28/03/2020

Here’s What The Coronavirus Pandemic Can Teach Us About Tackling Climate Change

The Conversation - 


James Ross/AAP
Dr Natasha Chassagne is a University Associate, University of Tasmania.
Dr Chassagne holds an undergraduate with Honours in International Studies from the University of South Australia and a Master's in International Law & International Relations from the University of New South Wales.
She is currently writing a book titled 'Buen Vivir as an Alternative to Sustainable Development: Lessons from Ecuador', to be published by Routledge later this year. 
Every aspect of our lives has been affected by the coronavirus. The global economy has slowed, people have retreated to their homes and thousands have died or become seriously ill.

At this frightening stage of the crisis, it’s difficult to focus on anything else. But as the International Agency has said, the effects of coronavirus are likely to be temporary but the other global emergency – climate change – is not.

Stopping the spread of coronavirus is paramount, but climate action must also continue. And we can draw many lessons and opportunities from the current health crisis when tackling planetary warming.
Action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions must not be compromised by the coronavirus pandemic. EPA/MAST IRHAM

A ‘degrowing’ economy
S&P Global Ratings this week said measures to contain COVID-19 have pushed the global economy into recession.

Economic analyst Lauri Myllyvirta estimates the pandemic may have reduced global emissions by 200 megatonnes of carbon dioxide to date, as air travel grinds to a halt, factories close down and energy demand falls.

In the first four weeks of the pandemic, coal consumption in China alone fell by 36%, and oil refining capacity reduced by 34%.

In many ways, what we’re seeing now is a rapid and unplanned version of economic “degrowth” – the transition some academics and activists have for decades said is necessary to address climate change, and leave a habitable planet for future generations.

Degrowth is a proposed slowing of growth in sectors that damage the environment, such as fossil fuel industries, until the economy operates within Earth’s limits. It is a voluntary, planned and equitable transition in developed nations which necessarily involves an increased focus on the environment, human well-being, and capabilities (good health, decent work, education, and a safe and healthy environment).

Such a transformation would be profound, and so far no nation has shown the will to implement it. It would require global economies to “decouple” from carbon to prevent climate-related crises. But the current unintended economic slowdown opens the door to such a transition, which would bring myriad benefits to the climate.

The idea of sustainable degrowth is very different to a recession. It involves scaling back environmentally damaging sectors of the economy, and strengthening others.

Reduced air travel is helping drive global emissions down. James Gourley/AAP






A tale of two emergencies
Climate change has been declared a global emergency, yet to date the world has largely failed to address it. In contrast, the global policy response to the coronavirus emergency has been fast and furious.

There are several reasons for this dramatic difference. Climate change is a relatively slow-moving crisis, whereas coronavirus visibly escalates over days, even hours, increasing our perception of the risks involved. One thing that history teaches us about politics and the human condition in times of peril, we often take a “crisis management” approach to dealing with serious threats.

As others have observed, the slow increase in global temperatures means humans can psychologically adjust as the situation worsens, making the problem seem less urgent and meaning people are less willing to accept drastic policy measures.

The human ability to adapt to climate change can make it seem less urgent. CHAMILA KARUNARATHNE/EPA






Key lessons from coronavirus
The global response to the coronavirus crisis shows that governments can take immediate, radical emergency measures, which go beyond purely economic concerns, to protect the well-being of all.

Specifically, there are practical lessons and opportunities we can take away from the coronavirus emergency as we seek to tackle climate change:

Act early: The coronavirus pandemic shows the crucial importance of early action to prevent catastrophic consequences. Governments in Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore acted quickly to implement quarantine and screening measures, and have seen relatively small numbers of infections. Italy, on the other hand, whose government waited too long to act, is now the epicentre of the virus.

Go slow, go local: Coronavirus has forced an immediate scale-down of how we travel and live. People are forging local connections, shopping locally, working from home and limiting consumption to what they need.

