Friday 13 March 2020

Going viral 2 - Corona, climate and collapse

My previous blog post was about Corona, how we stumbled into a pandemic and why some countries more than others (especially USA) have missed the opportunity to contain the crisis.

Even though we are only in the beginning of the Corona pandemic, there are already lessons to be learned and parallels to be drawn. Some of them relate to the connection between Corona and climate change. It is clear that the decrease in emissions due to lowered industrial activity have had a marked impact on CO2 emissionsFurthermore, it might well be that the reduction in particle emissions due to reduced traffic and combustion actually savedmore lives than those killed by the virus (which of course is not a good way to solve the pollution problem).

There are of course also economical effects. The slowdown in transports from both less cars and trucks on the ground and far fewer flights in the air has caused plummeting sales of cars. Airlines are bleeding economically and some are going bankrupt. Still, the long term effects on travel might be even bigger. The big pharma company AstraZeneca was already far ahead before this crisis, conducting 20,000 video and telephone meetings per week. Others will now need to adapt quickly and rapidly start to move towards a non-travel meeting culture. What the lasting effects on business travel patterns will be remains to be seen. But it is unlikely that once companies have gotten used to running virtual meeting they will go back to spending money and their employees time on long flights for short meetings. So even if the corona crisis eventually subsides, the airline industry  might not make a full comeback. 

Presently central banks and governments are pouring money into the financial system in order to shore up companies whose business has came to a standstill due to the pandemic. But as the airline example shows this may well be throwing good money after bad. We need transformation not return to an outgoing business model that is not compatible with a liveable climate. It’s not only a question of emissions and pollution. Anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity destruction is one of the factors behind pandemics with a zoonotic cause, as habitat destruction and increasing temperatures are pushing wildlife too close to humans. Ebola, SARS, MERS and Covid19 all have a common denominator in that it was a disease that jumped from animals to humans. Still, we fail to see this link, but also don’t grasp that while Corona infection is an imminent threat, climate change is already the big disruptor which will only get more dangerous in years to come.
While coronavirus is understandably treated as an imminent danger, the climate crisis is still presented as an abstraction whose consequences are decades away. Unlike an illness, it is harder to visualise how climate breakdown will affect us each as individuals.
There is another link between Corona and climate change. Despite a likely reduction in CO2 due to less energy used, the reduction in aerosols can paradoxically result in a jump in temperatures, since the particle formed during combustion shields some of the incoming sunlight. Considering the already hot start of 2020, with the warmest winter on record in Europe while Australia endured record heat, droughts and fires, even an small increase in temperature could be very bad. A worst case scenario would be that in the summer we are hit by heatwaves and droughts at a time when both public resources and population have been worn down by the Covid19 pandemic. If so, there is a huge risk that this would lead to calls for "strong leaders" when it is instead strong leadership we need.
Trump will veer toward the edge of the cliff here and his cult of followerswill go with him. There’s no choice now for the Trump faithful. To admit he is incompetent and at all responsible now would be a devastating blow to their reality that might destroy their lives. There will be vast conspiracies, drumbeats of unnecessary war, scapegoating of political rivals, and a demonization and dehumanization of vulnerable populations.
And while most people are showing responsible behaviour and are willing to accept sacrifices for the common good, solidarity seems to disappear with increase wealth, as the super-rich jet off to disaster bunkers amid coronavirus outbreakSo what do we need to do in order to change the course we are on? Stay tuned, this is a crisis to good to be wasted! 

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