2020 unmasked the truth about ‘all lives matter’

A working paper published this summer by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that in a few decades we’ll reach a threshold where white people begin to feel the impacts of warming as acutely as people of color. Written by the Climate Impact Lab, it estimates that by 2100, mortality rates from a planet with an onslaught of extreme heat, wildfire smoke, insect-borne diseases, and the mental stress from flood and storm relocations will become comparable to cancer and infectious diseases. One of the researchers, University of Chicago economics professor Michael Greenstone, said the continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions will result in temperature effects from climate change “five times deadlier than recent U.S. flu seasons.”