Researchers have identified that fears about personal well-being represent a major barrier to political support for the degrowth movement to date. However with social distancing expected to be in place for months, our scaled-down lives may become the “new normal”. Many people may realise that consumption and personal well-being are not inextricably linked.
Stimulus spending should be directed to clean energy. EPA

New economic thinking is needed. A transition to sustainable degrowth can help. We need to shift global attention from GDP as an indicator of well-being, towards other measures that put people and the environment first, such as New Zealand’s well-being budget, Bhutan’s gross national happiness index, or Ecuador’s social philosophy of buen vivir (good living).

Spend on clean energy: The International Energy Agency (IEA) says clean energy should be “at the heart of stimulus plans to counter the coronavirus crisis”.

The IEA has called on governments to launch sustainable stimulus packages focused on clean energy technologies. It says hydrogen and carbon-capture also need major investment to bring them to scale, which could be helped by the current low interest rates.

Governments could also use coronavirus stimulus packages to reskill workers to service the new “green” economy, and address challenges in healthcare, sanitation, aged care, food security and education.

More people are shopping locally during the pandemic. AAP/STEFAN POSTLES


Looking ahead
As climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe said this month:
What really matters is the same for all of us. It’s the health and safety of our friends, our family, our loved ones, our communities, our cities and our country. That’s what the coronavirus threatens, and that’s exactly what climate change does, too.
The coronavirus crisis is devastating, but failing to tackle climate change because of the pandemic only compounds the tragedy. Instead, we must draw on the lessons of coronavirus to address the climate challenge.

Links
at No comments:

(US) The Analogy Between Covid-19 And Climate Change Is Eerily Precise

Wired - Gilad Edelman

First deny the problem, then say the solution is too expensive? The playbook here is all too familiar.

Photograph: SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP/Getty Images
 
Gilad Edelman is WIRED's politics writer, based in Washington, D.C. Before that, he was executive editor of the Washington Monthly. He has a degree from Yale Law School.
For a brief moment there, it looked as though the coronavirus pandemic might escape the muck of partisanship.

It’s true that President Donald Trump, wary of a recession during a reelection year, had first tried to talk the virus into submission. His counterfactual insistence that the situation was under control did nothing to slow the viral spread through February and early March. It did, however, seem to influence the party faithful, as polls showed Republican voters were taking the pandemic far less seriously than Democrats. In other words, the facts of Covid-19 were already politicized. As I suggested last week, it looked as though this process were unfolding just as it had for climate change—but at 1,000x speed.

Then Trump began to shift his message. Suddenly he seemed to grasp the need for drastic measures (while claiming that he’d never hinted otherwise). The White House started repeating the advice from public health experts: Social distancing would be necessary, maybe through the end of summer. In my last piece, I wondered if this new acceptance of reality might keep an epistemic crisis from developing. Perhaps Americans would coalesce into a common understanding of this public health disaster.

But coronavirus denialism wasn’t in remission; it was only mutating. After a weekend of reported clashes among economic and health officials in the White House, and a spate of skeptical op-eds musing on whether social distancing was really worth its economic cost, Trump laid out a new approach by presidential tweet: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”

By Monday evening, Trump was promising to wrap up social distancing in weeks, not months. “I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” he declared on Tuesday, during a virtual town hall on Fox News. Meanwhile, a rising chorus of Trump followers have been suggesting that some folks will simply have to die to save the economy. “Let's get back to living,” Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick of Texas told Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “Those of us who are 70-plus, we'll take care of ourselves. But don't sacrifice the country.” Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University announced that it’s expecting students and faculty to return from spring break. “Even if we all get sick, I would rather die than kill the country,” said right-wing talk host Glenn Beck. “Because it’s not the economy that’s dying, it’s the country.”

The parallel to climate change, in other words, was even tighter than I realized.

“We went through the stages of climate change denial in the matter of a week,” said Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, who studies how misinformation spreads. Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science who has studied the origins of climate disinformation, spelled out the pattern in an email: “First, one denies the problem, then one denies its severity, and then one says it is too difficult or expensive to fix, and/or that the proposed solution threatens our freedom.”

These strategies, Oreskes explained, can exist side by side, depending on the context. The crudest skeptics, like the snowball-wielding senator from Oklahoma, Jim Inhofe, still deny the phenomenon itself: Humans aren’t warming the planet, look how cold it is outside! More sophisticated players, confronting a tidal wave of scientific data, may accept that the Earth is warming, but they argue that the ill effects are overstated and incommensurate with the costs of aggressive action. As a Wall Street Journal op-ed from 2017 put it, the economic damage one might expect from climate change “does not justify policies that cost more than 0.1 percentage point of growth.”

Now we’re faced with the threat of another global catastrophe arising from the clash of nature and modern human activity. As with climate change, the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic are difficult to predict with confidence. As with climate change, the uncertainty interval encompasses utter cataclysm. As with climate change, any serious effort to mitigate or stave off this disaster will require major economic disruptions. And, as with climate change, such efforts to save the world must be put in place before any of the experts’ doomsday warnings could ever be proved true.

So we see the same pattern of skeptical response from Republican elites. Whether it’s driven by self-interest (corporate profits, a president’s hopes of reelection) or by small government ideology, the approach sends a powerful signal to the party’s voters. If you take this problem seriously, you must be one of them, not us.

“The climate change issue has been transformed into a badge of who people think they are,” said Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist and environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “So if you’re a good card-carrying Republican in the Midwest, then you’d better be against that climate change stuff. And if you're a West Coast liberal, or you live in Boulder, like me, of course you support fighting climate change.” When scientific questions become political issues, he added, people’s beliefs become statements of identity. “To some extent we see that with the coronavirus.”

This partisan bubble effect is only amplified by the situation on the ground, where the distribution of infections has been anything but politically neutral. The worst-hit areas so far are deep blue cities in deep blue states: Seattle and New York, as well as San Francisco. For that reason, Pielke holds out hope that the coronavirus debate might not devolve completely into partisan identity signaling. “I’m not ready to say this fits our conventional motivated reasoning model of Republicans and Democrats that we’ve seen on other issues,” he said. As the disease spreads and hits its peak in different places, the impact of direct experience could overwhelm the power of identity.

There is some early evidence for this: A daily tracking poll by Civiqs shows a pronounced rise in concern among Republican voters over the past two weeks. On the other hand, the increase doesn’t directly track the spread of Covid-19: Republican voters in Wyoming (29 confirmed cases), for example, express far more concern than those in Wisconsin (more than 400 cases).

There’s a lot riding on the outcome of this looming clash between partisanship and reality. At minimum, the politicization of pandemic makes it even harder to evaluate the costs and benefits of the radical policy prescriptions currently on the table. (This is perhaps even harder than it is with climate change: None of the leading proposals to address global warming involves tanking the national economy and launching millions into unemployment.) Debates in good faith will be impossible if positions harden into partisan commitments, and social distancing won’t work very well if Trump keeps urging Americans to get back out there, and half the country listens.

It’s frightening to think what the pattern of climate denial means for the coronavirus crisis. But it might be even more terrifying to think what the pattern of coronavirus denial means for the climate crisis. If a plea to sacrifice human life for the sake of the economy becomes Republican dogma, this does not bode well for our ability to handle the even greater threat of rising temperatures around the world. After all, the worst effects of global warming are still decades away. Our elderly ruling class, and the elderly voters who elect them, may be dead and gone by the time Miami is underwater. But those same old folks are precisely the ones who are most at risk from Covid-19.

“I think what [all this] illustrates is the depth of the problem we’re facing with climate change,” said Pennycook of the University of Regina. “If we can’t get bipartisan agreement on a global pandemic that’s presently spreading, it’s making me less optimistic that we’ll ever see any change on people’s attitudes toward climate change until it’s too late.”

