2024-12-07 00:20:00
A federal appeals court ruled that a congressional ban on TikTok can go into effect in the next few weeks. That’s if the incoming Trump administration doesn’t decide to upend the court’s decision.
TikTok debuted in the US in 2017 as a platform for short-form videos and became the most downloaded app in the world during the pandemic, a hub for creatives, activists, politicians, and more. However, as its influence grew, so did concerns that the app, owned by a Chinese company, could endanger American interests. That led to a bipartisan effort to force it to cut its ties with China or ban it.
The ban, which would drop TikTok from US app stores if its owner ByteDance does not divest by January 19, passed and was signed by President Joe Biden in April. TikTok and some of its content creators swiftly challenged the law in court, arguing that it violates the free speech rights of its more than 150 million American users. The Department of Justice has countered that the app, given its connection to a foreign adversary, must be banned for national security reasons. On Friday, judges on the DC Circuit court sided with the DOJ.
TikTok and the DOJ asked the DC Circuit to issue a ruling in the case by December 6, and the court delivered. But that won’t necessarily resolve the matter of a ban once and for all. There is likely to be a lengthy appeal at the US Supreme Court, and the incoming Trump administration could reverse course on the government’s TikTok policy.
President-elect Donald Trump has had a fickle relationship with TikTok. His Cabinet picks are also divided on how to handle the platform. That leaves TikTok’s future uncertain, regardless of the final outcome of legal challenges to a ban.
A TikTok ban has been in the works since the first Trump administration. Lawmakers have argued for years that the Chinese government is using the app to spy on Americans by collecting their personal data and to spread propaganda that could be used to influence US elections.
Trump, ever the anti-China hawk, tried to ban the platform unilaterally via executive order in 2020. But the order faced swift legal challenges that were never resolved before Biden came into office and rescinded it, instead helping craft legislation to ban it.
When the bill came before Congress in March, ByteDance urged its users to call their representatives in protest. Teens and older people alike reportedly pleaded with congressional staff, saying they spend all day on the app. Creators posted on TikTok urging their followers to do the same. Some offices decided to temporarily shut down their phone lines as a result, which meant that they couldn’t field calls from their constituents about other issues either.
Lawmakers in both parties didn’t take kindly to the impromptu lobbying frenzy. Some characterized it as confirmation of their fears that the Chinese-owned app — which was already banned on government devices — is brainwashing America. The overrun phone lines were merely “making the case” for the bill, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote on X.
When the bill passed, ByteDance refused to sell TikTok, despite the fact that the company likely could have found a US buyer. Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was among those publicly angling to purchase the app.
Instead, TikTok challenged the law in court, arguing that it violated American users’ free speech rights under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. It also said that it would not be possible for ByteDance to divest within the 270-day period specified by the law due to technological challenges and the fact that the sale would have to include TikTok’s algorithm — something the Chinese government would not allow it to sell.
“For the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than one billion people worldwide,” the company said in legal filings.
Legal experts say Congress likely doesn’t have the power to outright ban TikTok or any social media platform under the First Amendment unless it can prove that it poses legitimate and serious privacy and national security concerns that can’t be addressed by any other means. The question in the case before the DC Circuit is whether the government could have, in fact, addressed its national security concerns by other means and whether this ban actually does so. TikTok argues that the government could have found less restrictive ways to address its concerns and that the ban does not resolve them.
The government’s national security arguments in the lawsuit are redacted in legal filings. But reports have suggested that both the Chinese government and TikTok employees have abused the app’s user data. A former employee of ByteDance has alleged in court that the government accessed user data on a widespread basis for political purposes during the 2018 protests in Hong Kong. And last December, ByteDance acknowledged it had fired four employees who accessed the data of two journalists while trying to track down an internal leaker.
However, civil society groups have argued that a ban won’t address concerns about data privacy. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) wrote in a letter to federal lawmakers that the Chinese government can still access Americans’ data in other ways. For instance, it could just as well buy Americans’ data on a legitimate open market, where the sale of that data remains unrestricted.
Nevertheless, the DC Circuit appeared to reject TikTok’s points in its decision. In the majority opinion, Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote, “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”
The court seemed to be leaning in this direction during oral arguments in the case. It noted that the US already bans foreign ownership of broadcasting licenses, asking why a ban on TikTok is substantially different. While acknowledging weighty free speech concerns with a ban, the court also questioned TikTok’s assertion that those rights would outweigh all else, to the point that the US could not ban the app even if at war with the country controlling it.
Now that the court’s upheld the ban, an appeal to the Supreme Court is likely. Since banning TikTok is an issue that cuts across party lines, it’s not clear how the conservative majority would rule. Trump’s return to the White House may also introduce uncertainty into the implementation of the ban, even if it survives legal challenges.
Despite previously seeking to ban TikTok, Trump has since warmed to the platform, on which he now has 14.6 million followers, and he has vowed to save it.
It’s unclear what exactly brought about his reversal. He’s said that banning TikTok would only benefit Meta, and he may be out for revenge against the company, which blocked him from Instagram and Facebook for two years following the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.
“Without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people,” Trump told CNBC in March.
Another factor could be the influence of one of Trump’s billionaire megadonors. Jeff Yass’s investment firm Susquehanna reportedly owns 15 percent of TikTok’s parent company, a stake worth about $40 billion, according to the Financial Times. As of May, Yass had contributed more than any other individual donor to Republican candidates.
However, it’s not clear if Trump will keep his word to salvage TikTok given that he is surrounding himself with people who vehemently oppose the app. That includes his pick for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and for Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr. Carr wrote in Project 2025 (the policy manifesto by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank) that TikTok is part of a Chinese “foreign influence campaign by determining the news and information that the app feeds to millions of Americans.”
On the other hand, Trump has also nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health secretary and former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence. Both have substantial followings on TikTok and oppose a ban.
Trump may have several options if he does decide to oppose the TikTok ban. The language of the ban is “broad and invests the president with quite a bit of discretion in how he chooses to enforce the ban,” George Wang, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told Vox. That includes determining whether ByteDance has engaged in a “qualified divestiture” from TikTok that would save it from a ban.
“It could grant the president some leeway to decline to enforce the ban if TikTok or ByteDance comes to some sufficient solution,” Wang said.
Alternatively, Trump may be able to influence the kinds of arguments that the DOJ would make to defend the ban (or not) before the Supreme Court if the case is appealed.
He might also be able to negotiate with Chinese officials to achieve a sale of TikTok to a US buyer in compliance with the law. James Lewis, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told NPR that, based on his conversations with such officials, they may be more open to a sale if Trump backs down somewhat on his tariff threats against China.
But Wang said the best outcome would be a more permanent solution that protects Americans’ First Amendment rights, he said.
