Category: The Dish

Last month, in an op-ed for Fox News, retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley made a national security-based case for worrying about climate change. Eric Holthaus interviews Titley about his belief that the changing climate will be a main driving force for conflict in the 21st century:

Q. What’s the worst-case scenario, in your view?

A. … You could imagine a scenario in which both Russia and China have prolonged droughts. China decides to exert rights on foreign contracts and gets assertive in Africa. If you start getting instability in large powers with nuclear weapons, that’s not a good day.

Here’s another one: We basically do nothing on emissions. Sea level keeps rising, three to six feet by the end of the century. Then, you get a series of super-typhoons into Shanghai and millions of people die. Does the population there lose faith in Chinese government? Does China start to fissure? I’d prefer to deal with a rising, dominant China any day.

Titley thinks it’s time for conservatives to start grappling with the problem:

Where are the free-market, conservative ideas? The science is settled. Instead, we should have a legitimate policy debate between the center-right and the center-left on what to do about climate change. If you’re a conservative – half of America – why would you take yourself out of the debate? C’mon, don’t be stupid. Conservative people want to conserve things. Preserving the climate should be high on that list.

Sean McElwee thinks that environmentalists could probably garner more support on the right if they framed the issue differently:

Republican support for environmental causes is stronger than it might appear. Two Ph.D. students at the University of California Santa Barbara, Phillip Ehret and Aaron Sparks, found that a quarter of individuals self-identifying as “very conservative” or “conservative” support environmental regulations, even if they risk harming the economy. A Yale Study finds that 85 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of Republicans favor “regulating CO2 as a pollutant” and majorities from both parties favor investing in renewable energy. If Republican voters are concerned about the environment, haven’t we seen an action?

One explanation is that the framing of environmental issues is often anathema to conservatives. Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer’s important paper on the subject, “The Moral Roots of Environmental Attitudes,” finds that liberals view environmental issues as moral concerns informed by a harm principle, while conservatives view environmental issues through the lens of purity, and particularly for religious people, stewardship.

One great challenge for environmentalists is finding a way to frame the issue in terms real conservatives intuitively grasp. To wit: If you love this land, why would you want to see it changed irreparably by our behavior? If you believe, as Christians do, that conserving the planet is our sacred duty, why would you treat the earth as disposable? Should we behave like Noah and conserve the earth – or ransack it for material ends? The trouble, of course, is that these deep conservative themes have been displaced on the right by know-nothing hatred of anything defined as “liberal”. And so you get outright mockery of concerns for the planet and too-clever-by-half attempts to deny the reality and moral challenge of climate change.

In the end, that is a crisis for conservatism, as much as environmentalism.

Earlier this month, Polly Mosendz covered the debate over Hepatitis C drug Sovaldi:

[I]nsurers cannot stand this life saving, revolutionary medication. That’s because it runs $1,000 a day and the average patient requires a 12-week treatment of Sovaldi.That’s $84,000 for one cycle. For patients with a strain that is more difficult to treat, the regiment is 24 weeks. That comes in at $168,000. It is projected to rake in between $5 billion and $9 billion in profits in the United States this year alone. There are an estimated 4 million Americans with Hepatitis C, and 15,000 are killed each year by untreated chronic infections.

Unfortunately, there is not much insurers can do about the price. A comparable drug is not yet on the market.

Dr. Frank Huyler fumes:

The low cost of manufacturing the drug means that it can be sold all over the world. Only the price varies, and that price is set by Gilead executives and protected by patent law and the FDA. At the moment, Gilead has a monopoly.

In poor countries, such as Egypt, they can’t sell many $1,000 pills. But they can sell a lot of $10 pills. So that’s how much Sovaldi costs in Egypt — and Gilead Sciences is still making a profit. Thanks to the FDA, the Egyptian version of the drug can’t be imported.

This sort of blood money is nothing new. But it is among the worst of recent examples; yet another evil act, yet another predation on mostly poor, mostly desperate people, who inevitably will ask taxpayers to save them.

“Blood money?” “Evil act?” I have to say I find that rhetoric appalling.

A miracle drug like this does not appear out of thin air. Developing these kinds of drugs can be hugely risky – so many end up as duds – and extremely expensive. If there were no real return on the few that make it to market, the economic incentives that make them possible in the first place would disappear, along with the drugs. And these drugs really do save lives – as Tim Mullaney, who has Hepatitis C, notes:

After two bouts with cancer, I can check hep C off the list of things that may kill me, thanks to virus-clearance rates of 97% in cases like mine. I’ve had no side effects. Prior therapies had much lower cure rates, and so many complications that patients refused treatment. Including me.

