Los Angeles Times - 03.04.2020

L ATIMES.COM/OPINION FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2020A

OP-ED

T

here’s nothinglike a
global pandemic to re-
mind us of what we
truly value. As mortal-
ity ratesand economic
upheavalfill the headlines, we in
coastal California are also grap-
pling with another significant
change: the closing of our beaches
and severing of access to the sea.
For the first time in history,
most people in Southern Califor-
nia, under stay-at-home orders,
are completely banned from surf-
ing, sunbathing, fishing or building
sandcastles at the ocean’s edge. It
is hard to understate the magni-
tude of this situation or how por-
tentous it is.
Californians are extremely atta-
ched to coastal places. The annual
California State University Chan-
nel Islands Coastal Survey has
found that sandy beaches are so
central to ouridentity that when
asked for words that come to mind
when prompted with “California,”
survey respondents overwhelm-
ingly answered “sunny,” “beach” or
similar phrases.
The survey also found that 8%
of the residents of Los Angeles,
Ventura and Santa Barbara coun-
ties go to the beach daily, 31% go at
least weekly and 61% go at least
monthly. One-third of us went to
the beach before our first birthday;
half of us before our second. Some
77% of Californians say the “condi-
tion of the ocean and beaches is
very important to the economy
and quality of life for California’s fu-
ture.”
This love of the coast is what
prompted Californians to create
the Coastal Act, protecting the
public’s access to the shore. The
monetary value of this access adds
up, with ocean-dependent tourism
and recreation in Southern Cali-
fornia’s five coastal counties alone
contributing more than $12 billion
to the state GDP in 2016.
The current beach closures are
giving us a glimpse of Southern
California’s likely future: one with
fewer and smaller beaches nearly
as inaccessible as they are right

now. An estimated 31% to 67% of

Southern California’s beaches will

be completely gone by 2100, accord-

ing to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Climate-change-driven sea-lev-

el rise and ever more powerful,

sand-robbing stormsincreasingly

gnaw away at the ocean edge of our

beaches. Property owners have re-

sponded by pouring more con-

crete, piling up mountains of boul-

ders or otherwise armoring the

landward side of beaches to shield

property and structures from the

encroaching sea.

As of 2018, 38% of Southern Cali-

fornia’s coastline was armoredto

combat that erosion. Unfortu-

nately, such protection sacrifices

public access and, ultimately, the

beach sand itself thanks to altered

wave energy focus and increased

scouring of the beach face.

Fostering a future rich with

beaches requires new, well-in-

formed approaches to face this

looming threat. We do have the

tools to respond to beach loss.

Chief among these is “managed

retreat.” Letting beaches and

coastal ecosystems evolve natu-

rally and migrate inland as the sea

level rises is one way of ensuring

they continue to exist. We’ve done

this successfully at Surfers Point in

Ventura and on the Pacific Coast

Highway at the base of the Big Sur

coast. Firmly opposing coastal ar-

moring is another. We need infra-

structure such as public parking

lots and stairways to access the

beach, but we need a beach to ac-

cess in the first place.

Governments everywhere

under-invest in shoreline protec-

tion. California is no exception. We

spend less than $100 million a year

on the health of the state’s sandy

beaches. More public resources

could help us improve coastal

monitoring to know where and how

to focus limited dollars, make the

coastal infrastructure more cost

effective and better help home-

owners and local governments de-

velop realistic plans for the future.

We are all now seeing what hap-

pens when we fail to invest in crisis

planning and ignore pending

threats. Improved public invest-

ment on the shoreline can help us

avoid repeating this mistake.

With the pandemic raging, Cali-

fornians need to live by the public

health measures communities are

taking to stop the spread of the co-

ronavirus. For now, that includes

avoiding the beaches, which are so

much a part of the California

dream. This forced separation

from the surf should motivate us to

support more policies that pre-

serve our glorious coastline before

much of it is gone for good.

