you end up getting bit by it, and bit pretty hard, okay?
WERTHEIM: You’re saying flatten another curve?
BILL MCKIBBEN: Flatten another curve. Flatten the carbon curve, too. And-- and-- and if we did that, then people might look back in fifty years at this time and thank us, you know, instead of curse us because those are the two possibilities.
