Back to Normal?
As hopes for the end of the pandemic emerge, our time of crisis is not over.
It seems we are only able to handle so much at a time. The past 12 months have been a hell of a ride with many more lows than highs (hooray, at least Trump was finally removed from the White House). The coronavirus has been the number one topic on the news, at schools and universities, at work and in private, changing all our lives considerably and abruptly ending the lives of hundreds of thousands.
A few months ago, the first announcements of surprisingly effective vaccines had made the way onto our screens, otherwise plagued by endless work from home sessions and Zoom happy hours. They brought a glimpse of light, a glimpse of the old life we had before March. Even if there is some time until the necessary amount of populations will be protected against the virus, and many have a tough rest of the winter ahead, the end does not seem to be completely out of reach anymore (at least for rich nations).
As of right now, the vaccine is already in use in some countries, including many European nations, the US, and Israel. More and more doses are getting produced and injected into as many arms as possible.
And Then?
After we all finally got used to meeting up with a glass of wine in front of our bad webcams, what will life look like with a vaccine widely available? What will we be talking about, hanging out in bars, meeting at our homes without worrying about deadly viruses and whatnot? What are politicians going to work on next?
Maybe you already have answers for yourself, be it plans for traveling, getting wasted on weekends again, or taking some of the positive things of our lives right now into the new “normal.” As for that last question specifically, the answer should be clear.
Before the pandemic, the fight against the climate crisis was finally becoming a real priority in what people saw as challenges to our society, and this started to reflect. First in marketing, then in news coverage, and even, if not yet sufficient in any way, in policymaking.
One important reason for this is, of course, the Fridays for Future movement, urging for the long-needed, radical change in thinking regarding the climate emergency and mobilizing millions of people around the world with the simple, clear message: Listen to the science.
Our knowledge of the climate crisis is not new. For decades, science has warned about the dramatic, potentially catastrophic consequences of humanity blowing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — in quantities that cause global temperatures to rise at a pace unknown during the brief history of our existence on the planet.
There had certainly been spikes in interest regarding the topic before, like in 2007, with the release of An Inconvenient Truth and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore. As well as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sparked consciousness for the destructive power global heating could have in the future in millions of people. Climate scientist and meteorologist Mojib Latif remembers the year as the first time that climate change as a topic really experienced some kind of public hype in his recent book Heisszeit.
However, the global financial crisis put an abrupt end to this development. It caused the highly anticipated COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen to be a complete failure regarding any binding commitment to emissions reductions and minimized public interest in the topic.
As already mentioned, Fridays for Future, together with many other movements and initiatives, managed to make the climate crisis a top priority in the news, to the general public in many countries, and to (some) policymakers. This even lead to parts of the global economy changing their thinking regarding the climate crisis, as seen at the World Economic Forum in January 2020 in Davos — before COVID-19 made it to the Western world.
Now, with the end of the rapid spread of the virus slowly approaching on the horizon, we need to make sure we continue to put pressure on influential people and increase this pressure so that real change will happen. The crucial goal needs to be a view of the climate emergency as what it is: a global crisis, just like the coronavirus.
If we manage to do that, if we really get into our heads that this crisis needs the same treatment as the other one, we may still be able to keep emission reductions on track. Luisa Neubauer, Greta Thunberg, Adélaïde Charlier, and Anuna de Wever van der Heyden came to a similar conclusion in their article published here on Medium in October last year.
Where We Are
All of you probably know about the existential threats of the climate crisis by now. Within the constant overload of information in daily news cycles, it can be hard to keep in mind that we still need to act as urgently as before the pandemic — even more so, actually.
Many people already suffer from the consequences of the planet heating up, and billions more will if we won’t do anything against it. The pathways to stay below the 1.5 degree Celsius rise of temperature set as the goal in the Paris Agreement more than five years ago are narrowing fast and mostly rely heavily on the use of technologies to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. These are yet to be developed in the future. On the global level, 2020 was about 0.62 degrees Celsius warmer than the average between 1981 and 2010, putting the year 1.25 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures (see also here). Does this sound close to 1.5? Yes, and it is pretty damn close.
To put it short, this means we need to stay in crisis mode — as harsh as this may sound right now. Otherwise, we will not be able to stay in control of events. In fact, we’re not even sure we still are right now, as crucial tipping points could be reached soon, accelerating the melting of, for instance, Greenland’s or the arctic’s ice irreversibly and dramatically increasing sea levels in the coming decades.
If you are, like me, sitting in a tiny apartment during a grey winter, in the middle of a pandemic, this is not a very encouraging forecast. However, a new year always brings new hope and new stories. And besides getting the facts straight, hope and a story are what we need right now. Because if we stay hopeful, we are going to start change.
Fighting a crisis surely is exhausting. It is hard. But there is still a way to do it. A way that will make our lives easier, better, and more worth living in the end. So let’s make this year the year of change, let’s make this the story to tell — there’s more than one crisis to solve, after all.