Sean Anderson, Kiki Patsch

and Dan Reinemanare professors

of environmental science and

resource management at Cal

State Channel Islands.

HERMOSA BEACH,like all other beaches in Los Angeles County, was closed last week to prevent
gatherings of people in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Jay L. ClendeninLos Angeles Times

A glimpse of California

without sand and surf

BEACH CLOSURES give Californians a taste of what life will

be like when we lose our beaches to climate change.

Allen J. Schaben Los Angeles Times

By Sean Anderson,
Kiki Patsch
and Dan Reineman

O

n Tuesday, Secretary

of State Michael R.

Pompeo unveileda de-

tailed framework for

restoring democracy in

Venezuela that was immediately

rejectedby the man who would

need to step aside for such a transi-

tion to occur: Venezuelan dictator

Nicolas Maduro. Perhaps this

should not come as a surprise, giv-

en that just last week the U.S. De-

partment of Justice charged

Maduro with narco-terrorismand

put a $15-million price on his head.

Many Venezuelans reacted with

understandable satisfaction to the

indictment of Maduro and some of

his closest collaborators. Presi-

dent Trump further rattled sabers

by announcing a buildup of his ad-

ministration’s counternarcotics

operation off Venezuela’s coast,

though the U.S. is unlikely to drag

Maduro into court anytime soon.

This will come as a disappoint-

ment to the Venezuelan diaspora

in the United States, concentrated

not coincidentally in the electoral

battleground state of Florida. For

those victimized by Maduro’s well-

documented repression, corrup-

tion and sheer incompetence, the

salient fact remains that someone

is taking steps to hold the unpopu-

lar Maduro regime accountable.

As the U.S. struggles to restore

democracy in Venezuela, however,

it will have to reconcile these crimi-

nal indictments with Pompeo’s

more conciliatory framework,

which proposes a transitional

unity government and a sequence

of steps leading to new elections. In

return for these steps, the U.S.

would incrementally lift sanctions,

which have been criticized for cut-

ting off Venezuela’s oil revenue

while the country tries to prevent a

COVID-19 catastrophe.

Legally speaking, the fact that

the U.S. does not consider Maduro

Venezuela’s legitimate president is

sufficient to overcome the custom-

ary immunity enjoyed by heads of

state, as it was three decades ago in

the case of Panamanian strong-

man Manuel Noriega.

But from the standpoint of U.S.

foreign relations, seeking the ar-

rest and prosecution of a de facto

leader bears many of the same

weighty consequences as indicting

a recognized head of state. So the

indictment of Maduro and other

top officials raises important stra-

tegic questions. Most fundamen-

tally, how does it advance the

Trump administration’s objective

of a peaceful, democratic transi-

tion in Venezuela, which Pompeo’s

framework aims to achieve?

The White House likely views

the indictments as the next step in

its “maximum pressure” campaign

against Maduro — an escalation,

perhaps, but a logical one. The U.S.

will interpret recent developments

as evidence that its efforts to as-

phyxiate the regime are succeed-

ing — the collapse in Venezuelan oil

production and sales, the gasoline

shortages in Caracas, and

Maduro’s doomed-to-fail appeal

for a $5-billion loan from the Inter-

national Monetary Fund.

The administration presum-

ably calculates that as funds dry

up, those keeping Maduro in power

—most prominently, Venezuela’s

armed forces — will cut him loose.

Under this theory, the indictments

speed Maduro’s demise by under-

cutting his legitimacy and eroding

the cohesion of his collaborators,

some of whom will look to abandon

a sinking ship — with the U.S. tran-

sition framework the life raft.

The first challenge to this ap-

proach is that maneuvers that

have tried to splinter the regime or

provoke its collapse have yet to

work. Efforts to force Maduro from

power through a combination of

domestic mobilization, interna-

tional isolation and economic pres-

sure reached their zenith in early

2019, when opposition leader Juan

Guaido emerged from obscurity to

lead mass demonstrations and

was widely recognized as Venezue-

la’s interim president. Even then, a

scheme to convince military lead-

ers to remove Maduro failed spec-

tacularly.

The regime is weaker economi-

cally today, but Maduro has

sources of revenue beyond oil, in-

cluding the illegal gold trade and

other criminal activities. And the

United States’ ability to assess the

loyalty of the military brass, much

less fracture it, has proven limited.

While Pompeo’s transition frame-

work offers assurances to the mili-

tary, such as keeping Minister of

Defense Vladimir Padrino Lopez in

place, the fact that Padrino was

indictedjust a week before the

framework was announced will do

little to convince his comrades in

arms to put their fates in the hands

of a government they have been in-

doctrinated to abhor.

Asecond challenge is that the

indictments tie the hands of the

Trump administration and

Guaido by rendering any negotiat-

ed pathway to a democratic transi-

tion even more complex. Remarka-

bly, this includes the roadmap

Pompeo put forward, which largely

replicates a sensible proposal

Guaido’s representatives made

during unsuccessful negotiations

with Maduro last summer. It would

require both Maduro and Guaido

to step aside, and their parties to

govern together until elections are

called. At the time, the Trump ad-

ministration threw cold wateron

the talks. Now it appears to be be-

latedly embracing the proposal.

The result is strategic confusion.

In what may be the most endur-

ing foreign-policy consequence of

last week’s indictments, any effort

to incentivize political compro-

mise and power-sharing is over-

shadowed by the actions of the De-

partment of Justice. Unlike asset

freezes and visa bans, public in-

dictments cannot be easily

quashed to reward positive behav-

ior or traded away in a deal for new

elections. The U.S. has in essence

demanded the unconditional sur-

render of not just Maduro, but

many of the most frequently men-

tioned candidates who might push

him aside. Arguably, the accused

now have even more motivation to

close ranks and crush their oppo-

nents, at a time when Venezuela

needs just the opposite.

On top of its existing institu-

tional and humanitarian crises,

Venezuela is staring down the bar-

rel of COVID-19, with a health sys-

tem that has collapseddue to

Maduro’s corruption and neglect.

In recent days, civil society leaders

appealedfor a humanitarian truce

between the country’s political fac-

tions in a desperate attempt to mo-

bilize international assistance for

coronavirus response. As Pom-

peo’s transition framework seems

to recognize, Venezuela needs po-

litical solutions now more than

ever. Last week’s indictments may

make that even harder than before.

Michael J. Camilleriis director

of the rule of law program at the

Inter-American Dialogue.

Our muddled

Venezuela strategy

By Michael J. Camilleri

O

n Jan. 20,South Korea
and the United States
both reported their
first confirmed cases of
the novel coronavirus.
While President Moon Jae-inof
South Korea acted with ingenuity,
dispatch and courage, President
Trump delayed, denied and lied.
As of Wednesday night, South
Korea reported 169 total deaths,
and the numbers seem to be lev-
eling off.
You know where this goes.
As of Wednesday night, the U.S.
reported more than 5,000 deaths,
with a potentially terrifying surge
in fatalities still to come.
And thus we get Trump’s latest
wretched failure to lead. But this
time he seems to have been ani-
mated by more than his addled
psyche. A workof sophistry by the
libertarian legal professor Richard
A. Epstein, which was widely circu-
lated by Trumpites, helped to

justify the administration’s equiv-

ocation and denial.

The federal government’s

response to the virus, in other

words, has been driven by the

usual Trumpworld up-is-down

madness. Only this time it comes

with a luxe academic sheen.

According to the Washington

Post, Trumpites began sharing

“Coronavirus Perspective,” Ep-

stein’s first blog post on the mat-

ter, just over two weeks ago, when

it appeared on the website of the

conservative Hoover Institution,

where Epstein is a senior fellow.