Links
at No comments:

$2tn US Coronavirus Relief Comes Without Climate Stipulations

The Guardian - 

Airlines get $60bn bailout, but Pelosi’s proposal on halving of emissions by 2050 not included

American Airlines aircraft at Ronald Reagan Washington national airport, Arlington, Virginia. The US aviation industry is to receive $60bn in the government’s coronavirus relief package. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

A $2tn US coronavirus relief package will dole out billions to struggling airlines and offer low-interest loans that fossil fuel companies could compete for – without requiring any action to stem the climate crisis.

The legislation, passed by the Senate late on Wednesday, includes a $60bn bailout for airlines. Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrat-controlled House, had proposed a requirement for airlines to cut their planet-warming emissions in half by 2050, but that provision is not in the bill.

The House is expected to vote on the package on Friday. It also includes nearly $500bn in lending authority that one environment group, Friends of the Earth, called a “corporate slush fund with insufficient guardrails to protect workers, taxpayers and the climate”.

Congressional Republicans have accused Democrats of taking advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to pursue climate policy. The Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said this week that Democrats were “bargaining as usual” with “counter-offers that demanded things like new emission standards or tax credits for solar panels”. Multiple Republican politicians tweeted accusing Democrats of trying to usher in a Green New Deal with massive climate spending during a crisis.

In the end, the stimulus package focused on direct aid to individuals and the worst-hit industries, while setting climate considerations aside.

Annie Petsonk, international counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, said that while the situation for airlines and their workers was dire, the industry should have had to commit to slashing emissions as a condition of the aid.

“The provisions we were focused on simply would hold the airlines to what they already said they’re going to do,” Petsonk said. “People do not want to solve one crisis by making another crisis worse.” The 2008 auto industry bailout, in comparison, led to stricter rules for pollution from vehicle tailpipes.

The bill, the third in a series of stimulus packages, offers virtually nothing to climate advocates, but it is not the last word. Scott Segal, a lawyer and lobbyist with the firm Bracewell LLC, which represents energy industry clients, said a fourth stimulus deal was likely to involve “significant discussions of green objectives”.

“Was this a missed opportunity for climate? I think the answer to that is no,” Segal said. “This stimulus package was primarily about getting money into the hands of individual households and workers and in some service sectors that were particularly hurt.”

Kevin Book, the managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a research firm, said: “Congress is going to be making more deals, and as long as there is a deal to be made, Democrats have made clear what they want.”

Democrats negotiated multiple measures meant to prevent abuse of the $500bn available in lending, including an oversight board, a special inspector general and provisions aimed at limiting Donald Trump’s businesses from benefiting – an issue that has already come under scrutiny.

But climate hawks said those stipulations were not strong enough. “What makes this so frightening is that there are very few binding restrictions on how this money can be used that the secretary of treasury cannot waive,” said Lukas Ross, a senior policy analyst with Friends of the Earth.

“It’s great that [Trump’s son-in-law ] Jared Kushner isn’t going to get a subsidised line of credit. It’s much more worrying in human terms that Chevron, Exxon and every other polluter you can imagine is eligible to be propped up in terms of the stimulus package.”

The bill also does not include specific assistance to the renewable energy industry, although trade associations and lobbyists expect to revisit that possibility as discussions continue about more targeted aid for at-risk sectors of the economy.

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) projects that the US wind industry could lose 35,000 jobs and $35bn in investment. Those losses could lead to lease payment and tax revenue reductions for local and state governments. No tax credit extensions have been granted for the solar and wind industries, meaning they may lose access to credits if they miss deadlines.

“Obviously of primary importance is the public health and keeping the economy moving. We applaud that big effort,” said Tom Kiernan, the chief executive of the AWEA, adding that his group would continue to push for tax provisions to stem industry losses.

The Solar Energy Industries Association said the solar sector could lose half its jobs, meaning “125,000 families who will no longer receive a paycheck”.

Abigail Ross Hopper, its president and CEO, said: “Legislators were really focused on industry-wide protections and assistance, like the unemployment insurance, like the loans for which our companies are eligible, and did not include industry-specific solutions for a couple of particularly hard hit ones.”

In one climate win for Democrats, the bill does not include a discussed $3bn to buy oil to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to lift global oil prices.

Links
at No comments: