What Can This Pandemic Teach Us About Acting On Climate Change?
One thing that anthropologists and sociologists have long known about human behavior is that we are much better at short-term thinking and problem solving (think “fight or flight”) than we are at dealing with long-term, generational issues. This couldn’t be more starkly evident in our response to the current pandemic versus our response to the climate catastrophe.
Within a month or less of the outbreak in China, that country essentially shut down its economy. Less extreme, but very aggressive lockdowns are now occurring in Italy and even New Rochelle, NY and the cancelling of most public sports events, conferences, theater productions, etc. in this country and many others are creating a significant shift in daily life. Add onto that school closures, work from home, travel bans and “social distancing” and no one living in the Global North in March 2020 would say that we are doing “business as usual.” This is unprecedented.
And what are the stakes? It’s possible that between 100 million — 200 million people become infected in the U.S. and that between 200,000 and nearly 2 million people die, per recent scenario modelling by the CDC*. If you extrapolate that out to the world-wide population, it’s theoretically possible that 1/3 of the planet will be infected and if the mortality rate was 1% (10x the common flu), then that could translate to 25 million people dying from the virus. That’s no small threat and the way we are responding at our most aggressive is unquestionably the right thing to do, even as our lack of “longer-term” planning for a pandemic in our country is becoming painfully obvious right now.
“Listen to the experts.” “Acting out of an abundance of caution.” These are things we are hearing from our community leaders, state leaders and even at the national level since last week. So where is this advice when it comes to acting on the climate catastrophe? The fact that this disaster is playing out over years and decades instead of days and weeks is the critical stumbling point to our society taking concerted action, no matter the cost, in order to contain a threat that will subsume us many times over compared to the coronavirus pandemic.
But this seems so intangible, this future threat with reports often referencing 2050 and 2100 as milestones for temperature rise. But tell that to the people in Australia this January. Tell that to the people in Paradise, to those in Houston, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico and the Mid-West farms whose crop yields dropped precipitously due to flooding last year.
The last six years were the warmest years on record and January was the warmest month on record. We are drowning and burning, suffering biblical floods and drought all at the same time. These events are not waiting to happen once the temperature exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial era as early as 2030 — these disasters are happening now, playing out in real-time, with only 1 degree Celsius of warming.
We could apply the lessons that we are learning from dealing with the coronavirus, lessons about coordinating globally even as we act aggressively at the local and national levels, in order to more effectively tackle anthropogenic climate disruption. And If we put a fraction of the effort expended on containing the coronavirus in order to ameliorate the effects of climate change, we might actually have a chance to avoid the worst-case outcomes that are assuredly bearing down on us.
So let’s change the messaging on our response to the climate crisis so people can understand that it is a short, medium and long-term threat ultimately many times greater than this current pandemic and because unlike with the coronavirus, the world is not seriously working on a vaccine for fixing climate change within 12–18 months.
*NY Times, “Worst-Case Estimates for U.S. Corona Virus Deaths,” by Sheri Fink, March 13, 2020.
