Why should I write about this pandemic’s implications for climate activism, other than to beat my chest and grunt like a hairless harangue-a-tang on a fallen tree trunk, swatting at an attacking trackhoe bucket? The purpose is to explicate the uncomfortable truth: this crisis, though formidable, pales in comparison to and may precipitate that which looms behind it. The crippling of the world economy inflicted by COVID-19 will leave us helpless against the cascading climate disasters to come. Melees over toilet paper are simply a comic adumbration of the impending scarcity.
The implications of the worldwide response to COVID-19 are enormous. First, the young and healthy must collectively sacrifice wages, social life, and education, despite having little selfish incentive to do so. Being infected by the virus, for almost anyone but the elderly, is an inconvenience like influenza and would normally elicit apathy. Instead, the younger generations are acting collectively through social distancing and self-isolation, catalyzed by exhortations from experts, to save the lives of moms, dads, grandpas, and grandmas. In the case of climate change, the roles are reversed—our parents and grandparents, who exert the majority of the world’s political power, are apathetic toward that which death might preempt them from witnessing, while the young are most vulnerable and most in need of collective action. The next big Fridays for Future (FFF) climate strike won’t be so easily ignored.
The lesson for climate activists is that, instead of seeing outcomes from the narrow scope of sea-level rise and dead animals, climate must be framed for what it is—the all-encompassing atmosphere that sustains life.
When the virus is contained and statistics released enumerating the lives saved via social distancing, and collective action is championed as a unifying and cathartic force, will we maintain that momentum to tackle humanity’s greatest threat, or will the boomers suffer from selective amnesia, advocating business as usual once again—a death-sentence redux?
Second, governments around the world are calling their own bluffs. The economy can never again be used as an excuse for climate inaction. When something is truly treated like a crisis, the market can be demoted and government involvement ratcheted up to allocate funds and aid where it’s most needed. The difference between the responses to the two crises is framing—COVID-19 is tangible enough to provoke a visceral, gut-level response that climate change never could.
COVID-19 evokes enough fear to incite mass panic and is therefore an easy common enemy for citizens to rally against. The symptoms are clear, the connection between the virus and the rising death toll are clear cut, and it devastates first- and third-world countries alike (though not equally). The effects of climate change, on the other hand, are more pernicious, too far removed in time and place from the myriad causes. Climate change—at least for now—isn’t tangible enough a common enemy for the world to unite against; and waiting to act until it is tangible enough is a death sentence for our children and grandchildren.
Recruiting one’s rational faculties, by perusing the soporific studies and following the argument through all its intermediate conclusions, is required for understanding climate change’s existential threat to life and society as we know it. But today’s mental environment is inundated with videos, songs, and advertisements all vying for—and winning—our attention; would you rather binge-watch Tiger King or slog through the latest IPCC report? And, to make things even worse, common-sense conservatism rejects—or at least pretends to reject during election time—any idea lacking intuitive, gut-level appeal. Invisible gas causing earth’s climate to go wonky? Sounds like a hoax!
But the bipartisan nature of a well-framed crisis precludes that type of denial from being taken seriously. The lesson for climate activists is that, instead of seeing outcomes from the narrow scope of sea-level rise and dead animals, climate must be framed for what it is—the all-encompassing atmosphere that sustains life, any deviation from which reverberates through and affects the plethora of other crises contained within it. Focus on how this will affect everyday life and how the term “new normal” is a misnomer, each day a deterioration from the last and an improvement over the next, and how “quotidian” could soon be deemed archaic by the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The impetus for action depends upon the message that what we do now will directly impact just how bad this gets.
Global warming and pandemics are not discrete issues.
Third, in terms of emissions reductions, the virus has accomplished in one month what environmental activists failed to do in the last thirty years. But championing the virus as some purifying force is a callous and inconsistent response, one that smacks of eco-fascism—eschew this view at all costs. Instead, highlight the emerging evidence linking warming-induced habitat destruction to increased contact between humans and wild animals, which in turn propagates viruses like SARS, H1N1, and COVID-19. Thus framed, viruses become another symptom of the overarching climate crisis, an enemy to fight and learn lessons from, not an ally.
Global warming and pandemics are not discrete issues. As explained in David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth, the world’s problems—hunger, natural disasters, wildfire, freshwater scarcity, dying oceans, air pollution, pandemics, war, inequality—are interdependent and are all subsumed by the enveloping climate. Each half degree of warming increases the probability and intensity of each crisis proportionally. And it doesn’t take much imagination to see how the effects of one crisis can spill over and exacerbate another, causing what are termed “climate cascades”. To use the current situation as an example, what if a hurricane were to clobber a coastal city now, when financial resources are stretched so thin?
When the virus is subdued and the GHG emission statistics are released, reductions not seen since The Great Depression, or at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union, may have been incidentally attained, and we’ll be left to digest the unpalatable truth—these are the levels of yearly reductions demanded by climate scientists, whom we inexplicably trust less than epidemiologists. Greenwashing megaprojects and relying on technology that doesn’t yet exist will not suffice, and a concerted effort will be necessary to censure such thinking.
And at what point do we revert to doubting scientific consensus? Can you imagine if the media, instead of ceding the airways to disease control experts, reported these deaths as unrelated events in different cities, casting doubt that COVID-19 even exists? Or if a geologist with a Youtube following were invited to debate an epidemiologist about whether these deaths were related to the virus? Sounds preposterous, yet similar obfuscations occurred every day in the years BC (Before COVID).
History will not provide a better opportunity to invest in green energy.
Here in Canada, Dr. Theresa Tam visits us during commercial breaks to advise us how to flatten the curve. This is a laudable example of cooperation between government and media. But what about the other curves? Where is the climate scientist to teach us how most effectively to flatten the emissions versus time curve? And if such a scientist were permitted this screen time, his or her advice would certainly not be that Canada should bail out the oil corporations complicit in steepening the latter curve. Yet as I write this, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) is at Bill Morneau’s elbow, dictating the terms of the $15-billion-dollar bailout for an industry whose principal product is at the whims of Saudis and Russians and now trades at $4 per barrel.
When Jason Kenney acceded to Alberta’s petro-throne, he ended solar subsidies. His reason was that renewables should have to compete on the market like everyone else. This was a brazen statement considering the bevy of research highlighting the history of and continued subsidization of the fossil fuel industry worldwide. And the statement seems even more ludicrous now that market forces have decimated Canada’s oil and gas sector. Clearly, the path forward will require heavy subsidization. But why should a dying industry, one that must be phased out anyways, deserve handout hegemony?
History will not provide a better opportunity to invest in green energy. Spend that money to support the unemployed workers, not the corporations, by providing training and investment in jobs that look to the future. Scrap this atavistic, inertial, Weekend at Bernie’s-like impulse that says we should prop up our wealthy but deceased boss and parade him around to trick others into believing he’s still alive so that the party can continue for the rest of the weekend. On Monday we’ll all know he’s dead.
This morning, unsure of how to wrap this up and daunted by the prospect of trying, I lingered near the television to hear Trudeau’s morning address. The perfunctory deflections and diplomacy had me daydreaming. But, after being asked if the federal government’s simulations projected similar results as those of Ontario’s, his uncanny response jolted me into an alternate reality. The Prime Minister said that he’s seen the various models and the wide range of uncertainty, the cause of which, he said, is not the result of poor modelling; it’s the result of a significant unknown variable—us. Where we land on the spectrum between bad and catastrophic depends on how we choose to act.
By inadvertently explaining the uncertainty inherent in climate modelling, Trudeau provided an adventitious conclusion. The Overton Window has shifted. The rhetoric is written. Our task as activists is to draw these connections, broadcast them to the public, and hound the government into applying the same scientific rigor to climate action. Exploit the angles outlined above and, though it’s beyond the scope of this missive, provide the public with a positive vision of change; because perhaps we’re glimpsing that a more fulfilling life awaits if we step off the hedonic treadmill of consumerism. The worst-case scenario now would be to suffer from short-term memory loss or to inadequately address the misconception that COVID-19 can be isolated and analyzed as something separate from its environment; and subsequently to backslide into business-as-usual. There is no going back. The changes are locked in and irreversible.
The status quo will resist. Good. We activists enjoy a challenge.