Today is Earth Day, a good moment to realize that our post-coronavirus future looks just like the past
The end of the lockdown in China shows us the grim reality of where we’re headed: the huge drop in pollution levels that satellites detected as a result of the pandemic has been reversed in a couple of weeks. Anybody who thought we were going to learn something from the traumatic experience we’re going through, like rethinking our activities and our relationship with the planet they inhabit, was living in cloud cuckoo land.
It was a fantasy to think that the coronavirus crisis would make us see what we could do to tackle a much bigger problem like the climate emergency. We will never address the climate emergency with anything like the same determination and scale we did to protect ourselves from a virus. COVID-19 was not good for the climate. It was, in fact, terrible news: it simply meant a reshuffling in our allocation priorities, and not precisely a good one
We are like the frog in the saucepan: a sudden threat makes us jump, but pollution levels that claims more than three times as many lives as coronavirus each year, but does so slowly, as well as damaging our brains or making us more vulnerable to viruses prompts no reaction. We are still refusing to see the climate emergency, and worse, we still stupidly believe that the matter is open to…
