Why don’t
we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?
Owen Jones
No Cobra
meetings, no sombre speeches from No 10, yet the consequences of runaway global
heating are catastrophic
Thu 5 Mar
2020 11.52 GMTLast modified on Thu 5 Mar 2020 14.44 GMT
It is a
global emergency that has already killed on a mass scale and threatens to send
millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it could destabilise
entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and
infrastructure. But this is the climate crisis, not the coronavirus.
Governments are not assembling emergency national plans and you’re not getting push
notifications transmitted to your phone breathlessly alerting you to dramatic
twists and developments from South Korea to Italy.
More than
3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health
Organization, air pollution alone – just one aspect of our central planetary
crisis – kills seven million people every year. There have been no Cobra
meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements
detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public. In time,
we’ll overcome any coronavirus pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are
already out of time, and are now left mitigating the inevitably disastrous consequences
hurtling towards us.
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. Perhaps when unprecedented wildfires engulfed parts of
the Arctic last summer there could have been an urgent conversation about how
the climate crisis was fuelling extreme weather, yet there wasn’t. In 2018,
more than 60 million people suffered the consequences of extreme weather and
climate change, including more than 1,600 who perished in Europe, Japan and the
US because of heatwaves and wildfires. Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe were
devastated by cyclone Idai, while hurricanes Florence and Michael inflicted
$24bn (£18.7bn) worth of damage on the US economy, according to the World
Meteorological Organization.
As the
recent Yorkshire floods illustrate, extreme weather – with its terrible human
and economic costs – is ever more a fact of British life. Antarctic ice is
melting more than six times faster than it was four decades ago and Greenland’s
ice sheet four times faster than previously thought. According to the UN, we
have 10 years to prevent a 1.5C rise above pre-industrial temperature but,
whatever happens, we will suffer.
Pandemics
and the climate crisis may go hand in hand, too: research suggests that
changing weather patterns may drive species to higher altitudes, potentially
putting them in contact with diseases for which they have little immunity.
“It’s strange when people see the climate crisis as being in the future,
compared to coronavirus, which we’re facing now,” says Friends of the Earth’s
co-executive director, Miriam Turner. “It might be something that feels far
away when sitting in an office in central London, but the emergency footing of
the climate crisis is being felt by hundreds of millions already.”
Imagine,
then, that we felt the same sense of emergency about the climate crisis as we
do about coronavirus. What action would we take? As the New Economic
Foundation’s Alfie Stirling points out, a strict demarcation between the two
crises in unwise. After all, coronavirus may trigger a global slowdown: the
economic measures in response to this should be linked to solving the climate
crisis. “What tends to happen in a recession is policy-makers panic about what
the low-lying fruits are; it’s all supply chains and sticking plasters,” he
tells me. During the 2008 crash, for example, there was an immediate cut in VAT
and interest rates, but investment spending wasn’t hiked fast enough, and was
then slashed in the name of austerity. According to NEF research, if the
coalition government had funded additional zero-carbon infrastructure, it would
not only have boosted the economy but could have reduced residential emissions
by 30%. This time round, there’s little room to cut already low interest rates
or boost quantitative easing; green fiscal policy must be the priority.
What would
be mentioned in that solemn prime ministerial speech on the steps of No 10,
broadcast live across TV networks? All homes and businesses would be insulated,
creating jobs, cutting fuel poverty and reducing emissions. Electric car
charging points would be installed across the country. Britain currently lacks
the skills to transform the nation’s infrastructure, for example replacing fuel
pumps, says Stirling: an emergency training programme to train the workforce
would be announced.
A frequent
flyer levy for regular, overwhelmingly affluent air passengers would be
introduced. As Turner says, all government policies will now be seen through
the prism of coronavirus. A similar climate lens should be applied, and
permanently.
This would
only be the start. Friends of the Earth calls for free bus travel for the
under-30s, combined with urgent investment in the bus network. Renewable energy
would be doubled, again producing new jobs, clean energy, and reducing deadly
air pollution. The government would end all investments of taxpayers’ money in
fossil fuel infrastructure and launch a new tree-planting programme to double
the size of forests in Britain, one of Europe’s least densely forested nations.
There is a
key difference between coronavirus and climate crisis, of course, and it is
shame. “We didn’t know coronavirus was coming,” says Stirling. “We’ve known the
climate crisis was on the cards for 30 or 40 years.” And yet – despite being
inadequately prepared because of an underfunded, under-resourced NHS – the
government can swiftly announce an emergency pandemic plan.
Coronavirus
poses many challenges and threats, but few opportunities. A judicious response
to global heating would provide affordable transport, well-insulated homes,
skilled green jobs and clean air. Urgent action to prevent a pandemic is of
course necessary and pressing. But the climate crisis represents a far graver
and deadlier existential threat, and yet the same sense of urgency is absent.
Coronavirus shows it can be done – but it needs determination and willpower,
which, when it comes to the future of our planet, are desperately lacking.
• Owen
Jones is a Guardian columnist
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