To be legitimate climate leaders on the world stage, the US and China must start by raising ambition at home.
Top officials from the US and China met in Alaska this week for their first face-to-face meeting since President Joe Biden took office. On the agenda was a full range of issues of importance to both sides — not least of which is climate change.
China and the US, the world’s top two economies, together account for 43 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. And while much of the industrialized world is looking to the United States for signaling on climate action, many countries in the developing world look to China for guidance.
“The Biden administration coming into office has been a massive shot in the arm. There are countries around the world that were not planning on increasing their Paris targets this year and are now actively reconsidering that. For example, Japan,” Thom Woodroofe, senior adviser at Asia Society Policy Institute, told me.
“They are doing that because of the Biden administration more so than China, but there are several other countries who will take their lead from China, just as much if not more so. For example, a country like India,” Woodroofe added.
The last time the US and China collaborated on climate change it resulted in the signing of the landmark Paris Agreement. But relations deteriorated under Trump, so there’s work to be done in reestablishing ties.
“Working constructively to bolster these international agreements rather than weaken them, that’s the core part of the cooperation,” Deborah Seligsohn, assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, said.
Appointing John Kerry as the new US climate envoy shows just how eager the Biden administration is to engage and lead the world on climate. A seasoned diplomat, Kerry played a key role in helping to negotiate the Paris Agreement while serving as secretary of state under Obama. Since then, he’s continued to act on climate with his World War Zero Initiative.
And in a positive sign that the country is willing to engage with Kerry, China has appointed seasoned climate diplomat Xie Zhenhua, whose close friendship with former US climate diplomat Todd Stern helped broker the original Paris Agreement.
“Perhaps the biggest signal that [China] wants to find a way to be able to cooperate on climate is the appointment of Xie Zhenhua,” said Woodroofe.
“He’s someone who’s a climate person, not a geopolitical person,” Woodroofe added.
When Kerry first announced that climate could be treated as a stand-alone issue in US-China negotiations, Beijing quickly threw cold water on the idea.
But in a change of heart, during a March 7 news conference state councilor Wang Yi, China’s highest-ranking diplomat, said China would be “willing to discuss and deepen cooperation with the United States with an open mind” on key issues like climate — while taking a hard stance on Taiwan.
So despite a tense relationship between the US and China on several issues, the selection of high-ranking climate diplomats suggests that a careful collaboration on climate may be possible.
“The two sides are talking to each other. The channels are there and have been used in the past,” Li Shuo, Beijing-based policy adviser at Greenpeace East Asia, told me in an email. “The question is whether these talks will result in positive outcomes. Climate should provide a safe space for them to conduct an honest conversation. It could, and should, be a stand-alone issue, and not at the expense of other issues.”
With that in mind, here’s how the US and China could lay the groundwork for addressing the climate emergency, and how the US can pressure China to raise its climate ambition.
Work toward “parallel development” on climate goals in each country
As the world’s largest polluters, the most important task is for the US and China to commit to stronger emission reduction targets than currently proposed. The process begins with both countries delivering results at home independently of each other but with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in mind.
“I see the future being more about parallel development,” Seligsohn, the professor at Villanova, said.
Biden’s $2 trillion climate plan is the most ambitious climate platform of any US president in history, but until it gets signed into law, it’s just a platform.
To reassume climate leadership, “the first thing the US has to do is get our own house in order. We’re not in a good position to ask China to do more on climate change if we have nothing on the books,” Joanna Lewis, director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program at Georgetown University, said.
And while China’s announcement of its goal to become carbon neutral by 2060 initially sent major shockwaves throughout the climate world, its 14th Five-Year Plan for economic development left more questions than answers on how the country would get there.
As a central part of the 2016 Paris Agreement, nationally determined contributions (NDCs) indicate what each country plans to do domestically to help achieve the broader goal of limiting warming to 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
So more than any high-level meeting or summit, strengthening America’s nationally determined contribution will signal to China and the rest of the globe that “America is back” and put the US in a better position to influence China and other countries to pursue even more aggressive climate plans.
“The most important item [the US and China] need to discuss is their respective climate ambition, as embedded in the Nationally Determined Contributions. We need to see joint enhancement of their climate targets,” Greenpeace’s Li said.
Although relations between the two countries are at their iciest in years, each country working to improve its nationally determined commitment under the Paris Agreement is an effective starting point that will improve its ability to influence the rest of the world.
