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Born out of the live animal market in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus has exploded into an
international pandemic.
China quarantined millions of people and basically shut down its economy.
Italian leaders grounded flights, suspended mortgage payments, and cleared streets with
mandatory lockdowns.
Trump unilaterally banned all travel from European countries.
Swift and drastic action seems to be following in the footsteps of COVID-19, and as someone
who spends most of their time grappling with the specter that is climate change, I can’t
help but notice the stark contrast in the global response between climate change and
the coronavirus.
Today, I want to dig into this difference with a simple question: what can we learn
from the response to COVID-19 and how can we apply it to climate change?
First of all, the Coronavirus (or COVID-19) is a serious global issue.
At the time of writing this, the global death toll has reached over 4,700 and will no doubt
continue to rise.
In the face of this crisis, the news media has gone haywire--exhaustively covering the
virus with constant coverage of death tolls and quarantines.
Yet in contrast, an environmental problem like air pollution, which has been estimated
to cause 4.5-7 million premature deaths every year rarely makes headlines.
So, instead of adding to the barrage of coronavirus coverage, I want to use the global response
to COVID-19 as a tool to understand the best approach to spurring immediate climate action,
because, let’s face it, if we responded to the threat of climate change the way we
have to the coronavirus, we would be well on our way to a zero-carbon future.
Before we can dive into this analysis, however, we must first understand the differences between
the two crises.
And the starkest contrast between the two has to do with time.
While climate change slowly builds--becoming a catastrophic threat over the course of decades--Coronavirus
is immediate and right in our face.
As a result, climate change research and evidence is more easily called into doubt, making it
much harder for global leaders to act confidently and swiftly on environmental issues.
Coronavirus, on the other hand, sprung up quickly, and there’s a very clear connection
between cause and effect.
We know that it’s a virus that travels through respiratory droplets produced when a person
coughs or sneezes.
With this knowledge, we are then able to draw a clear line between actions and consequences.
We know for sure that actions washing your hands and quarantines will directly hinder
the spread of the virus.
Climate change, however, is not so simple.
This is due to not only its gradual timeline and scale but also to the successful obfuscation
campaigns run by fossil fuel giants like ExxonMobil.
At first glance, it seems like there is no direct line between taking action and seeing
change.
My fellow YouTuber ClimateAdam put it best in his own video on the Coronavirus: “I
mean climate change certainly is costing lives today, but the link between a particular death
and between our emissions is long and tangled.
Yes, of course, from one example climate change is making certain extreme weather events more
likely, raising the risk of death either directly from that extreme event or indirectly through
things that extreme event contributes to, but compare that to this statement: coronavirus
has already cost over a thousand lives.
That second statement is so much more direct and so is our response to it.”
In short, there are not only more incentives for those with power to stymie climate action
than there are to prevent the coronavirus, but we are also more psychologically and structurally
equipped to deal with short-term, clear-and-present dangers like Coronavirus, and less able to
tackle multi-decade problems like climate change.
Despite these differences, and in some ways because of these differences, there is a lot
to learn from how we’ve responded to COVID-19.
One of the big take-aways is that there is a very clear connection between emissions
rates and the economy.
This NASA satellite image shows the steep drop in Nitrogen Dioxide air pollution during
the sharp decline in economic activity as a result of China’s rapid and aggressive
response to the Coronavirus.
CarbonBrief asserts that China’s coronavirus shutdown temporarily decreased the country’s
CO2 emissions by a quarter, which Stanford Professor Marshall Burke predicts might have
possibly reduced the number of premature deaths due to air pollution, so much so that China’s
overall mortality rate might have decreased in the two months during the height of the
coronavirus shutdowns.
The point here, as Burke notes, is not that pandemics are good or necessary, it’s instead
that there is a large, hidden toll of fossil fuel emissions that is here and now.
But to prevent the millions of future deaths caused directly through burning fossil fuels
or indirectly through the consequences of a hotter planet, the world needs to act quickly
to create rapid and drastic structural change.
The often-quoted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report asserts that we have
until 2030 to make sharp global emission cuts, which many argue is impossible.
Luckily, we’ve just seen that it’s not.
The Coronavirus definitively shows that collective, large-scale, structural change is feasible
in the face of a crisis.
And climate change is the biggest crisis of our generation.
As Amy Jaffe, director of the Council on Foreign Relations' Energy Security and Climate Change
program, puts it, "Suppose you were a policymaker, and you were thinking about what you would
do to lower emissions — you just got a pretty good instruction."
Because of the Coronavirus, countries like Italy have almost done away with travel, many
previously busy streets are now free of cars.
Workweeks are shortening for some, others are embracing the potential of video chat
and messaging software instead of traveling long distances, and some companies have staggered
work shifts to reduce traffic.
Temporary bike lanes were set up all over New York City, and walking and biking were
encouraged over other transportation options.
Of course, the answer to climate change is not to quarantine everyone in their homes,
that would be an absolute disaster.
The response to the Coronavirus demonstrates that planned economic slowdowns are not only
possible but necessary to cut emissions drastically.
But this type of fast structural change shows that without robust social safety nets like
a clean jobs guarantee, extensive free public transit, or a strong low-carbon low-cost public
housing system, degrowth will harm millions.
Climate action propositions like the Green New Deal need to incorporate this type of
essential framework in their policymaking because to combat climate change quickly we
need a rapid structural transition.
A break from the status quo.
But what’s key is that this slowdown doesn’t have to mean job loss, worry, and pain, it
can instead mean opportunity, free time, and a more intentional, quality-driven economy.
In short, Coronavirus shows us that the rapid emissions reductions called for in the IPCC
report are not a pipe dream, they can and are happening.
The virus demonstrates that to garner support for this needed action we need to treat climate
change like it really is: a crisis.
But it also shows us one more thing: that the needed reduction in emissions through
degrowth has to be coupled with strong safety nets like healthcare and childcare for all,
to catch those affected by an economy-wide transition to a fossil-fuel-free world.
COVID-19 is scary and is affecting the whole world, but if we don’t act in the same way
about climate change, the effects of a hotter planet will be much worse.
The Coronavirus response has shown us a path forward, we just have to have the courage
to break from the status quo and go down it.
Hey everyone, Charlie here.
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