(This is my third text on the Corona virus / Covid19 epidemic, see previous posts on the blog)
We are in a global pandemic crisis and countries are heading into a lock down, closed border survival state. Everyone tries to find ways to avoid the Italian situation where hospitals are overwhelmed with critically ill patients. The situation is likely to become even worse in countries with less developed health care system, or as in USA where lack of paid sick leave in combination with high individual costs will make people stay away from necessary care. We have NOT seen the worst yet!
It will be a long and hard time ahead before we see any kind of turn for the better. What combination of ordered and voluntary containment that will be needed, how bad the situation will become and how many that will die we just don’t know yet. What’s making this worse is that we are in a triple crisis, as was discussed on Gaslit Nation this week. The combination of authoritarian and incompetent “leaders” with the accelerating climate breakdown contributes to making the Corona crisis so much worse.
That's the struggle against autocracy. That's the struggle against the climate crisis. That's now the struggle against a pandemic in a world where most countries don't have the healthcare apparatus and or the transparency of government necessary to prevent a large scale human tragedy.
There is a high risk that authoritarian regimes will try to use corona created chaos to enhance their power and financial gains in the midst of the turmoil. Today there was a report from newspaper Welt am Sonntag that Trump has tried to lay his small hands on a potential vaccine being developed in German, in order to use it exclusively in USA. At a time when collaboration and cooperation is what is needed, men like Trump, Bolsonaro, MSB and Putin will not be able to look beyond there personal power and gains. That is a crisis as bad as Corona itself. When Saudi Arabia is waging a price war on oil that threatens to further escalate the economic crisis, Trump sees it as chance to fill up with cheap oil.
So what can we do and how do we act? We will need a countermovement and a new direction in order to not just to survive but to transform our societies for a better future. I find inspiration in how Italians confined to their homes have been singing on their balconies rather than stay silent in despair. As Eric Holthaus wrote in a recent post about climate change and what we need to have more climate action it’s trust in mutual aid, not competition, that could form the basis of a new collective story: "I would have to trust others a lot more than I already do.”
Sadly, at the moment we can watch the lack of trust in Europe, where countries within the EU are keeping critical medical equipment to themselves. It would probably been much better also for the rest of Europe if Italy had received the support it asked for. Even better would be if EU would be proactively equipped to handle crisis like this. But if governments are not able to handle this kind of solidarity, likely we as citizens need to finds way to create the kind of collaboration that we will need for the future to meet both the Corona crisis and the climate breakdown.
We will need to tell a better story that can lead us forward. It will not be simple story of happily ever after story, it will be a story that also includes struggles and losses. However, both human history and our collective storytelling shows us so many occasions where mankind has rissen to the challenge.
We will need a transformation to a society that can adsorb the challenges ahead without falling apart. The last year I have been given the opportunity to be involved in the regional development strategy for the region of Västra Götaland in Sweden. Three keywords in the forthcoming strategy have suddenly become eerily important and also scalable on the global level:
- Robust
- Inclusive
- Fossil Free
Robust - There will be more challenges ahead, a new pandemic like Corona or rapid sea level rise that inundates our coastal regions. There could be other completely unknown Black Swans that we need to deal with. To sustain these kind of challenges we can not run our societies, our companies or ourselves at the limit of capacity, because then every extra straw will break the camels back.
Inclusive - At the moment we can foresee that the Corona crisis will hit the most vulnerable hardest. The same is true for climate change. We need to distribute the burden far more equitable than what we have seen during the last two decades. A world for the 1% is not sustainable for anyone.
Fossil free - Getting of rid of our dependence on coal, oil and gas is not only a given if we want to have a stable climate, it is also necessary for a stable global economy. A world where the power of both fossil fuel companies like Exon, Shell and BP as well as petrostates like Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran will be a better world for everybody.
The young climate movement has during the last 18 months been able to make both climate change and climate justice subjects that have been discussed at the highest level, from the UN to World Economic Forum. We need to harness the same energy in dealing with the ongoing corona crisis. It is a crisis, but if we can sustain the immediate crisis it is also an opportunity to rebuild in a far better way than the system that brought us to this brink. Whether we call it Great New Deal or something else is irrelevant. But wise governments and leaders should not throw good money after and try business that have outlived their time. The era of weekend shopping flights and mass consumerism fuelled by oil will need to stop now. Corona may show us in a brutal way what we can live without. What we need now is both leaders and social movements to help us discover what we need instead.
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