Epstein’s first post — along

with two others, “Coronavirus

Overreaction” and “The Grim

Cost of Lockdowns”— evidently

told Trumpites what they wanted

to hear: That the virus had been

overhyped by liberals trying to

crush personal freedoms. “Pro-

gressives think they can run every-

one’s lives through central plan-

ning,” he groused in the second

post, with all the brio of a new

reader of “Atlas Shrugged.”

He also claimed it would kill

only the weak and elderly people

the economy could afford to lose.

And that the flu-like bug would

soon lose steam.

But Epstein also got truly rash,

projecting that in the U.S. the

coronavirus would cause only 500

deaths. With little explanation,

and just as reality was proving him

wrong, he revised his tally to 5,000.

Wrong again. Dr. Anthony

Fauci, director of the National

Institute of Allergy and Infectious

Diseases, projects the total at

100,000 and 240,000, if we’re lucky.

Epstein described that first

faulty calculation as “a public

relations gaffe.”

A lot of Epstein’s factual as-

sertions were challenged by jour-

nalist Isaac Chotiner, citing vari-

ous virus and infectious disease

experts, in a Q&A in the New

Yorker, and also by the data scien-

tist Rex Douglass, whose method-

ical dismantling of Epstein’s argu-

ments went online Monday.

Douglass, of the Center for

Peace and Security Studies at UC

San Diego, faults Epstein not just

for errors but for intellectual dis-

honesty: cherry-picking data,

avoiding specificity, using double-

speak, and showing indifference to

the truth.

And yet Trump’s recent helter-

skelter propaganda has regularly

contained echoes of Epstein’s bad

faith. When Trump condemned a

disciplined stay-at-home response

to the virus as “overreaction,” and

wanted Americans to get back to

business as usual by April 12 —

those moves could have been

derived straight from Epstein’s

work.

I hope Epstein’s posts go down

in history in much the same way as

another landmark of pseudosci-

ence: The 1998 paper in the august

medical journal Lancet by Andrew

Wakefield. This is the article that

falsely connected vaccinations

with developmental disorders in

children.

Wakefield’s paper, since

retractedby the Lancet, gave

ballast to the dangerous anti-

vaccination movement, which

contributed to a resurgence of

measles; Epstein’s work seems to

have informed at least some of the

Trump’s administration’s fateful

coronavirus missteps, adding to

the pandemic’s dangers and in-

creasing the toll of sickness and

death.

And yet Epstein calls an inex-

cusable mistake a public relations

gaffe.

And there’s the crux. Why did a

legal scholar at a solemn think

tank dish out something he would

later excuse as PR? What about

the accuracy, honesty and the

consequences of his claims?

Maybe it’s a consequence of the

internet bandstand, the notion

that everyone has a right to take

the mic on any subject and win an

audience. Maybe Epstein found

the possibility of socking it to

pearl-clutching lib overreactors

impossible to resist. After all,

when you say dangerous Trumpite

stuff like “back to work by Easter!”

you get to make people mad; you

get to run with the devil. Maybe it

feels manly.

Like many conservative intel-

lectuals, Epstein likes to think of

himself as a “contrarian,” an ivory-

tower troll. Douglass convincingly

identifies the kernel of Epstein’s

intellectual misconduct in that

pose.

“Contrarianism is not a search

for truth, it’s a search for political

influence,” Douglass writes. “Per-

formative controversy, fake horse

races, hypotheses that don’t follow

from theory are immediate red

flags the author doesn’t actually

care what the right answer is.”

Indeed. The Hoover Institution

should retract Epstein’s danger-

ous posts, which constitute disin-

formation. They are a public-

health hazard. Trollish posturing

has no place in serious intellectual

work, let alone in the formation of

White House policy.

@page

One source of Trump’s inexcusable coronavirus failures

A legal scholar low-balled

COVID-19 deaths, helping

to justify White House

equivocation and denial.

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN