Ukraine, climate, pandemics and the “Great Reset”

Just when it felt like the COVID pandemic was starting to give us all more time and space to breathe, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine startled the whole World (and Europe even more so).

The daily reports and news about violence, deaths, atrocities and the broken families cap our ability to feel happy and take away any pride of being human. Only the stories of those that chose to stay and fight back and the wave of solidarity that spread a bit all over can justify any belief in humankind.

We pride ourselves on being the only rational animal on Earth yet we’re incapable of learning from our own mistakes.

In Europe this invasion brought even more attention to some of our most known weaknesses: energy dependency and external diplomacy (one need only think of Macron’s last minute attempt to talk Putin out of the decision to invade).

Nonetheless it also accelerated some of the European Union’s best efforts to tackle it’s weaknesses: coordinated response has been faster and faster, economic sanctions have been harsh (and growing) and the demonstrations of political support have been strong.

The same is happening with energy. Now that the effects EU’s dependency on Russian natural gas started to show — with record costs for fuel, gas and electricity — the strategic response is accelerating the EU Green Deal so we can finally have a more resilient, secure, renewable, decentralized, self-sufficient and efficient energy system.

The irony is that, in what concerns energy, the response to the war in Ukraine is the same it was for Covid-19 which is the same it was for climate change — it needs to be green and local.

Just like the Covid-19 pandemic and most extreme climate events, the invasion of Ukraine triggered a short-term wave of solidarity and a long term response that suggests the creation of a greener, more democratic and sustainable future.

Everything is interconnected as are all the challenges we face and need to solve as a species, be it war, climate, poverty, injustice, corruption or the pandemics.

While it is true we won’t be able to solve these problems until we’re able to shift from “Me” to “We”, it is also true that every small change to mitigate one issue will have a ripple effect in all the others.

I believe we’re in between social models today, in transition.

In our daily lives, sometimes not even noticing, we’re called upon to choose between war or peace, the concentration or distribution of wealth, resource depletion or sustainability, corruption or transparency, equality or exclusion and corruption or transparency (just to name a few). It is a global decision of which values will prevail and define our future as a species.

Ukraine is nowadays the main battlefield where this decision is being made but it extends well beyond the war that is taking place.

When the world “stopped” with the first big confinement in 2020 the World Economic Forum very accurately called it “the great reset”, an opportunity to correct a lot of what was wrong with a system that clearly can not continue to be the same.

Where they got it wrong was on the focus on the pandemics: the “great reset” spreads well beyond the pandemics and we’re still to find out (or decide) how much longer it will last.