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Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Deanne Criswell
Hurricane Idalia kicks FEMA while it’s down
With Hurricane Idalia hitting the Gulf Coast of Florida and Georgia, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is readying its response but finding itself stretched thin.
Idalia weakened from a category 4 to a category 1 storm before making landfall but still plagued the Sunshine State with severe flooding. It is moving through Georgia and up through the Carolinas, with local officials warning of potentially catastrophic storm surges from rising waters.
Meanwhile, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell says her agency’s disaster fund is depleted and warns it will soon run dry unless more funding is allocated. The agency is pushing Congress to approve $12 billion in additional funding – a mere bandaid for addressing major challenges in the face of climate change-induced crises. The uptick in these natural disasters is also leading to FEMA employee burnout, with staffing down 20% since 2020. Burnout combined with the need for disaster assistance rising 130% since 2020 has left FEMA 35% short of its staffing needs.
So far this year, US disasters have cost $33 billion, and Idalia is expected to be another multibillion-dollar disaster, adding itself to the list of 15 natural disasters that have cost a billion dollars or more. This is a daunting new record for the first seven months of the year in the US – and hurricane season hasn’t even peaked yet.
Boris Johnson's days are numbered as UK PM; Blinken, Biden, Putin & Ukraine
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week, discussing Boris Johnson's tenuous status as UK PM, US Secretary of State Blinken's visit to Ukraine, and the volcano eruption in Tonga:
Will Boris Johnson resign?
It certainly looks that way. He's hanging on by his fingernails. He's losing members of Parliament. He's giving shambolic media interviews. In fact, I think the only people that don't want him to resign at this point is the Labour Party leadership, because they think the longer he holds on, the better it is for the UK opposition. But no, he certainly looks like he's going. The only question is how quickly. Is it within a matter of weeks or is it after local elections in May? But feel pretty confident that the days of Boris Johnson are numbered.
It's interesting you ask about Ukraine because, of course, you need to make progress not just with the Russians, but also the Ukrainians, because publicly they've been pushing the Americans and others very hard to offer them NATO membership, a membership action plan, none of which is forthcoming and furthermore, they don't look like much of a democracy when they're engaged in charges that look very made up, calling the former president a traitor for cutting a deal on coal to try to keep Ukraine economically functioning with members of the occupied territories of former Ukraine. But in any case, I think that the big question here is whether or not there's any room for negotiation with the Russians. There, I don't think Blinken is a breakthrough. Blinken could get the maneuver for an additional Putin-Biden conversation and there, I think it's not over. I think there still is an opportunity. So I'm not someone who believes that war is in any means inevitable here and also keep in mind that the Americans are not going to defend the Ukrainians directly in terms of defense. So the likelihood that this explodes in a maximal way is still pretty limited.
What do we know about Tonga's volcano eruption?
Well, we knew when we saw Tonga in the news that it probably wasn't going to be anything good. It's a volcano. It's a major tsunami, warnings of more. The good news is it's not in any way climate change related. Most natural disasters these days are. And also, Tonga only has a total population of 100,000. The bad news is they're at risk and three of them apparently dead and they need help and they need water and they need humanitarian support and it's hard to get there. And any of you that had vacations planned for Tonga in the coming months, I think those have been dashed.
The history of disasters
It's easy to judge the Pompeiians for building a city on the foothills of a volcano, but are we really any smarter today? If you live along the San Andreas fault in San Francisco or Los Angeles, geologists are pretty confident you're going to experience a magnitude 8 (or larger) earthquake in the next 25 years—that's about the same size as the 1906 San Francisco quake that killed an estimated 3,000 people and destroyed nearly 30,000 buildings. Or if you're one of the 9.6 million residents of Jakarta, Indonesia, you might have noticed that parts of the ground are sinking by as much as ten inches a year, with about 40 percent of the city now below sea level.
The fact is, human beings just aren't all that great at learning from past disasters, and that includes the ones we can see coming, like those caused by climate change. Firefighters in the American West, for instance, are bracing for the worst wildfire season in recorded history, thanks to protracted drought and record-high temperatures. And yet, a June report found that California state and local officials are encouraging rebuilding in areas destroyed by wildfires.
After more than a year of enduring the greatest calamity of our lifetimes in the COVID-19 pandemic, it's time we learned a lesson or two from the disasters of the past.
Watch the episode: Predictable disaster and the surprising history of shocks
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The 2020 pandemic was hardly “unprecedented,” says historian Niall Ferguson
"We've been dealing with pandemics from the earliest recorded history. Thucydides writes about a pandemic in the history of the Peloponnesian War. So the last thing 2020 was, was unprecedented," Stanford historian Niall Ferguson told Ian Bremmer on GZERO World. Ferguson, whose new book, "Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe," believes that the world should have been better prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic based on the numerous health crises of the 20th century, from the 1918 Spanish flu to influenza and HIV/AIDS. He provides perspective on how the COVID crisis stacks up compared to other pandemics throughout history.
Watch the episode: Predictable disaster and the surprising history of shocks