Who Needs Bats Anyway?
The Covid-19 crisis proves that we need an imminent threat to jump into action. Why not consider climate change such a threat, too?
If you want to blame someone for the coronavirus, it is nature itself. Bats and cute pangolins, whose gene pools are under suspicion to be the source of the deadly strain of the coronavirus, are getting a lot of bad press today. And — let’s face it — they are totally non-essential to humankind.
It is heartwarming to see how much we care for our own species these days. On the other hand it is not surprising that politicians don’t hesitate to push their usual agenda.
While the crisis is disrupting the economy and should cause a shift in priorities, people stick to their beliefs and make their usual moves: President Trump has closed the borders and brags about the TV ratings of his press briefings. The republican party is showering money on big corporations. Left parties demand basic income and tapping the rich. The NRA declares guns to essential goods to keep ammo stores open. State leaders with budget problems are the first to ask for fiscal relief. Authoritarian regimes tighten their surveillance programs and censor the bad news. It’s business as usual, but on steroids.
Everybody is looking for themselves first, others second.
Covid-19 is not the first and will not be the last plague. There have been outbreaks of Ebola, SARS and MERS. There are pandemics threatening our livestock like the bird flu or the swine flu. There are diseases that plague the bees who are very essential to farming. It is very likely that we will see more disrupting outbreaks in our lifetime.
The reason why Covid-19 turned out to be so deadly is its long incubation time. The virus has been able to spread because the disease takes some time until symptoms are surfacing. On the other hand, the virus has been spreading too fast to mitigate its deadly effects.
Governments reacted reluctantly to the outbreak. The paradigm finally shifted when the world was watching how Italy was hit by a tsunami of cases. But before that, only a few countries reacted to the scientific predictions quickly. Those who did, like Japan and South Korea, are doing significantly better than others. Today it is very clear to see that those countries with deniers in top government positions are doing badly. The US and the UK are already in deep trouble. Others who reacted too little and too late to the crisis, like Russia, Brasil and Sweden, will probably follow. To be clear: I would be more than happy if I’m totally wrong with that prediction.
Obviously it is difficult for people to get a grasp of exponential developments. Western politicians were only ready to put hardships on their citizens when the dead people in Italy were hard evidence that there are lives at stake. Maybe it is not possible to pass cutting legislation without that proof. Anyway, today the threat is too big to ignore and most countries follow more or less the same mitigation strategies.
We face a multitude of crises today. First the CoVid-19 pandemic itself. Then the economic fallout, which will result in political crises in a lot of countries. Some politicians may rise to the occasion, but most will stick to their usual messages. When we are hitting the the bottom of the recession there will be a surge of populist movements all over the world. There will be a pandemic of blame-shifting. This is how the Nazis came to power — after WWI and the big depression. Recession opens a window for extreme populism and there will be people willing to tell people whatever it takes to rush to power. The fallout will leave us with a fractured world, with nationalism on the rise.
And this means, truth and science, which have been essential to live through this pandemic, could be sidelined once again. This is a big problem, because we have another exponential threat to cope with today: global warming. Sadly it is not a hoax.
Covid-19 should make us listen to scientists
These devastating days are obviously no time to think about climate control. But if we don’t act early in the curve again, if we choose not to listen to our scientists again, we will face problems we won’t be able to mitigate with everyday measures like #stayathome.
Regarding global warming we are in the beginning of a curve, similar to the one of the real time contagion dashboards we are now familiar with. To be clear: This growth will slow sooner or later, because our ability to create power plants or cars does not grow in an exponential way. But until today those curves are still accelerating: carbon emissions, loss of biodiversity, the rise of sea levels, global mean temperature. This planet has a fever and no vaccine.
We are already experiencing smaller and local problems of global warming. More deadly storms, droughts and floods here and there. But the more climate change, the more global effects will be felt, like the extinction of countless animal species or migration because of war, hunger and pollution. Like in the early days of Covid-19, when the virus haunted the city of Wuhan, climate change still feels very much like a minor and distant problem. The loss of life in the great barrier reef and the sinking of some remote islands in the rising tides are not a threat that is felt right here and right now.
Our economy is on a turning point anyway, because of the virus. If we want to decide where to go from here, beyond and after the necessary measures, we must consider global warming, too.
Scientists assume that there are tipping points in the curve, which are very much like the first infected person who brought the virus from China to Italy. If we choose not to look at the data, because other problems seem to be more threatening now, we will make the fallout of the destruction of the environment way bigger than if we decide to act more forcefully now. It may be a good start to simply stick to the facts and to the agreements that has been made.
Of course the usual suspects are moving in the opposite direction. Right in the middle of the corona-crisis, the US federal government decided to cut back environmental regulations to help the US car industry. I guess President Trump made a „deal“ with GM to incentivise them to build those medical ventilators which are needed badly in hospitals. But the production of a lot of clean air devices shouldn’t require ramping up pollution, does it?
Climate change does not feel like an imminent threat. But it is.
We have to deal with the virus first and foremost. But the debate has already started how we restart the economy and how we will prepare for the next global crisis. Yes we will need to put food food on people’s table now, then think about stocking gloves and building levees. But you will have to do that, too, sooner or later. People in New Orleans know what I mean.
I know: the climate debate sounds like an exotic thing to consider today. Also, environmentalism has never been extremely popular. People are not ready for more hardships on top of the problems they already have. Of course people don’t want to switch to public transport right now, instead of using their own corona-safe fossil-fueled vehicle. People don’t want to lose their jobs or their investments in the oil and coal industry. We will need more farmland to feed ~8 billions of people in 2050 and we don’t „need“ rainforests, ice bears, bats and pangolins to do that. We already watch TV series instead of travelling to the Seychelles or to the Great Barrier reef. And we pay for the zoo to take care of the most funny animals. Who needs bats anyway?
We should not fall into that climate trap. If we don’t want to face a climate crisis which will make those Covid-19 days look tame, with constant floods and storms and hurricanes all over the globe, we have to change policy.
The world after the plague will be a different one. When the dust of the perfect storm has settled we have to rebuild the world we want to live in: more digitally connected, more safe, hopefully with even more global cooperation. Nature is a treasure worth keeping (maybe even the bats). We will have to agree on environmental measures, or we will lose what is left of it in a sudden uptick of a deadly curve.