“Trump might decide not to enforce the TikTok ban when he first takes office in January, but he could also change his mind at any point,” he said. “And so, while I think maybe some of these enforcement and executive branch solutions might be good temporarily, I’m still really hoping that the courts declare the law unconstitutional or Congress decides to repeal it.”
Update, December 6, 11:20 am ET: This post was originally published on December 5 and has been updated to reflect the DC Circuit court’s decision.
2024-12-06 21:30:00
Last month, tech outlet The Information reported that OpenAI and its competitors are switching strategies as the rate of improvement of AI has dramatically slowed. For a long time, you’ve been able to make AI systems dramatically better across a wide range of tasks just by making them bigger.
Why does this matter? All kinds of problems that were once believed to require elaborate custom solutions turned out to crumble in the face of greater scale. We have applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT because of scaling laws. If that’s no longer true, then the future of AI development will look a lot different — and potentially a lot less optimistic — than the past.
This reporting was greeted with a chorus of “I told you so” from AI skeptics. (I’m not inclined to give them too much credit, as many of them have definitely predicted 20 of the last two AI slowdowns.) But getting a sense of how AI researchers felt about it was harder.
Over the last few weeks, I pressed some AI researchers in academia and industry on whether they thought The Information’s story captured a real dynamic — and if so, how it would change the future of AI going forward.
The overall answer I’ve heard is that we should probably expect the impact of AI to grow, not shrink, over the next few years, regardless of whether naive scaling is indeed slowing down. That’s effectively because when it comes to AI, we already have an enormous amount of impact that’s just waiting to happen.
There are powerful systems already available that can do a lot of commercially valuable work — it’s just that no one has quite figured out many of the commercially valuable applications, let alone put them into practice.
It took decades from the internet’s birth to transform the world, and it might take decades for AI also (Maybe — many people on the cutting edge of this world are still very insistent that in only a few years, our world will be unrecognizable.)
The bottom line: If greater scale no longer gives us greater returns, that’s a big deal with serious implications for how the AI revolution will play out, but it’s not a reason to declare the AI revolution canceled.
Here’s something those in the artificial intelligence bubble may not realize: AI is not a popular new technology, and it’s actually getting less popular over time.
I’ve written that I think it poses extreme risks, and many Americans agree with me, but also many people dislike it in a much more mundane way.
Its most visible consequences so far are unpleasant and frustrating. Google Image results are full of awful low-quality AI slop instead of the cool and varied artwork that used to appear. Teachers can’t really assign take-home essays anymore because AI-written work is so widespread, while for their part many students have been wrongly accused of using AI when they didn’t because AI detection tools are actually terrible. Artists and writers are furious about the use of our work to train models that will then take our jobs.
A lot of this frustration is very justified. But I think there’s an unfortunate tendency to conflate “AI sucks” with the idea that “AI isn’t that useful.” The question “what is AI good for?” is a popular one, even though in fact the answer is that AI is already good for an enormous number of things and new applications are being developed at a breathtaking pace.
I think at times our frustration with AI slop and with the carelessness with which AI has been developed and deployed can spill over into underrating AI as a whole. A lot of people eagerly pounced on the news that OpenAI and competitors are struggling to make the next generation of models even better, and took it as proof that the AI wave was all hype and will be followed by bitter disappointment.
Two weeks later, OpenAI announced the latest generation models, and sure enough they’re better than ever. (One caveat: It’s hard to say how much of the improvement comes from scale as opposed to from the many other possible sources of improvement, so this doesn’t mean that the initial Information reporting was wrong).
It’s fine to dislike AI. But it’s a bad idea to underrate it. And it’s a bad habit to take each hiccup, setback, limitation, or engineering challenge as reason to expect the AI transformation of our world to come to a halt — or even to slow down.
Instead, I think the better way to think about this is that, at this point, an AI-driven transformation of our world is definitely going to happen. Even if larger models than those which exist today are never trained, existing technology is sufficient for large-scale disruptive changes. And reasonably often when a limitation crops up, it’s prematurely declared totally intractable … and then solved in short order.
After a few go-rounds of this particular dynamic, I’d like to see if we can cut it off at the pass. Yes, various technological challenges and limitations are real, and they prompt strategic changes at the large AI labs and shape how progress will play out in the future. No, the latest such challenge doesn’t mean that the AI wave is over.
AI is here to stay, and the response to it has to mature past wishing it would go away.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
2024-12-06 20:30:00
The second half of an election year can be a fraught one for books. Publishers tend to front-load their most interesting titles away from the election to try to keep them from being swallowed up by politics come the fall. After an election, books can feel too trivial and unserious to deserve our focus.
The books I took the most from in the second half of 2024 are the ones that fought against that impulse, that insisted on their own importance. They were works that took their subjects and their language seriously, that demanded my focus and rewarded it with something bigger and more beautiful than I could come to on my own. I hope, in these strange and confusing months, that they can do the same for you.
I’ve already chronicled the best books of the first half of the year here. (One of the below is actually from this January, but I didn’t get to it until now and it was so good that I didn’t want to keep it from you.) A number of them I first recommended in my monthly book recommendation newsletter Next Page. If you’d like to learn about the best books I’m reading early, subscribe here.
Martyr!, the debut novel from poet Kaveh Akbar, is word-drunk and elegiac, an enormous pleasure to read. Just look at that exclamation point in the title: its ironic knowingness, its outrage, its euphoria. This is a book whose author has weighed every punctuation mark just that carefully.
The inciting incident of Martyr! is a true one. In 1988, the US military shot an Iranian passenger plane out of the sky, mistakenly believing it to be a fighter jet. Akbar takes as his premise the idea of a man whose mother died on that flight, instantly “turned into dust” when the missile hit the plane: “clean in a way, if you didn’t think about it too much.”
The motherless boy grows up to become Cyrus, a poet and a recovering addict searching aimlessly for purpose. What Cyrus cares about most is poetry, but he feels that language, rule-bound and limited, will never be able to touch his depression, “get rid of the big ball of rot inside me.” He tells his AA sponsor he wants to die, then tries to channel the impulse into a literary project about martyrs. Cyrus’s mother died because of an error the US never apologized for (“Actuarial,” Cyrus fumes, “not even tragic”), but a martyr can make their death bear meaning. Perhaps by studying them, Cyrus can give meaning to his own life.
Martyr! is a messy book. Akbar has a poet’s unease with plot, and the coincidences that power his narrative forward never manage to feel elegant. Still, the dreams and poetry and warmth that lace the novel make a triumphant case: for life, and for art, and for beauty, which matter even when they shouldn’t.
The reign of Queen Elizabeth II was so long that contemplating it can feel, sometimes, like contemplating eternity. She came to the English throne in 1952, anointed by God, still expected to hand-pick her prime ministers and decide when to dissolve Parliament. At her death in 2022, Elizabeth was queen of a cosmopolitan liberal democracy with almost no real political powers left to her, but her remarkably strong aura of stateliness remained unshaken despite decades of familial royal scandal.
The reign of Queen Elizabeth II was so long that contemplating it can feel, sometimes, like contemplating eternity.
In Q, Craig Brown makes Elizabeth the still, behatted center of a kaleidoscopically turning world, ever stoic and unchanging as the world powers forward without her. Brown’s trademark move is to write biographies in fragments, assembling them out of bits and pieces of other sources; he likes to go to the London Library and check the indexes of every memoir and biography in the place for mentions of his subjects. He’s got a chapter on every person who ever called Elizabeth “radiant” (including Sylvia Plath), all the surreal dreams people have about her (English novelist Kingsley Amis dreamed of trying to elope with her), all the inane things people have said in a panic when they have to make small talk with her (the author found himself expounding on the German playwright Bertolt Brecht).
Brown’s key insight is that Elizabeth was so determinedly unreadable that she became a mirror to her subjects, a figure on whom they so fervently projected their fears and aspirations that she ended up showing them themselves. What to make of a woman whose coronation was marked by active combat troops in Kenya firing shells filled with red, white, and blue smoke into battle? Or whose death inspired a supermarket chain to turn down the volume of the beeps on its cash registers? What, except: what strange impulses we find in our strange human selves.
Garth Greenwell is a hedonist of language. In previous books, his sentences have hummed the pleasures of the body, of sex and of conversation and poetry. In Small Rain, Greenwell begins with pain — five days of it, so intense, the narrator tells us, it felt as though “someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked.” Yet even here, in this novel about illness and suffering, Greenwell cannot abandon his palpable joy at sensory pleasures, at beauty.
Greenwell’s narrator brings himself reluctantly to a hospital, still in the grip of early Covid in spring of 2020, after those five days of pain don’t seem to be abating. There, he occupies himself charting the power dynamics of the hospital staff and sending his partner out to bring him books of poetry. In the dream space of the hospital bed, where days follow the rhythms of tests and doctors’ rounds and meals, there are long stretches of unmarked time with which the narrator can do nothing but think. “The point was to perceive reality,” he thinks of poetry, “to see things that are only visible at a different speed, a different pitch of attention, the value of poems is tuning us to a different frequency of existence.”
What to do about America in this moment when we are far past whatever we might imagine to be her golden age? So many of our old national myths have gone threadbare and shabby, increasingly revealed to be too flawed to sustain us now, or riddled with hidden cruelties, or always only beautiful lies. What stories can we tell about ourselves and each other now if we want to learn to move forward?
One of the metaphors we sometimes turn to in these moments is King Arthur’s Camelot, which provided a romantic lens for processing the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. In Lev Grossman’s Arthurian novel The Bright Sword, Camelot feels like a match for our own post-Trumpian moment. It’s a Camelot after the death of King Arthur. All the higher powers and supernatural figures who used to take an interest in Camelot’s fate have turned their backs. All the quests are over. The only people left alive are the ones who never quite fit into the stories to begin with, the ones who were too poor or too queer or too feminine or too Black to become legends. How, Grossman’s characters seem to ask, are we supposed to figure out what to do next in this kind of story?
The answers, when they come, are radiant, and they feel surprisingly true.
Rachel Kushner’s cool-voiced ecothriller Creation Lake got a fascinatingly polarized reception when it came out this fall. Brandon Taylor at the London Review of Books said it was so bad he “wanted to weep”; Dwight Garner at the New York Times said that after the opening paragraphs, he knew he was “in the hands of a major writer, one who processes experience on a deep level.” Me, I think Creation Lake is a rich, messy, frustrating piece of work. It doesn’t always land, but when it does? Oh boy.
Creation Lake tells the story of an American spy we know only by her alias, Sadie Smith. A Berkeley dropout, she’s been hired to infiltrate a group of radical environmentalists in rural France to see if they’re planning a terrorist action. Sadie goes about her job efficiently, but she doesn’t particularly care about the group, whose members she considers boring and hypocritical, or about the environment. Kushner handles the espionage part of the plot with an almost hostile disregard for such classic thriller elements as suspense or intrigue, but the whole book comes to life when we get to the part of the story Sadie (and, apparently, Kushner) actually cares about.
Creation Lake is a rich, messy, frustrating piece of work. It doesn’t always land, but when it does? Oh boy.
The environmentalists correspond with Bruno Lacomb, an esoteric philosopher who long ago renounced the excesses of human civilization to go live in a cave and think about Neanderthals. Periodically he emerges to use his daughter’s computer and write to his environmentalist friends, and Sadie, having hacked into their inbox, is entranced by his emails. Reading them, she winds across vast stretches of time, encountering alien and disenfranchised figures: the gentle and depressed Neanderthals of prehistory, whom Sadie imagines as 1950s greasers with Joan Crawford faces; the persecuted Cagot of medieval Europe, who Bruno provocatively suggests might have been descendants of Neanderthals; Bruno himself, a Jew who grew up in occupied France in World War II.
Sadie, who is so cynical in her interactions with the people she manipulates and uses, seems to long for Bruno’s letters to cohere into a grand unified theory that will tell her there is something worthwhile about being human, no matter how destructive human civilization may have been. She searches his emails for redemption — and he doesn’t, in the end, disappoint her.
The women’s hotel was an institution of the first half of the 20th century: a place for ambitious young women and virtuous spinsters who were modern enough to try to make something of themselves in a big city, but modest enough (either of character or of means) to want to do it in a chaperoned facility, for a reasonable fee.
In the midcentury, however, everything changed. The women’s hotel, writes Daniel Lavery in his exceptionally charming new novel, found itself “made obsolete by the credit card, by hippies and the New Age movement, by lesbianism and feminism, by the increase in affordable apartment stock and the increased acceptance of premarital cohabitation.”
Lavery’s story takes place in the 1960s, in the dying days of the women’s hotel. New York’s Biedermeier hotel, where his focus lies, was always a second-rate facility, but now, its profits are so low that it has had to stop serving breakfast, a move the penny-pinching residents take as a deep affront. (“We’re all used to breakfast now,” one laments. “It’s like smoking. You can’t just ask people to give it up once they’ve made a habit of it.”)
Lavery tracks the foibles of the Biedermeier’s band of misfits with a light touch. His characters were driven to its dubious comforts by family estrangement, addiction, poverty, and ambition above their means; dark subject matter, yet he writes their story with a tender affection. This novel is sweet, thoughtful, and very, very funny.
All book critics have to spend a lot of time making our way through mediocre books where the prose starts off feeling solid enough but begins to fall apart in your hands as you read on. There is so much relief, under those circumstances, in turning to a Sally Rooney novel: taking the weight of her elegant, deeply felt sentences; feeling how much control she has over the words she’s using; how strongly she believes that they should be as beautiful as she can make them. At last, the chance to relax in the presence of someone who knows what she’s doing.
Beauty is where God is, which means it’s all connected to what right and wrong are, too.
In Intermezzo, Rooney shifts her usual focus on romantic couples to spotlight the relationship between brothers Peter and Ivan. Peter is a lawyer in his 30s, charming, fastidious, and depressed. Ivan is an aging chess prodigy in his 20s, awkward and perhaps autistic, trying to evolve away from adolescent flirtations with incel forums and still wearing braces on his teeth. We meet them in the aftermath of their father’s funeral, semi-estranged, each ignoring the other to focus on their own fascinating love lives. They ignore each other, they try to make up, they fight, they hurt each other as badly as they possibly can.
What elegance. What bliss. What beauty. Which is, as Ivan thinks, maybe the most important thing, anyway: Beauty is where God is, which means it’s all connected to what right and wrong are, too.
When young Mieczysław Wojnicz arrives at the mountain resort of Görbersdorf, Poland, in 1913, he’s looking forward to a brief, healthful, and relaxing sojourn. Wojnicz is consumptive, and, like the hero of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain before him, he has put his faith in the pure mountain air to cure him.
On Wojnicz’s first day at the sanatorium, however, he arrives at his boarding house to find the dead body of his landlord’s wife stretched out on the dining room table. She’s killed herself, the landlord reports without emotion to the shaken Wojnicz.
In the wake of his disturbing discovery, Wojnicz tries to focus on the concrete rituals of sanatorium life: the cold showers and long hikes, the simple food and hard drinking, the long debates with his fellow patients about history and philosophy. Yet there’s something violent and misogynistic lurking behind these everyday habits. All of the women he meets around town seem despondent. The philosophical debates always seem to hinge on the inferiority of women. On those long mountain hikes, he keeps coming across eerily anatomical glory holes built into the earth itself.
Wojnicz doesn’t quite know what to make of all these horrors. But Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, is playing a long game. One hint is in the title: Empusa is a Greek shapeshifter who feeds on men. Perhaps the dead woman on the table will be avenged in the end.
2024-12-06 19:30:00
Recently, I argued that progressives were wrong to see Kamala Harris’s defeat as proof that Democrats have little to gain from moderation. Osita Nwanevu, a contributor to the New Republic and author of the forthcoming book The Right of the People, has made one of the most interesting cases against my perspective. So, to hash out our disagreement — and discuss the Democratic Party’s challenges and opportunities more broadly — I spoke with Nwanevu last week. We discussed the challenge that the nationalization of politics poses to Democrats in red states, how the party became the face of establishment institutions, and what it means to be pro-worker in an age when very few Americans belong to labor unions. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
In your columns since the election, you’ve criticized the notion that Democrats can mitigate their present political challenges by moderating on policy. But you’ve also expressed some skepticism about whether Sen. Bernie Sanders’s brand of left populism constitutes a sound formula for Democrats’ political renewal. So, I’m wondering what you see as the alternative to moderation; how should Democrats go about rebuilding a national majority?
I certainly don’t have a definitive answer in my mind. But I don’t think we have very strong evidence on either side of this question. I think people on the left are making pretty sound criticisms of the efficacy of moderation as a strategy. But at the same time, if the left had its own kind of reliably effective approach — if it had a way of building a majority for itself — Bernie Sanders would’ve been president already. And I don’t think that we can say that the lack of success there is clearly a function of Democratic Party machinations, as real as the machinations might be.
So I think that we’re in a place where basically all sides left-of-center need to go back to the drawing board. There’s something structural happening to the electorate that I think makes Democratic moderation less and less effective. That’s not to say that I think that if you ran a DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] candidate in a congressional district in Nebraska — on economic populism — that that candidate would do better than moderate candidates. It’s not what I’m saying at all. But I do think that the electoral record of the past, let’s say, 20 or so years of running disciplined moderates in places that are tough for Democrats seems to be less and less effective.
And I think overall, when we look at this presidential campaign, I mean, there was this extraordinarily disciplined tack to the center by Harris. She did, I think, all of the right things that you would expect or want a candidate to do running for a general election if you are a kind of mainstream political consultant. She took the anxieties that people had about social progressivism after 2020 seriously, and shaped her campaign in a way that they thought would circumvent some of the impact of those positions. And it didn’t really work.
How do we know that she wouldn’t have done even worse, had she not followed the advice of mainstream consultants or taken those anxieties seriously? After all, this was a bad national environment for Democrats: Across the globe, virtually every party that presided over inflation suffered at the ballot box in recent elections. And Harris also came into the race with personal liabilities: In the 2020 primary, she took several left-wing stances that are highly unpopular, and which Trump’s campaign highlighted in campaign ads.
So, a defender of Harris’s messaging choices might argue that these background factors are what doomed her, and that her gestures of moderation prevented her from losing by a larger margin (but messaging can only do so much). And the fact that Harris came closer to matching Biden’s 2020 performance in swing states — which were the places most exposed to her moderate messaging — than in non-battlegrounds is arguably consistent with that view.
I think this was a tough election to win. There’s no doubt about it. I think the point about the incumbent parties getting shellacked across the world is true. If anything, I think I was reading the other day that Democrats performed a little bit better than some parties have in elections this year.
I don’t know that you can necessarily say that it was her kind of background identity here that freighted her the most heavily of all the issues and all the factors that might’ve played into how she performed. It is absolutely true that the campaign performed better in swing states than it seems to have elsewhere. But you’re hearing from operatives, people who were working on the campaign, that it was in the swing states where you really had a focus from the Harris team on their economic message.
So yeah, I think that’s actually a point in favor of the idea that she would have done better with a more economically focused message.
There was a lot of scolding of the campaign when they came out with their price-gouging plan. You can debate the economic merits and the substance of her proposals, but all of the data that I’ve seen suggests that it actually resonated really strongly with a lot of voters, and they were kind of browbeaten by moderate columnists and economists.
But I think the one thing you can indict Democrats for in general in this election more than anything else, even more than the particular messaging decisions they made over the course of this campaign, was how long it took for them to realize that Joe Biden was not going to be a viable candidate. That’s the original sin of this election.
Zooming out from this particular election cycle, how do you understand the structural shifts in the electorate, such as the realignment of non-college-educated voters away from the Democratic Party?
I’m still piecing together what I think about this. But some of my first thoughts are about media. I don’t know that it’s the case that the American public on social issues is more reactionary today, in 2024, than it was in 2014 or 2004 or 1994. I don’t think that’s the driving reason why Trump came into power and people took interest in the campaign. I do think that you have a more consolidated conservative media infrastructure though, one that is very efficient at packaging political messages. Segments of the electorate that would’ve considered voting for Democrats 20 years ago — kind of moderate to conservative folks in swing areas of the country — I think they’ve bought into this media in a way that makes them more reluctant to even consider voting for the Democrats.
On educational polarization, there’s the case that a lot of the people who run Democratic Party messaging and Democratic political operations and Democratic Party campaigns are college-educated professionals that aren’t necessarily sure what kind of messaging resonates best with working-class Americans. And I think there’s some truth to that. But I don’t think there’s one easy answer.
Educational polarization goes way, way back. For several decades now, people have been pointing to this trend. White working-class erosion amongst the Democratic Party is a trend that goes back decades as well.
There’s this paper by a professor at Vanderbilt that pointed out that [then-Republican presidential nominee] Mitt Romney actually did more to pull working-class voters to the right in 2012 than Trump did in 2016.
If you buy the kind of standard left argument — that white working-class voters are looking for anti-establishment politicians who don’t seem conventional and who are going to take on corporate power — well, hey, Mitt Romney did well amongst this constituency of people.
So I think that none of the extant explanations seem to really take seriously how long these trends have kind of been baked in for the Democratic Party.
In one of your recent pieces, you suggest that moderation has been tried repeatedly by the party in recent decades and found wanting. You write that the Democratic Party has been dominated by centrists for longer than you’ve been alive. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were moderates. As you noted before, Kamala — maybe she had a reputation as a liberal before this campaign, but she ran pretty tightly on the recommendations of the so-called “popularists” in the party.
And I think one objection to that would be that while Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden won primaries against more progressive candidates and weren’t identified with the left wing of the Democratic Party for most of their careers, Hillary Clinton’s substantive positions on public policy were pretty much all to the left of Obama’s in 2012. And Obama’s in 2012 were to the left of his positions in 2008. First-term Obama is the “deporter in chief,” second term he does Deferred Action for Parents of Americans. And Clinton comes out against the Hyde Amendment, decries systemic racism, etc. And then as you note, Biden’s positions in 2020 also seemed to the left of Clinton’s in 2016. I think Harris is arguably the first step back in the other direction, but it’s not a huge step back either. And so, over the broad sweep of 2008 to 2024, you’re seeing a party that is becoming more and more progressive, while simultaneously having a harder and harder time competing in culturally conservative parts of the country. Is it not plausible that those two developments have something to do with each other?
To an extent, the Democratic Party has moved left on certain cultural issues because the public has moved left on certain cultural issues. I think that the public is in a different place on LGBT rights, on race, and so you would expect the Democratic Party to shift in response to that. Are there places where Democrats have moved ahead of public opinion? Sure. There are always places where each of the parties are a bit further afield than public opinion. I don’t think that’s a novel problem or a novel situation.
The person who did this right — by the lights of Democratic moderates — was Bill Clinton. He himself was a Southern Democrat. We think that he was disciplined on social issues, obviously on domestic policy, on things like criminal justice reform. He made deals and made policy with the right. I think the point to recognize, though, is that even Clinton did not master the task that Democratic moderates say the party has lined up for itself now. I mean, Clinton loses Congress in 1994 in this historic rout because the perception at the time is that he had moved too far to the left by pursuing health care and on some cultural issues.
I am not a huge fan substantively of where the Clinton presidency went after 1994. But it’s always a little striking to me that the peak of class-based voting in the modern period is 1996 with Bill Clinton (that year, Democrats’ share of the non-college-educated vote was much larger than his share of the college-educated one — in fact, this was the largest such gap since 1968). That year, he both wins reelection comfortably and the actual class composition of his coalition is unusually working-class for a Democrat in the modern period, which is interesting. It seems like there’s a case that it at least worked in the moment. Obviously it didn’t solve the Democratic Party’s brand issues for a long period of time.
I think that’s important. I think Clinton ran two very successful presidential campaigns. I think it is important for the left especially to recognize that if you believe exit polls, the last Democratic candidate to win the white working class outright was Bill Clinton. So I think that that is an important thing to appreciate. If you’re somebody who wants to believe that there is a kind of natural working-class constituency out there that is primed against neoliberalism, I don’t know that we have evidence that that is necessarily the case.
All of that said, I do think it’s true that whatever Clinton’s strengths were at the top of the ticket, there was this kind of structural erosion underneath.
That’s actually very similar to the dynamic that we had under Barack Obama, where Republicans are able to make all of these sub-national and sub-presidential gains that seem kind of durable. And they did that partially by capitalizing on the idea that Clinton was not as moderate as he claimed to be. So I think the question that I’d pose to people at the center of Democratic politics is, well, what is the right amount of centrism? We have seen a lot of disciplined moderate and conservative Democrats lose elections in the last 15, 20 years, for a lot of reasons that I think, again, are worth thinking about and taking seriously.
I think proponents of moderation have an account of the Democrats’ down-ballot difficulties that overlaps with your own understanding. So, one, I think that they would posit that the Democratic Party’s movement leftward on some issues has outpaced the public’s own leftward drift. But then second, they would point to this development where local media institutions progressively die off while more Americans gain access to high-speed broadband internet, and the internet goes from being a text-based medium that attracts a narrower population to being a really effective vehicle for dispensing video content. And then because of this, people get less of their information from local outlets, more of their information from ideologically oriented national outlets. And this leads voters in Indiana and North Dakota to evaluate Democratic Senate candidates less on the basis of their own discrete moderate positions, and more on the positions and image of the Democratic Party nationally. And so, since candidates in red and purple areas are now more tied to the national brand, this creates an imperative to make that brand more broadly appealing and more moderate.
That feels right to me. I mean, as local newspapers, local outlets die, your consumption of political news is less about who’s doing what about highway funding in your state than about the national policy-making cultural narratives. I think that’s true. Unfortunately, I don’t know that there’s an easy solution to the media problem. I think it’d be fantastic if we had a hundred different progressive publications brought up in the next hundred years that are backed by, I don’t know, the Ford Foundation. I don’t really see that happening. And so to the extent that there is a kind of path forward, I think you’re right that Democrats are going to have to craft some kind of national narrative about themselves that is more broadly compelling to more people.
I think one of the other key things I want to mention here though is that moderation and the perception of moderation are not always connected tightly. The fact that Donald Trump is perceived as more “moderate” in certain respects than Kamala Harris was out of whack with the positions he actually took. You can talk about, “Well, he doesn’t talk as much about entitlement reform as conventional Republicans do. He’s dialed back on abortion in the last year or so.” I think he makes a lot of contradictory statements on these points. But I think that the balance of his policy platform is actually quite extreme. He succeeds at being perceived as moderate on the basis of his affect, his way of talking about political problems, whatever it is.
And so to the extent that maybe being perceived as moderate is a task for the Democratic Party ahead, I think we should be careful about believing automatically that that means they need to tack substantively much further right than they are on the issues.
It seems to me that the Obama approach, the Obama message, which I think has shaped Democratic rhetoric as long as I’ve kind of been engaged in politics — “We are one country, all have the same common values, whether in red states or blue states, there’s this fundamental commonality and there’s more that unites us than divides us, and business owners and workers and everybody, all the constituencies in American politics have kind of common interests that we would realize if it weren’t for the peddlers of division and those who seek to capitalize on division for their own personal gain” — worked for a good while, certainly for his presidential campaigns. But I think that this election, and frankly Donald Trump’s election in 2016, should be understood as a repudiation of that from most of the American electorate. I think there are a lot of people who really matter in the electorate for whom that message is not really resonating reliably.
There’s something about Donald Trump’s political style and personality — the fact that he stands against our institutions and norms — that is very compelling to a lot of people you need to win the Electoral College. And so maybe that’s one area where Democrats can think about tweaking their messaging.
That last point’s really interesting. I think Donald Trump’s elevation and then the dangerous ways that he attacked established institutions during his first term — trying to compromise the independence of federal law enforcement, obviously attacking the basic administrative offices of vote counting — seemed to polarize Democrats into becoming the party of established institutions. And this does seem to have potentially hurt the party with voters who are more anti-system in their general orientations.
So, it seems plausible to me that the Democrats should move in the general direction of being a bit more anti-system and populist in their orientation or affect. But then, I also see a risk that such messaging could promote more cynicism about government. Basically, I see a tension between affirming the idea that there’s perennial corruption in Washington and building a consensus for giving the federal government more power over some domains of American life.
I think government can do a lot of things for us, and does a lot of vital things for us. As a matter of fact, I think it is the ground under all of our feet, and for marginalized Americans especially. Social programs are a lifeline that allows them to live productively. All of that being said, I think that there is a kind of ambient distrust of government that conservatives have been able to capitalize on. I think some of this is because it’s frustrating to deal with bureaucracy. Sometimes people don’t like paying taxes — all kinds of background frustrations people have when they interact with government that are easy for conservatives to capitalize upon. I think that’s how they built out a durable constituency in American politics, seizing upon these kinds of nagging indignities.
So maybe what being anti-institutional could mean for Democrats isn’t to tear down these institutions, but to say, “God dammit, these things aren’t working as well as they could be, and I’m going to go in and I’m going to take out a monkey wrench and really get into the gears and then fix stuff and make it work right, make it into something that doesn’t burden you, doesn’t burden the American worker.”
I really think, to the extent that I have a direction I feel very confident in about messaging, it’s really about focusing even more deeply on labor. And I know that we’ve had these takes in the last couple weeks about how Biden did all these things for labor and he didn’t really seem to be getting an electoral payoff for it. Still, I do think there’s a lot of evidence that in the long run, there are things about labor organization that do redound to the benefit of progressive parties, beyond just being materially beneficial and good in their own right.
I think there’s something about these institutions that sustains liberal-left politics. You see that in the history of this country. I think that’s something to invest in. But I also think the thing that’s useful about labor on a rhetorical basis is that you have a kind of message and a kind of outsider politics that doesn’t require you to invest quite as much in defending and shoring up — or being seen as defending and shoring up — government. The message could be, “Look, I am for you, the worker, and you and your collective power.” And that’s power that can and should exist outside the halls of Washington and outside the halls of your state capital.
So I think that that’s a kind of way to dive into populism. You’re promoting solidarity, you’re promoting collective action, promoting people becoming democratically involved in new ways. I think all of that actually helps us knit people together in certain respects. It’s not just about tearing down these other institutions. But it is also not dependent on being seen as the steward or protector of our policymaking institutions. Does that make sense?
Yeah, I think so. I’d also note that, in opinion polling, Democrats are often on their firmest ground when advocating for policies that seek to redistribute power within companies, as opposed to redistributing through the government via taxes and transfers. Some of the latter stuff is popular and higher-impact. But it does require some trust in the government, whereas the sentiment that workers should have a higher share of the profits of an enterprise and a bit more authority in how things are done within the business seems like it asks for less in terms of trust while still being a fundamentally progressive sentiment and project.
Right.
So, I’m in broad sympathy with what you were saying there. I do wonder, though: At a time when the private sector unionization rate is so low, how much does talk of helping unions resonate with voters? I worry about the vast majority of voters responding to such messages by thinking, “This sounds fine, but you’re not actually talking about the thing that I’m concerned about because I don’t belong to a union.”
I don’t think that we should rely exclusively upon the traditional labor movements here, either rhetorically or substantively. I think, should we get a trifecta again, the PRO Act has to be at the top of the agenda. But I think we also are at a place where we need to be thinking more creatively and ambitiously about ways to organize workers beyond the kind of standard National Labor Relations Board framework.
So Sharon Block at Harvard has this “Clean Slate For Worker Power” that contains a whole lot of ideas for how to pull people into democratic work organizations of various kinds, even if they’re not in a union. I’m doing some reporting right now on wage and workers’ boards and how they might be a step towards sectoral bargaining.
But my interest in all of this is driven by a faith that, if we talk about labor policy in the terms of democracy, that that’s a kind of message that could resonate with the people that Democrats have been struggling to reach. And it grounds the kind of rhetoric we saw in this campaign about the importance of democracy in the actual material interests of working-class people.
2024-12-06 03:10:00
America’s favorite animal to eat — the chicken — has also become its most expendable: In 2021, around 556 million chickens in the US died at hatcheries and on farms before reaching the slaughterhouse, their carcasses winding up in landfills, incinerators, compost heaps, or pet food.
An additional 41 million never entered the food supply, either because they died during transport to the slaughterhouse or were slaughtered but deemed unsafe to eat due to a variety of reasons, including tumors, bruising, or infections.
That’s all according to a new analysis released today by the international animal rights group Animal Equality.
To put Animal Equality’s findings into perspective, these 597 million chickens that are never consumed — 6 percent of the 9.8 billion raised for meat every year in the US — are far greater than the combined number of turkeys, pigs, and cattle slaughtered for meat annually.
So many chickens die prematurely on farms that one startup even created a robot to scoop them up so farmworkers don’t have to — it’s built into the industry’s business model.
In 2021, the National Chicken Council, the industry’s main trade group, reported a 5.3 percent mortality rate, or the share of birds that die prematurely, but that analysis only included chickens that died on farms. Animal Equality’s report provides a more comprehensive accounting, including for other deaths in the production chain, such as chickens that die after birth at the hatcheries where they’re incubated and born, in transport to farms, and those that are slaughtered but don’t enter the food supply.
“The industry knows that a significant portion — [nearly] 600 million animals — are going to die, and that still allows them to make a profit,” said Sean Thomas, Animal Equality’s international director of investigations. Across the group’s undercover investigations of factory farms, Thomas said, “we don’t see veterinary care for a single chicken that is sick, because that single chicken does not matter to the industry.”
All these dead chickens constitute a form of hidden food waste that adds up to an unfathomable amount of suffering, as the birds perish from what have become features of American poultry farming: painful diseases, heart attacks, dehydration, starvation, and rough handling.
Additionally, around one-fifth of poultry meat that does enter the US food supply is thrown away by grocers, restaurants, and consumers at home. When accounting for both waste in the production chain and waste at the consumer and retail levels, about one-quarter of chickens hatched — some 2.6 billion per year — are never consumed.
The problem appears to only be getting worse. Since the mid-20th century, the poultry industry has steadily reduced its on-farm mortality rate. But in the last decade, it’s been on the rise, recently reaching levels not seen since the 1960s.
It’s well understood what kills chickens on farms: infectious diseases and health problems that stem from how the birds are bred to grow too big and too fast. Over the last decade, producers have been breeding chickens to grow ever bigger, which could explain why more and more are dying on farms. Another likely cause of increasing mortality could be that chicken farms, under pressure from public health officials and advocates, have used fewer antibiotic drugs in recent years, because the poultry industry’s use of these lifesaving drugs is a major driver of the antibiotics resistance crisis.
Both of these problems can be addressed in a way that alleviates the animals’ suffering and safeguards antibiotics used in human medicine. One of the country’s largest chicken companies is showing how it can be done, but the question is whether the rest of the industry will follow.
Around 1950, US farmers began feeding their chickens and other farmed animals antibiotics to make them grow faster and prevent disease. Rather than reserve them for cases when an animal gets sick, the drugs have been widely used prophylactically as a crutch to keep farmed animals alive in the unsanitary, overcrowded warehouses in which the vast majority of them are raised, and where disease proliferates.
By the early 2000s, about half of all antibiotics ever produced globally had been fed to livestock.
Over time, public health experts learned this practice had come back to bite us: Bacteria commonly found on farms, like Salmonella and E. coli, were mutating and becoming resistant to antibiotics, making the drugs less effective in treating humans.
Throughout the 20th century, numerous efforts aimed at the US Food and Drug Administration to restrict antibiotic use in food production failed in the face of pharmaceutical lobbying pressure and growing anti-regulatory sentiment. But after decades of pressure, US fast food restaurants and big chicken companies eventually took action, as did the FDA.
In 2014, just 3 percent of chickens were raised without antibiotics; by 2018, more than half were, and 90 percent of chickens were raised without antibiotics relevant in human medicine. It was a major public health win, but as the livestock industry was quick to point out, it led to more chickens dying on farms.
As a result, Tyson Foods — the nation’s largest poultry producer — and Chick-fil-A each rolled back their “no antibiotics ever” pledges and reintroduced a class of antibiotics called ionophores, which aren’t used in human medicine. Ionophores pose a lesser threat to human health, though some experts worry they could still contribute to the growth of bacteria resistant to antibiotics.
But the data suggests the chicken industry’s move away from antibiotics isn’t the only cause of its rising mortality rate: Even as antibiotic use remained stable from 2018 to 2023, on-farm mortality rates continued to climb. Some of that could be attributed to disease outbreaks that impacted the industry during this period, like infectious bronchitis, Avian metapneumovirus, and necrotic enteritis. But part of the problem could be what the meat industry has done to the chickens themselves.
In the 1950s, poultry companies began breeding chickens to grow bigger and faster. Back then, it would take chickens 70 days to reach their “market weight” of 3 pounds. Now, chickens reach 6.5 pounds in just 47 days; almost half the time for more than double the weight.
Among other traits, poultry companies selectively bred chickens to have bigger breasts, the most valuable part of the bird. As a result, today’s chickens are extremely top-heavy compared to chickens of the past.
Animal advocates say this transformation has turned the birds into “Frankenchickens” that are “prisoners in their own bodies,” which cause a number of health problems that lead to premature death. Many chickens’ tiny legs can’t support the weight of their giant breasts, leading to injuries that can be so severe that they struggle to walk to reach food and water, resulting in death by dehydration or starvation.
Between 2013 and 2023, when antibiotics use fell, chickens were bred to grow 10.5 percent bigger, which could’ve contributed to rising mortality rates. Fast-growing chickens “have relatively high mortality rates as compared to slower growing strains (and systems with higher welfare requirements),” Ingrid de Jong, a senior researcher of poultry welfare at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, told me over email.
It’s unclear how much of a role this played in rising mortality over the last decade, however, because for many decades before, poultry companies had been making chickens grow bigger while reducing mortality rates. It could be that in recent years, these companies have hit a biological limit of sorts — a point at which making the birds grow bigger and bigger has made more of them die on the farm.
Animal advocates want to see the poultry industry switch to slower-growing chicken breeds, which they argue would do more to reduce animal suffering than just about any other single change to the factory farm system.
Big chicken producers might now be thinking that they need to choose between phasing out antibiotics to protect human health and keeping chicken mortality rates down. But the experience of Perdue Farms, America’s fifth largest chicken producer, shows that would be a mistake.
The company isn’t exactly a shining beacon of animal welfare — in most ways, its operations look much like any other factory farm — but it’s taken steps to alleviate animal suffering that other major producers haven’t, and remains committed to never using antibiotics even as its competitors have resumed using them.
Perdue began to remove antibiotics from its production in 2002 and became antibiotic-free by 2016. Early in the process, its mortality rate was slightly above the industry average, but now the company’s mortality rate tends to run “about half a percent to a percent better” than the industry, Bruce Stewart-Brown, Perdue Farms’ chief science officer, told me.
The company got there in part by cleaning up its breeding operations and hatcheries: “We’re not relying on this kind of antibiotic to clean up something that we could do ourselves.” For instance, it works to get its breeding hens to lay their eggs in nests, rather than on the floor where there might be disease.
The company also refined its vaccine regimen, and adjusted its chicken feed by adding probiotics and removing animal byproducts, which can irritate the birds’ guts, among other changes.
Across the chicken industry, a lot of birds die in their final week of life — which is under seven weeks — as the health problems that stem from fast growth catch up with them. To help mitigate this problem, Perdue sends its birds to the slaughterhouse when they’re at a slightly lower weight than the industry average. “The last week gets harder when you have heavier birds,” Stewart-Brown said.
The company is also conducting experiments with numerous slower-growing breeds. It’s not going as far or fast as animal advocates want to see the company go, but it’s more than what Perdue’s competitors have done.
Many chicks also die in the beginning of their lives at hatcheries, where they can be roughly handled, culled due to injuries or deformities, or injured on the mechanical processing line. Many also die in transport from the hatchery to the farm, in which their fragile bodies are packed tightly into crates and don’t receive food or water for 24 to 72 hours.
There’s a growing push in Europe for on-farm hatching, which has shown to reduce mortality and the need for early-stage antibiotics.
Poultry production is the least regulated part of the meat industry, which isn’t saying much, considering beef and pork production have also been thoroughly deregulated. But chickens have no federal laws protecting them at the hatchery, the farm, or the slaughterhouse. Setting meaningful regulations for animal welfare, farm hygiene, and antibiotics would go a long way toward reducing animal suffering and mortality on poultry farms.
Absent that, the industry is left to engage in a never-ending game of optimization whack-a-mole, in which public health and animal welfare are almost always sacrificed on the altar of endless chicken wings and cheap meat.
2024-12-06 03:00:37
The planet is about 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer today than it was in the late 1800s. That seemingly small increase has impacted the natural world in some pretty profound ways. Birds have become smaller. Lizards, insects, and snails have changed color. Some goats have become more nocturnal. These are adaptations that help animals survive climate change.
Many species, though, haven’t been able to adapt fast enough. Rising temperatures have not only eroded animal populations, such as by stoking wildlife-killing wildfires in Australia and the Amazon, but they have also driven entire species to extinction. Several years ago, an Australian rodent called Bramble Cay melomys went extinct, largely due to sea level rise. Warming temperatures spread disease-ridden mosquitos into higher elevations in Hawaii, killing every last individual of certain bird species.
That’s the situation today. It’s already bleak. So what happens to wildlife populations if — or more like when — Earth gets even hotter?
That urgent question is at the center of a new study, published in the journal Science. The research analyzes how different degrees of warming, relative to the pre-industrial-era average, affect the portion of species globally that are at risk of going extinct.
The numbers reported in the study are alarming, but they also underscore an important message: If countries can rein in their greenhouse gas emissions, they stand to save thousands of species from meeting their permanent end.
This new study is a meta-analysis, meaning it synthesized the results of other existing studies — 485 of them, to be precise. It estimates the percentage of known plant and animal species globally that are projected to become extinct under different climate scenarios in the future. Those scenarios include the current level of warming and targets under the Paris Agreement, a global UN agreement to curb climate change, as well as more extreme emissions scenarios.
Scientists still don’t have a firm grasp of how many species there are on Earth, so it’s hard to translate these percentages into actual numbers of extinct animals. Scientists now think there are 10 million species or more, according to ecologist Mark Urban, the study’s sole author. That would put projected losses under current warming at around 160,000 species, rising to half a million should the world fail to enact additional policies to curb carbon emissions. That is a lot. We are talking about potentially losing half a million species to extinction from climate change.
“There’s this acceleration of extinction risk with each increment of temperature rise,” said Urban, director of the Center of Biological Risk at the University of Connecticut, told Vox.
To be clear, Urban is reporting extinction risk. This is different from extinction certainty. He compares a species at risk of extinction to a jug of water with a crack in it: “We know the water is pouring out,” he said. “What we don’t know, however, is how big the crack is. So we don’t know how long it’ll take [for the water to run out].” Meaning, for the species to go extinct.
The study also has some important limitations. Models like this are only as good as the data that feeds into them, said Chrystal Mantyka-Pringle, a researcher at Wildlife Conservation Society Canada who was not a part of the study. And research tends to be biased toward certain types of animals and areas that are easier (and cheaper) to study, such as forests in the US or Europe and not, say, the Arctic. Yet the study is sound, according to Mantyka-Pringle and Ilya Maclean, a conservation ecologist at the University of Exeter, who was also unaffiliated with this research. “It’s a pulse check on where we are,” Mantyka-Pringle told Vox.
The paper also explored which animals and habitats are most and least at risk from warming. Birds, for example, face a lower risk of extinction, Urban found, likely because they can easily move around. As the ideal habitat for avian species shifts toward the poles or up mountains, birds will try to shift with it. That said, warming still poses a serious problem to many avian species, and other research suggests birds face a high extinction risk in North America.
On the flip side, organisms that can’t easily move, such as plants or those that are highly dependent on water, will be more at risk, Urban says. Indeed, Urban’s analysis found that amphibians, including frogs, are most sensitive to a warming climate. Climate change can intensify droughts, and frogs need water. Hotter temperatures may also contribute to the toll of chytrid fungus, a deadly pathogen that has wiped out dozens of frog species. What’s more is that amphibians don’t typically travel very far, so it’s harder for them to simply shift their habitat.
As for different habitats, mountains, islands, and freshwater ecosystems appear most sensitive to climate change, according to the analysis. Again, this isn’t shocking. Animals that live on mountains can move to higher elevations as temperatures warm, but they’ll eventually reach the top and literally just run out of room. That’s led some scientists to describe climate change as an “escalator to extinction” for mountain species.
Islands face similar space issues, and they tend to be home to species with smaller populations to begin with. Plus, they already contend with other threats such as invasive species, which warming can make worse. This point is key: Climate change is just one threat, but it often intensifies other ones, such as droughts tied to deforestation or the spread of wildlife disease.
Barring the worst-case scenarios for greenhouse emissions, the study projects that a relatively small portion of species will go extinct from climate change — a single-digit percentage. Is that really a problem?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
That is the widely held answer from ecologists, at least. Even a small percentage translates to tens of thousands of species, each of which has value for human society, whether or not we have figured it out.
A single animal species may be crucial to a community’s culture, such as the Chinook salmon, which is considered sacred by some Indigenous tribes in the American West. And we already know that the natural world holds the cure for many life-threatening diseases. Researchers estimate that an astonishing 70 percent of antibiotics and cancer treatments in use today are rooted in natural organisms.
“Most humans love nature, and that’s one aspect of it, but biodiversity is also the foundation of our health and our wealth and our cultures,” Urban said.
Allowing even one species to go extinct is like playing Russian roulette, he said.
“We don’t know what we’re losing,” Urban said. “But when you really lose a species, that is truly irreversible. That’s the end.”