Essays about the calamities of 2020 like to equate Corona and Climate Change as two big challenges that highlight and accelerate the problems we already have by acting as prisms that magnify existing societal fissures. Indeed, both a unprecedented global challenges that require actions beyond the scale humanity was used to do date. But in many ways, Corona and Climate Change pull in different directions, adding to the the stress they already exert. In fact it is much easier to see how Corona ruins the environment than how it could help.
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| Plastic and COVID (Photo: Reuters) |
Much that is good for the environment is not good for fighting the virus. Specifically, Corona, as a matter of life and death, plays first fiddle and pushes the environment into second rank, record breaking hurricanes and forests fires notwithstanding. All eyes are on COVID not on Climate Change. Resources, and priorities are addressing the pandemic. The enormous sums spent on economic support measures could have easily funded a pivot to a "green economy", but they are now gone without much structural change to show for it.
Aside from starving the world's resources, Corona also pollutes the environment directly in quite a number of ways. This may seem like a minor collateral damage compared to the human and the material damage the pandemic inflicts, but that doesn't hold true in the long run. Unmitigated Climate Change and a ruined environment will eventually dwarf the impacts of any pandemic.
COVID and the environment
COVID is only the most recent excuse to push the decisive pivots needed to avert catastrophic effects from Climate Change and environmental degradation yet again into the future. The global, national and local inequities that express themselves in poverty, hunger, joblessness and under-education are the everyday reasons why a radical shift such as the Green New Deal is so difficult. COVID has made all those inequities worse and seemingly restructuring of the economy even harder. The presidential campaign provides a perfect foil for the natural human pattern of looking at the nearest obstacle first leaving the one further ahead unnoticed.
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California fires: In Irvine 91,000 evacuated during the pandemic
(Photo: CBS) |
Worse, here and now COVID adds directly to environmental problems. Here some examples:
- Reusable bags: Due to the ongoing fixation on fomites as a primary way of virus transmission,
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