A terrifying new threat is spreading across the world, upending familiar routines, disrupting the global economy and endangering lives. Scientists have long warned that this was coming, but political leaders have largely ignored them, so they are now scrambling to respond to a crisis that they could have prevented or at least alleviated if they had acted sooner.
The coronavirus pandemic and the slower-moving risks of climate change are intertwined in important ways, and experts say the aggressive, if belated, response to the outbreak could hold lessons for those pushing for climate action. And while the drop in greenhouse gas emissions from a sharp drop in travel and other economic activity is likely to rebound after the pandemic passes, some of the shifts in carbon emissions that the spread of Covid-19 is driving could be more lasting.
Both pandemics and the climate crisis are exponentially growing problems with limited capacity to respond, said Elizabeth Sawin, co-director of Native Local Weather Interactive, a think tank. In the case of viruses, the danger is that the number of infected people overwhelms health care systems; with climate change, she said, rising emissions will overwhelm our ability to manage consequences like droughts, floods, wildfires and other extreme events.
With entire states virtually shutting down in hopes of slowing the spread of the virus, “the public is starting to understand that in that situation, you have to act in a way that seems disproportionate to the current reality, because you have to react,” she said. “Where exponential growth takes you is,” she said. “You look out the window and it doesn’t look like a pandemic, it looks like a beautiful spring day. But you have to close all the restaurants, close the schools.”
The virus has shown that if you wait until you see the effects, it’s too late to stop it.
Even though the disease is happening faster than the effects of global warming, the principle remains the same: If you wait until the effects are visible, it’s too late to stop them, she said.
“Covid-19 is climate at warp speed,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University and co-author of the book Climate Shock . “Everything with climate is decades long; this is days. Climate is centuries long; this is weeks long.”
Government responses have shifted as quickly as the threat. French President Emmanuel Macron ordered all nonessential businesses to close just a week after spending an evening at the theater with his wife. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and New York Mayor Invoice de Blasio have made similar abrupt changes, and President Trump has gone from downplaying the virus to advocating measures that once seemed unthinkable.
“We’re watching our political leaders learn these lessons live on TV within days,” Wagner said. “It’s a learning curve we’ve never seen with anything, at least not in my lifetime.”
Now, he says, politicians who have grasped the terrifying power of compound growth must apply that new understanding to the climate.
And as with the coronavirus, Wagner said, climate policies must force people to pay attention to the costs their actions — whether disease exposure or carbon emissions — impose on others. “It’s all about someone else stepping in and forcing us to internalize externalities, which means not relying on parents to pull their kids out of school, close schools,” he said. “Don’t rely on companies or workers to stay home or ask their people to stay home, force them to do so, or pay them to do so, but make sure that happens. And that’s the role of government, of course.”
Stimulus measures to cushion the economic shock from Covid-19 could also aim to spur emissions reductions, Sawin said, by funding low-carbon infrastructure or providing online training for jobs in the green economy for newly unemployed workers stuck at home. Fatih Birol, director general of the International Energy Agency, also called last week on governments and international financial institutions to incorporate climate action into their stimulus efforts by funding investments in clean energy, battery storage and carbon capture technology.
In Sawin’s view, the pandemic’s cascading effects support an argument that proponents of the U.S. Green New Deal are making: Tackling our biggest problems together can be more effective than tackling them one at a time. Just as people who don’t take sick leave can spread the virus because they have to work while infected, she says, unaffordable child care and an employer-based health insurance system can rob people of the flexibility to move to find jobs in growing industries like clean energy. “People are starting to understand that in order for society as a whole to change behavior really quickly, you have to support everyone,” Sawin says. “The social safety net reduces the resistance to change.”
Another similarity between the two crises is that we can prevent them, says Michele Wucker, author of The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore . The book’s title is a metaphor Wucker uses for a highly probable, high-impact event, as opposed to the popular idea of a black swan, a term coined by writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb for an event that is highly unlikely but highly damaging because of its unpredictable nature.
Voters reward politicians for fixing problems, but rarely reward them for preventing them.
Both viral spread and climate change are gray rhinos, Wucker says — “the two-ton thing that’s coming at you and most of the time we either overlook it or ignore it. “We kind of miss the obvious.”
The Trump administration, which has aggressively rolled back measures to reduce carbon emissions, has also axed the National Security Council’s global health security office and sought to slash funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And, like many other countries, the United States did little to ramp up its coronavirus preparedness even as the disease ravaged China.
There are political, structural and psychological reasons for inaction, Wucker said. “Taking a risk is a risk in itself,” she said. “People are more afraid of doing the wrong thing” than doing nothing. Voters reward politicians for fixing problems, but rarely for preventing them, giving leaders incentives to address problems.
And powerful interests are vested in maintaining the status quo, she points out. That dynamic is at the heart of the global failure to act on climate, with the fossil fuel industry funding a decades-long effort to cast doubt on climate science and lobbying to block changes that would threaten its profits.
In the case of Covid-19, while some people have sought to deny the severity of the coronavirus, people and governments have largely been quick to recognize its dangers. That may be partly due to our instinct to fear disease rather than the climate threats that many people have trouble visualizing, Sawin said.
More importantly, however, “one of the richest industries in human history [fossil fuels] is not trying to prevent people from understanding the coronavirus,” she said.
The global response to Covid-19 – the near-halt of international air travel, factory closures in China and elsewhere, the panicked scramble to enable remote working – will almost certainly result in a drop in carbon emissions.
But such changes may be temporary, like emissions from driving, which are expected to bounce back as people return to work. If more people become fearful of public transport, carbon emissions from commuting could rise further, experts say.
But some new behaviors could outlast the pandemic, including the carbon-cutting changes that climate activists have been pushing for years. The changes most likely to happen during such a crisis are those that were already underway before it hit, said Amy Myers Jaffe, director of the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“The question is which existing trends can be accelerated,” she said. Jaffe believes that at the top of the list is the decline in business travel as large companies realize that video meetings can often achieve as much as in-person meetings.
Likewise, she said, the pandemic could decelerate the growth of international trade, which began to slow in 2019 amid tariff tensions. “Of course it’s really collapsing now,” Jaffe said. If virus-induced lockdowns or border closures cause shortages of medicines, medical equipment or other essential goods, many countries and companies may be anxious to reduce their vulnerability to highly globalized supply networks. “If we shrink supply chains, if countries produce more of their own goods, I think that would structurally reduce demand for oil” and reduce carbon emissions from shipping, she said.
The trend toward remote work is also likely to continue as some companies abandon the office altogether.
The shift to remote work is likely to continue, too, says Prithwiraj Choudhury, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. And that doesn’t just mean workers logging in from home in the same city as their company. It offers the freedom to work from anywhere — a small town with a lower cost of living, for example, or wherever a spouse works, he says. Some companies and organizations have gone completely virtual, ditching the office altogether.
“There is a lot of latent demand” among workers for such arrangements, Choudhury said, and companies may welcome the change as they realize they can save money by maintaining smaller offices or no offices at all.
Those workplace changes could yield real emissions reductions, but Sawin said the pandemic’s most important impact on the climate may come from people applying the lessons the coronavirus teaches about the urgency of quick action.
When the outbreak finally ends, “if we can tell the story of what we just went through and help people understand that this is an accelerated version of another story we’re going through that has the same plot structure but a different timeline, that can be transformative,” she said.
No one can celebrate a disease that spreads so much fear and suffering, Sawin stressed, but with the losses caused by the coronavirus sure to mount, “perhaps there is some kind of honor, at least, in taking what we have learned and putting it to good use.”