America has a president who is enamoured with markets but ignorant of Mother Nature, and the US paid a steep, steep price for that — and will pay an even bigger price when it comes to climate change, if Trump remains in charge.
How so? I believe that the most powerful force on the planet is Mother Nature and the second most powerful force is Father Greed, i.e., the markets. The coronavirus spread in the US because Trump looked at the problem through the lens of the markets first and the science of natural systems second, if at all.
Mother Nature was not impressed by Trump or his markets. Mother Nature, alas, doesn’t “open” her workday at 9:30am or close it at 4pm. Monday through Friday and then take weekends off
Early on, Trump clearly spent his days watching the markets and downplaying the virus’ potential for rapid spread. If the markets were doing well for investors, Trump thought it meant that he was doing well containing Mother Nature’s COVID-19 disease — one of many Darwinian engines she employs to mercilessly sort out the weak from the fit.
Deadly mistake
Trump thought that closing off flights from China was enough to stem this growing epidemic and calm the markets — without the mass testing, surveillance and quarantines of the infected that South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore employed to great success. It was his deadly mistake.
Mother Nature was not impressed by Trump or his markets. Mother Nature, alas, doesn’t “open” her workday at 9:30am or close it at 4pm. Monday through Friday and then take weekends off. As Rob Watson, one of my favourite environmental teachers, likes to remind people: “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.”
You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot manipulate her. And you certainly cannot tell her, “Mother Nature, stop ruining my beautiful stock market.”
That is exactly what Trump did initially with the coronavirus — and is trying to do still with climate change. Yes, we must absolutely focus on combating this virus now. And Trump seems to have finally become properly awed by the power of Mother Nature’s COVID-19, ordering federal distancing guidelines to stay in place until April 30. That is a good thing.
Battle with coronavirus
But as we win this battle with the coronavirus and begin to think about the next round of stimulus that we want to inject into the economy — and there will be a next round — it is vital that we keep in mind just how much more destructive climate change could be for all of us and make sure that we invest in long-term resilience against that as well.
Because there is one huge difference between the coronavirus and climate change: — and then flatten out and then maybe dissipate or be permanently prevented by vaccine — so normal life resumes.
No, when the Greenland and Antarctic ice melts, it’s gone, and we humans will have to contend with the implications of sea level rise, mass movements of populations and various kinds of extreme weather — wetter wets, hotter hots and drier dries —
There is no herd immunity to climate change. There are only endless effects on the herd.
Thinking about climate change, even in the middle of this pandemic, is actually useful in a number of ways. For starters, they follow similar natural laws and have common mitigation strategies.
“Both the COVID-19 epidemic and climate change kick off compounding accelerants that can run your health or climate system completely out of control,” noted Hal Harvey, founder of Energy Innovation. With the coronavirus, “an early sickness becomes a citywide problem, which quickly crosses the country and morphs into an epidemic. The pandemic is right on its heels. Each early-avoided illness saves thousands of lives down the road.
“It will be exactly the same with climate change,” Harvey continued. “Human-caused warming triggers nature’s compounding forces: If we defrost the tundra in Alaska, Canada and Russia, for example, that thawing soil will emit billions of tons of further carbon dioxide and methane. Only early action can prevent a runaway catastrophe.”
Managing the unavoidable
That is why the first rule of scientists for climate change mitigation happens to be the first rule for public health officials of COVID-19 mitigation: Manage the unavoidable so that you can avoid the unmanageable. Trump was slow to manage the unavoidable. Let’s hope that his team’s improved performance will avoid the unmanageable.
A second principle that climate change and pandemics share is: If we don’t take care of the conditions that enable us to prosper, we will not prosper in the end.
China was reckless about importing and mixing “terrestrial wildlife” with regular meat and seafood in its wet markets. It appears to have spawned both SARS and the new coronavirus. This has to stop.
In America, we built cities on coasts and rivers for navigation and fishing. We farm the Midwest, where the soils, rain and temperatures are ideal. If we continue saturating the atmosphere with carbon, we undermine all the weather, moisture and temperature patterns that allowed America to prosper for so long. If that happens, our society will need endless bailouts to move cities and recover from weather extremes.
Finally, epidemiologists will tell you that climate change may well be the next great engine for the next pandemic — only this virus could easily be carried by mosquitoes, which, because of warmer temperatures in the global north, are able to migrate up from places they’ve never migrated from before.
For all these reasons, as we invest in infrastructure to stimulate our economy out of this corona crisis, we should be doing it to make our society more resilient against both pandemics and climate change. We should use tax incentives to make it incredibly beneficial for every utility to decarbonise their power generation and shift to wind, solar and other renewables.
Once the grid is carbon-free or close to it, every electric car becomes carbon-free, every electric-powered building becomes carbon-free and every electric-powered factory becomes carbon-free. That makes us physically more fit and economically more resilient.
Now that we have tasted Mother Nature’s wrath in the form of both COVID-19 and climate change, let’s get her on our side. She’s as happy to help as to destroy. Let’s use chemistry, biology and physics, not to mention sun and wind, to create the vaccines and power systems that immunise us from viruses and weather extremes — and not double down on bad habits that will only make us sick again.
— Thomas L. Friedman is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author
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