Surowiecki uses the outcry over Sovaldi to discuss drug pricing more generally:

Price restrictions have always been a political non-starter here, but at some point the math of the situation will be hard to resist. According to a study by the research group I.S.I., by 2018 spending on “specialty drugs” like Sovaldi could account for half of all drug spending in the U.S. Furthermore, one traditional argument against price controls is looking weaker: biotech companies claim that prices need to be high to reward risky and expensive innovation, but the fact that they’re churning out drugs and profits so consistently seems to undermine that claim. Biotech, in other words, may become the victim of its own success: the bigger the profits, the bigger the likelihood of regulation.

You might think that this prospect would encourage companies to be more cautious. But, if you assume that price controls are coming, the rational play is to squeeze out all the profits you can now.

I think there’s a trade-off here. Price controls on drugs in existence could make them far more affordable for the healthcare system as a whole. And there is a strong, moral argument for doing that. But the trade-off is that the innovation that occurs outside the NIH – and the bulk of all drug research is done by the pharmaceutical industry – would inevitably suffer. At some point a society has to navigate these two goals – innovation and access. And both matter.

John Upton flags a recent study showing that wildfires are affecting more and more of the Western US each year:

The numbers of big fires that strike annually are on the rise throughout most of the region, from the Rocky Mountains’ pine forests to the wind-whipped deserts that border Mexico. Worsening droughts are taking searing tolls, helping to nudge vast biomes into combustion. The only region spared seems to be coastal California—and, even there, in the relative respite of a Mediterranean climate, the amount of land affected by large fires continues to grow.

Researchers recently pored over satellite fire data and climate data before concluding that monster wildfires—the types of uncontrolled blazes that tear through at least 1,000 acres of forests, parched grasslands, and neighborhoods—increased at a rate of seven every year throughout the region from 1984 to 2011. That helped push the amount of area that burned in such blazes up by an average of nearly 90,000 acres every year.

Becky Oskin talks to the study’s lead author, geographer Phil Dennison of the University of Utah:

“There are a lot of different causes for fire and a lot of different things that contribute to a fire regime, and those vary tremendously across the West,” Dennison said. But because the bump in wildfires seen in the study is so widespread, Dennison thinks one main factor likely underlies the trend: climate change. “This is over too short of a period to say this is definitely climate change, but it does point in the direction of changing climate having an impact on fire,” he said.

And Ari Phillips looks at the attention this problem is getting in Washington:

In February, President Obama called for shifting the costs of fighting the biggest wildfires to the same emergency fund that handles other natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes. The move is intended to allow the U.S. Forest Service to avoid using their mitigation and prevention budget to pay for the costs of massive, and extremely costly, western fires.

Rose Eveleth suggests that the “curse” of the Unlucky Mummy – blamed in Britain for a variety of disasters in the late 19th and early 20th century, including the sinking of the Titanic – reflected  sublimated anxieties about colonialism:

As it happens, the Unlucky Mummy arrived in England during the perfect curse-making storm. … At the time, Britain was occupying Egypt. It had invaded the Middle Eastern country in 1882, bombarding Alexandria for 10 and a half hours from the sea in an attack that was largely one sided – the British didn’t lose a single boat. The fires that followed destroyed much of the city and two days later the British army entered Alexandria and took on Egyptian forces in a handful of skirmishes, the most notable being the battle at Tel-el-Kebir. Because the Egyptian land was flat and open, the British decided to attack at night. After an hour of fighting, the Egyptians fled. The British military stayed in Egypt in a variety of capacities until 1922.

While the occupation of Egypt was a military success, it was met with trepidation back home.

Should a European power intervene in the goings on of a Middle Eastern country? The British said they were there to help depose a tyrannical rule, but the British people weren’t sure that was their government’s job in the first place. But while the occupation troubled many, some didn’t want to outwardly express their anxieties. So they turned to objects that represented the country in question: Egyptian artifacts. “You can’t talk about how difficult it is to occupy another country because that’s unpatriotic,” says Roger Luckhurst, a professor of literature at Birkbeck College, University of London, who details the Unlucky Mummy’s journey through myth and reality in his 2012 book, The Mummy’s Curse. “This is a narrative that lets you talk about it in another way.” The idea that objects from Egypt like the mummy board would exact revenge was a way to express anxiety without actually talking about war.

(Photo of a 1909 Pearson’s cover featuring the story of the Unlucky Mummy via Wikimedia Commons)