In December, Chinese president Xi Jinping announced new NDC targets that weren’t ambitious, but the formal NDC paperwork hasn’t been submitted, leaving room for the targets to be strengthened ahead of COP26.
“Once it becomes clear that the US can put forward an ambitious set of climate targets, then there will be increased pressure on China to engage with the US and potentially revisit the ambition of its own climate targets,” Georgetown’s Lewis said.
If Biden can set a stronger US target before his summit of world leaders to address the climate emergency on April 22, there will be more pressure on China to match the level of US ambition. In which case, experts suggest China has two choices.
“One is to do nothing and suffer the cost to its reputation (and potentially further complicate the [US-China] bilateral relationship),” Li said, and, “the other is to further step up ambition.”
“This is a tightrope that Beijing needs to walk,” Li added, noting the difficulty that lies ahead for China. “What’s clear is this will be a top-level decision over the next few weeks.”
The same is true for the Biden administration.
Compete in helping less-developed countries make the clean energy transition
If the US and China are successful in raising their climate goals at home, the next step is to play a leadership role in helping less-developed countries transition to clean energy.
Both Washington and Beijing have indicated that they want to play a role in helping developing countries, but China’s status as a global leader on climate change is complicated by the county’s paradoxical status as both the world’s largest coal consumer and largest renewable-energy producer.
To be considered a legitimate climate leader on the world stage, experts say that, much like the US must also do, China will have to reckon with its pollution.
“China’s leadership will need to understand, before too long, that there is no way for China to maintain and enhance its standing in the world, with rich and poor countries alike, if climate change starts to wreak widespread havoc and China stands out as the dominant polluter who has refused to do what needed to be done,” Todd Stern, the former climate envoy, wrote in a September 2020 article for the Brookings Institution.
China also needs to address the climate impact of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — a massive infrastructure project formally launched in 2013 to increase Chinese influence around the globe. BRI projects are now in at least 140 countries, representing pretty much every inhabited corner of the planet.
Since 2013, the country has invested a total of more than $760 billion in BRI countries with nearly $300 billion going to energy investment, according to data from the American Enterprise Institute’s China Global Investment Tracker.
There are even plans to build a Polar Silk Road using Arctic shipping routes, which the recent loss of year-round sea ice has made possible.
China has been catching flack from critics who say its plans to build coal plants in developing countries along Belt and Road are just a way to find markets for its coal companies while decarbonizing at home. And since 2013, the Chinese government has invested $50 billion to build overseas coal projects. Unless China changes course, 60 additional coal plants, emitting nearly as much carbon dioxide as Spain does each year, could come online in BRI countries.
Biden also called out China’s BRI in his climate plan for “financing billions of dollars of dirty fossil fuel energy projects across Asia and beyond.”
To encourage a Chinese shift to clean-energy projects along BRI, Biden said on the 2020 campaign trail that, if elected, he would rally the rest of the world to hold China accountable for the environmental impact of its BRI and make the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies a necessary condition for starting any new US-China climate negotiations.
Instead of climate legislation, on January 27 President Biden issued an executive order asking the secretaries of State, Treasury, and Energy to work with all relevant agencies and partners of the US government to “identify steps through which the United States can promote ending international financing of carbon-intensive fossil fuel-based energy while simultaneously advancing sustainable development and a green recovery.”
The Biden administration’s strategy is to call China’s bluff on international climate leadership by leaving the country isolated in its support for overseas fossil fuel projects. Feeling the cold shoulder and already committed to addressing climate change as part of its national interests, the hope is that China would then reverse course and use clean-energy alternatives for BRI instead.
In 2020, China’s investment in renewable energy (solar, wind, hydropower) accounted for the majority of its overseas energy investment for the first time, at 57 percent — a substantial increase from 38 percent in 2019. But China’s state-owned companies and banks still largely support fossil fuel projects over renewable energy, which means there’s more room for improvement.
On February 13, noting the number of intricate steps necessary to pull off Biden’s BRI strategy, Politico reported that former climate adviser to President Barack Obama, John Podesta, said Biden’s climate strategy of isolating China as a climate hypocrite would take some “diplomatic choreography” to work.
There’s reason to believe the dance between the US and China on climate has already begun.
As the Wall Street Journal reported on March 9, the US and China are co-chairing a G20 group on the economic risks of climate change and ensuring a green recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, which means Biden’s plan to pressure China to switch to clean-energy alternatives by seeking a “G20 commitment to end all export finance subsidies of high-carbon projects” is underway, though given the tensions between the two countries, the negotiations are progressing at a slow pace.
The best approach to engaging China moving forward, Georgetown’s Lewis wrote in a recent paper, is to “leverage rather than block China’s BRI investments to support regional development needs, while simultaneously redirecting BRI toward greener technologies.”
But the Biden administration also needs to invest in clean-energy projects for lower- and middle-income countries, not just push China to do so.
One way to do that is through the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) established in 2019. And it appears for the Biden administration, that work is already underway.
While naming future priorities for DFC’s work at a DFC board meeting March 9, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said “development finance is a powerful tool for addressing the climate crisis.”
Blinken said he and Kerry are “very interested in how the DFC can help drive investment toward climate solutions, innovation in climate resilience, renewable energy, and decarbonization technologies.”
On March 18, in a display of DFC’s commitment to helping developing countries transition to clean energy, DFC and USAID announced $41 million in financing support for renewable energy in India. Blinken also said that Biden’s climate summit of world leaders on April 22 would be a chance to put DFC’s work on display.
Climate responsibility begins at home, but it has worldwide impact
The US alone can’t finance all the clean-energy projects needed to make renewable energy more attractive to developing countries than China’s coal investments in BRI. But it can send a strong message to China and the rest of the international community by finally contributing to international climate funds established under the Paris Agreement.
In 2014, then-President Barack Obama promised $3 billion for the Green Climate Fund, an international initiative that has committed nearly $8 billion since 2010 to help developing countries address climate change by tying the money to “low-emissions and climate resilient development.” But by the time Obama left office, the US still owed $2 billion.
During his term, President Donald Trump ended US commitment to the fund. But with Trump out of office, climate activists are now calling on the Biden administration to step up to the plate.
As a part of his climate platform, Biden said he will recommit the US to the Green Climate Fund. Climate envoy Kerry has also echoed that commitment. But if the US does recommit, it should also play a role in helping manage the Green Climate Fund. This would help ensure the money goes to those most vulnerable to climate change, as recent claims about Fund mismanagement have surfaced.
The US may also become a first-time donor to the Adaptation Fund, which has raised $783 million to help developing countries prepare for climate change impacts.
The Biden administration is very much aware of its responsibility to help developing countries transition to net-zero economies. During remarks on January 25 at the virtual Climate Adaptation Summit, Kerry promised the Biden administration would “make good” on past promises.
“Internationally, we intend to make good on our climate finance pledge,” Kerry said.
While noting that in the long term the best way to help developing countries address climate change was transitioning to net-zero by 2050 and limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, Kerry said the Biden administration will “significantly increase the flow of finance, including concessional finance, to adaptation and resilience initiatives.”
There’s no better way to signal that “America is back” on the world stage than for the US to become more active in development finance for countries in need of help. If enough countries increasingly prefer renewable-energy projects, it could pressure China to reconsider its overseas investment in fossil fuels.
There’s already evidence to suggest this is happening. On March 10, the Financial Times reported that China decided to cancel its coal projects in Bangladesh, citing concerns about pollution.
At this point, there’s also significant support among American voters for US-China cooperation on climate change, so it’s just a matter of summoning the political will to make ambitious plans a reality. Recent polling by the Asia Society Policy Institute and Data for Progress indicates that a majority of likely American voters (56 percent) think the US should work with China to address climate change, setting aside disagreements on other issues to end the emergency.
Though the two countries had a combative first meeting in front of cameras on Thursday, there are still plenty of ways both sides can work in tandem, if not together, to address climate change.
Author and film scholar Celine Parreñas Shimizu on how both hypersexual and docile tropes of Asian women play into the Atlanta shooting.
Lillian, a young Asian American woman, was fed up with the flurry of fetishizing messages white men were sending her on Tinder. In 2017, she decided to create a meme Instagram account to show how men would slide into her inbox with remarks such as “I want to try my first Asian woman” or “I need my yellow fever cured.”
After more uncomfortable matches on the online dating app, Lillian used the account to speak out about the fetishization and intersection of racism and sexism that Asian women like her often face in real life. Although Lillian’s last post was in 2018, the account still has more than 19,000 followers, many of whom are Asian women who have expressed similar experiences of fetishization in the comments section.
For Asian women, the Atlanta spa shootings hit close to home. Robert Aaron Long — the white 21-year-old gunman who was arrested on Tuesday and charged with the killing of eight people, six of whom were Asian women — told the police he had a “sex addiction” and that the spas were a “temptation he wanted to eliminate.” Many were quick to note the intersections between racism, misogyny, and racial fetishization.
The stumbles of authorities and media outlets in distinguishing spas from massage parlors alone (the latter of which have a connotation of prostitution and sexualization) show that people were already viewing the case with certain tropes in mind without engaging in the vulnerable realities these workers face.
As Vox’s Li Zhou reported, Long’s statement about his “temptation” speaks to the longstanding stereotypes about not just the businesses, but also “Asian American women who have been exoticized and fetishized as sexual partners as far back as the 1800s,” Zhou writes.
Even before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese immigrants from becoming US citizens, the US had passed the Page Act of 1875, which ultimately banned the importation of Asian women, who were feared to be engaging in prostitution in the country, whether they were or not. And while many scholars point to different origins of Eastern fetishization, film scholar Celine Parreñas Shimizu, author of the book The Hypersexuality of Race, says the emergence of films and artwork after US-led wars in Asian countries is when the trope of the hypersexual but docile Asian woman really took hold in America.
With Asian women, “there’s this construction of a being for others, and a being for the white man, usually that were in these drawings and films and other cultural materials, that really extends to the way that we are capable of giving voice to this gunman who says that he was ‘sexually addicted to the temptations’ that [these Asian workers] offered,” Parreñas Shimizu told Vox. Meanwhile, “the Asian women who were killed were essentially silenced.”
I spoke with Shimizu about the history of fetishizing Asian women and how it translates to the shooting in Atlanta. Our interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Rachel Ramirez
People seem quick to want to label the motives of Atlanta shootings with one definitive answer — it’s racism, it’s misogyny, it’s sex addiction. But it’s much more complicated than one thing. How do you see it?
Celine Parreñas Shimizu
This particular event of Asian American women who work in a place that’s been attributed to sex work really hit me hard, because I’m a scholar that studies the representations and lives of Asian and Asian American women who are sex workers.
So for me, I could see their image and their identities catapulted into the national stage in a way that made it clear how much we lacked knowledge of how they got there. Why are they working there? Who are they? Are they immigrant women? What are their circumstances? What I’m thinking about is how their death has led to further silencing and burial — and how this killing has led to the amplification of the gunman’s voice and the simplification of a “sex addiction,” which further dehumanizes and decontextualizes the Asian women.
Rachel Ramirez
Talk to me more about this silencing and the intersection of a vulnerability and stigma of these workers. The shooter called these spas “a temptation he wanted to eliminate.” What comes to mind when you hear these words?
Celine Parreñas Shimizu
So the arrival of Asian American women can really be captured as a genital event: The Page Act of 1875 reflected the fear of Chinese women as a source of contaminating sexuality. That they were possibly prostitutes.
That they were possibly going to introduce a polyamorous way of life into the United States at a time when there was a growing influx of Asians to the country. If you look at that law, it’s revealing that race has always been tied to gender and sexual difference. That there’s a fear of genital sex, and that there’s a fear of new kinds of sexual culture that these racialized women were representing.
At the same time, there was also the beginning of a mass circulation of Asian women in plays; for example, The Good Woman of Szechuan in the 1880s, Madame Butterfly in 1904. These cultural productions were occurring at a time of Asian encounters with the West and Western invasions of Asia.
There was a production in the circulation of Asian women as sexually different and sexually excessive. They love you so much that they are going to be blinded by your lack of regard and how that love is not reciprocated. It’s such a maddening, scary love and sex and feeling and desire that is contained in an Asian woman’s body. So this is going on in history in the law, and this is going on in popular culture.
When I hear those words, that the Asian women at those spas were “temptations” that he wanted to eliminate, it really captures the legacy of the history and the law and popular culture constructions of Asian women — that they are the vessels of excessive sexuality. For me, it captures producing otherness and the alienation and object status. It’s really a dehumanizing move.
Rachel Ramirez
You mention The Good Woman of Szechuan and Madame Butterfly — is it with this kind of representation in art that the Western fetishization of Asian women really takes off?
Celine Parreñas Shimizu
My first book, The Hypersexuality of Race, chose to begin with Miss Saigon in 1989, which continues and really was one of the most lucrative Broadway productions. I wanted to begin there, because I was so arrested by the repetition of the same story — like what is so appealing about an Asian woman who loves a white man so much that she will choose to kill herself and give up her child and give it to him?
That was from 1904, so it’s really almost 100 years, and it wasn’t just repeated in Miss Saigon; there were other incarnations of it, like in the movies of Anna May Wong. One of her first films, Toll of the Sea, was the same story in 1920. So my book really concentrates on about 100 years of that repetition. Why are we addicted to that story? What is so arousing and pleasurable about that construction? Who does it serve? It isn’t a happy romance; the man and woman’s intimacy are torn apart. In the end, it’s revealed that she has no value, that she is unimportant.
I don’t know where fetishization began. I think there are many stories that we don’t know about, regarding the colonial encounter between Asia and the West. But what I do know is that the hierarchy of value when we enter that relationship between a white man and an Asian woman, whether it’s in the context of the military industrial complex.
One recent story is the one of Jennifer Laude, the trans Filipinx sex worker, who was killed by an American GI in the Philippines. But the United States protected him as soon as he was pronounced guilty; they shuffled him out of the Philippine courthouse, and he was never imprisoned in the Philippines.
Most recently, President Duterte pardoned him. The movement of trans Filipinx women who mobilized in order to say her name — and to make sure that her story did not get buried — tell us that the status of Filipinx trans women sex workers reflects the colonial relationship between the Philippines and the United States and the power inequalities between the countries.
Rachel Ramirez
I want to stay on this, because I am also thinking of the massive US military presence in Asian countries — particularly in Vietnam, the Philippines, Korea, and Japan — and the immediate colonization of not just the lands but of Asian women’s bodies. That Asian women’s bodies are for Western men’s taking.
How does this translate to the events in Atlanta, particularly that the suspect insinuated he wanted to eliminate these spas because he couldn’t control his own addictions?
Celine Parreñas Shimizu
My research on The Hypersexuality of Race included uncovering some photographs that I found of women, photographs of the places where they worked, where they were enslaved, essentially. There were makeshift beds and a pile of towels to aid them in cleaning themselves — and there were cartoon images that attributed the slanted vagina onto Asian women.
There was pornography that eroticized the relationship between the war brides coming back to the US after the Korean War, for example. And this was the first time that Asian women were in pornography that I saw versus white women in yellow face. They were romanticizing the compatibility of a docile war bride, as an ideal American wife, because she was sexually servile but also a domestic servant.
There’s this construction of a being for others and a being for the white man, usually that were in these drawings and films and other cultural materials, that really extends to the way that we are capable of giving voice to this gunman who says that he was “sexually addicted to the temptations” that they offered, and how the Asian women who were killed were essentially silenced.
It’s stunning, too, that there’s still this innocence that’s being projected onto a man who killed so many people. How can that innocence not shatter? And how come that person is given the microphone in order to continue this narrative that relegates this sexuality that drives white men crazy? To say that these women hold in their bodies temptations that he can’t resist, and using that as a reason to justify their killing.
Rachel Ramirez
As you mention, on one hand, Asian women are stereotyped as hypersexual; on the other, they are also seen as “submissive” or “docile.” In fact, there was a study done in 2013, which basically found that Asian women are the most “desirable” racial group among white men and other races. How have these two different stereotypes contributed to Asian women being not just objectified but seen by white men as a more “desirable” race?
Celine Parreñas Shimizu
The polar way we understand gender as virginal equals good or hypersexual equals bad is particularly a prison for Asian American women, because representations in between are hardly in the movies or are hardly around.
So whenever we appear, we must contend with the inheritance of excessive sexuality, where you have to say I am not that, and in the act of saying I am not that, it’s easier to go toward the place that says I am a good woman without that scary sexuality. So, it does not allow for Asian American women to define their own sexuality, which would most likely be in the vast expanse of the middle. We really have to live with those scary and very limited polar opposites.
Rachel Ramirez
Yes, it seems there is little imagination of Asian women outside of the binary subservient and overtly sexual. Relatedly, there has been some hesitancy to talk about the possibility of these spas in the Atlanta shooting being places of sex work. While we don’t know much about the victims and would never want to assume or lean into stereotypes, are we also ignoring an important vulnerability these women faced, even if by connotation alone, one that is made worse the more we stigmatize it?
Celine Parreñas Shimizu
I definitely think that this must be an opportunity for us to educate on the plight of vulnerable, poor, working women in every industry, including the sex industry. While we don’t know if there were indeed sexual transactions, what we do know is it is really important to highlight questions like: Are these women safe at work? What are their conditions of work? How can we improve them, so that they are not any longer some of the most vulnerable in our society?
I do see this definitely as an opportunity for us to educate ourselves on the plight that led these women to work there. And also how there is the accepted linkage between Asian and Asian American women and the sex industry, due to the various wars in Asia and the non-accidental ways that the cities and towns that flank the US military bases had a prostitution industry that was supported by the US military industrial complex. We cannot normalize our ignorance around the conditions in which these women live and work. This is definitely an opportunity to improve their situations by finding out more about what we can do to help.
Rachel Ramirez
In your book, The Hypersexuality of Race, you encourage a shift in thinking about the way Asian women are sexually depicted. How can people move beyond that negative perception of Asian women as submissive sexual objects that have no agency? How should we be thinking about the nuance of Asian women and how does that nuance keep them safe?
Celine Parreñas Shimizu
Sexuality is a part of all of our lives — whether we love it or are ambivalent about it or don’t want to participate in it. It can be a great life-giving source of physical and psychic pleasure of which we should not be deprived, if we wish to participate in it.
One fear that I have in looking at over 100 years of representing Asian and Asian American women as a source of excessive sexuality is that Asian American women should be encouraged to do the work of defining their sexuality in the face of this heavy truck that is trying to tell them that they are a particular way.
I concluded my book with a respectful, interrogative celebration of how Asian American women are using film precisely to explore their sexualities — and, of course, it includes their victimization, as well as their empowerment through sexuality.
We need to acknowledge this huge systemic force that relegates us into a particular kind of sexual role in society. We must take it in our own hands and really centralize our experiences and follow the lead of our foremothers, including Asian American women who worked in Hollywood and Broadway.
I do hope that we can look at the way Asian American women — whether actors, activists, or scholars — have confronted this infliction of perversity and not run away from our own sexualities, and really use it as a force, not only to feel good for ourselves but as an opportunity to capture how we are not yet free and that we have so much possibility to create new narratives about ourselves.
Why did the killer keep going back to those spas? Why did these women continue to deepen into an object status for him? There’s a pornography to this whole thing in terms of what he chose to see about them, and how he chose to narrate that encounter, in a way that continues their devaluation, so that in his mind, in his actions, their lives were not worth living or saving but instead had to be extinguished.
The long history of brutalization of Asian American women has been a part of this country inside and outside it. We need to question our capacity of repressing those stories — and instead, we need to cultivate the need to hear about them and to know them.
TSA data shows Americans are flying more than last year, despite the threat of another wave of Covid-19 cases.
The number of people flying each day in the United States officially surpassed last year, according to checkpoint data from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). It seems Americans are increasingly behaving like they’re done with the pandemic, even as it continues to wreak havoc on the country.
The number of people who passed through TSA checkpoints at airports in the US surpassed last year’s numbers for the first time earlier this week, with 1.1 million people doing so on Wednesday versus fewer than 954,000 a year ago. That gap was even wider Thursday, with 1.4 million people clearing checkpoints in the US — nearly double what it was a year earlier.
Of course, we’re still nowhere near where we used to be in terms of air travel. In the third week of March 2019, more than 2 million people went through TSA checkpoints each day.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22383404/ye5Kw_more_people_are_going_through_us_airport_security_than_last_year.png)
The actual number of commercial flights is still slightly lower than it was at this point last year, according to domestic flight data from Flightradar24. That means flights are fuller than they had been at the beginning of the pandemic as well, which might also mean they’re more likely to spread the virus.
The surge in air travel is happening for a few reasons, including increased vaccination rates that may make people feel more comfortable traveling, spring break for many young Americans, and general fatigue with how the pandemic has changed our lives. It’s been a year since many cities and states around the US went into lockdown and people were urged not to travel. After so much time stuck at home, people seem eager to return to normal life.
The state of the pandemic in the US, however, is much worse than it was at this time last year. Currently, there are more than 50,000 new cases recorded each day, compared to a few hundred at this point last year. Even accounting for the fact that Covid-19 tests were less available then, the situation is much worse now. Thousands of Americans are dying each day and cases are spiking in a number of states, such as Michigan. Additionally, a number of highly contagious Covid-19 variants could cause another wave of new cases.
Traveling increases people’s chances of getting and spreading the coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), whose guidelines tell people to delay travel and stay at home. The US requires all people traveling into the US to have a negative Covid-19 test, but the same guidelines aren’t mandatory for people flying within the US. And while a number of industry studies have said that flying is safe, some of their models are suspect.
So even though it’s clear Americans are impatient to get back to activities like flying, it’s not clear yet if vaccinations are happening fast enough to prevent another wave.