Just weeks ago, Singapore was a coronavirus success story, admired for pinpointing infected patients and isolating their contacts with brisk efficiency, all while causing minimal disruption to an economy that was the envy of Asia.

But the island city-state is now battling to control an enormous outbreak spreading among a population that officials had mostly overlooked: the migrant workers who form the vast but unseen engine of Singapore’s prosperity.

The dissonance is enough to make me uninstall Twitter from my phone. Maybe it’s compassion fatigue, maybe it’s 2020. But if I’m honest with myself, it’s a world-sized rift in how we perceive the climate emergency on the different timelines I doom-scroll. On one feed, everyone – American or not – is forced to tune in to each candidate’s climate policy because the US’s electoral fate is inextricably linked to the future of the planet. On another feed from back home in India, 40 new coalmines in the last great sal forests are being served up to any bidder who’ll take them, while civil rights activists from a different era of environmental organising languish in jail, their health deteriorating.

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The L.A. Times recently quoted attorney Allie Brudney on how CAL and other rights groups are using the Tariff Act of 1930 to pressure multinational companies producing for U.S. markets to address forced labor in their supply chains: “The law was created to protect U.S. industry from foreign competition, but we are now seeing it as a tool that can be leveraged for worker-focused human rights.”