01/04/2020

With The Climate Crisis And Coronavirus Bearing Down On Us, The Age Of Disconnection Is Over

The Guardian - 

With the climate crisis and coronavirus bearing down on us, the age of disconnection is over 

‘What started to become clear thanks to the fires was rammed home by Covid-19. We are only as healthy as the least healthy among us’ Photograph: Blend Images/Dave and Les Jacobs/Getty Images

Tim Hollo is executive director of the Green Institute and visiting fellow at The Australian National University’s School of Regulation and Global Government (RegNet).
Everything is connected. It’s hard to imagine right now that, just weeks ago, the truism of ecological politics was treated as hippy nonsense by mainstream politics.

Announcing the statutory review of the commonwealth’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) last October, the Morrison government pitched it as an opportunity to weaken the Howard era laws even further and make it easier still for environmentally destructive projects to be approved. And, regardless of clear statements from scientists and strong advocacy by campaign groups, it looked like it would get away with it because, back then, we were still living in the age of disconnection when the environment and the economy could be seen as separate things, in competition with each other.

But then the summer arrived, delivering one after the other two massive wake-up calls. In the age of consequences, with the climate crisis and a deadly pandemic bearing down on us, it’s impossible to pretend that we are separate from each other and from the natural world.

A pandemic, more than almost any other phenomenon, shows that all our lives are inextricably intertwined, for now and forever, whether we like it or not. It brings into sharp focus the impossibility of trying to keep economics, health, environment, education and social justice treated as separate questions with separate answers. It heightens awareness of our vital need, as social beings, to stay connected to each other as well as we possibly can while keeping our physical distance.

It shows how the “efficient”, on-demand world that capitalism has constructed is so incredibly fragile that a series of shocks can bring it to the point of collapse. And with the rules of neoliberal economics being broken by governments the world over, it demonstrates that massive policy interventions, shifting the entire structure of the global economy, are possible.

With the complete focus right now on Covid-19, it takes an effort to cast our minds back to this summer’s bushfires. They were, of course, far larger and fiercer than ever before, over a season that started when we were barely out of winter. Where previously bushfires had affected a small number of people, this season the smoke blanketing Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne, and the repeated evacuation of summer holiday spots, meant that most Australians were affected.
Covid-19, among other things, shows us the consequences of deregulating markets in health services, food supply and more
This heralded a shift in thinking that went deeper than personal impact. Perhaps due to the remarkably low loss of human life compared with the scale of the disaster, there was a tremendous focus on the more than a billion mammals, birds and reptiles killed. We mourned the thousands of koalas and the numerous species being pushed towards extinction if their habitats aren’t restored.

The true legacy of this summer could be a vital turning point in recognising that “the environment” isn’t something “over there”. The environment is the air we breathe and the water we drink; it’s the soil in which we grow our food; it’s the animals we identify with and the landscapes imprinted on our souls; the environment is us, all of us, together, integrally connected with everyone and everything else on this beautiful blue marble floating in space.

Damage the environment and we damage ourselves. And not just some of us – all of us together. Continue to think in our compartmentalised, linear fashion, and we’ll keep missing what’s coming, be it weeks of smoke, runs on toilet paper, or deadly pandemics.

What started to become clear thanks to the fires was rammed home by Covid-19. We are only as healthy as the least healthy among us. Everything we do relies on extraordinary networks of activity by people we’ve never met, crisscrossing the globe. And responding to a health crisis that was likely triggered in part by environmental destruction has world-changing impacts on the economy, on education, on social justice, on geopolitics.

To bring us back to where we started, where does that leave the review of the EPBC Act?

We have an opportunity now to not just push for a new generation of environment laws, but to re-evaluate the whole deal, to cultivate a new political settlement based on ecological principles of living well together in harmony with the natural world, understanding our place as part of it as First Peoples did for millenniums, with an economy designed to serve people and planet.

As part of this, in the immediate term we need to advocate for vital improvements to the EPBC. It is extraordinary that the Howard legacy of deliberately excluding a project’s climate impacts from the triggers to require assessment still hasn’t been remedied. That must now be fixed, as must the fact that there is no mechanism for assessing the cumulative ecological impacts of various proposals. After this summer’s destruction of huge areas of remaining healthy ecosystems, we need to institute, in both legislation and the practice of assessment, a presumption of protection instead of a culture of managed destruction.

All this will, of course, be attacked as “green tape” and we have to be ready to actively defend it instead of changing the subject – and defend it on ecological grounds. Regulation is a vital part of the connective tissue which holds the body politic together. Removing it sees us fall apart. Covid-19 is, among other things, showing us the consequences of deregulating markets in health services, food supply and more.

Having that conversation in this way means we won’t just be advocating for marginal improvements, but will be working to change politics. We’ll be building into the political common sense the idea that corporations absolutely should be regulated to enforce environmental and social responsibilities, and that we can no longer consider shareholder profit to be their sole focus. That helps move our politics towards altering the DNA of corporations so they operate as part of the body politic rather than as cancer cells.

The flip side of this systemic shift is to institute legal rights for the natural world. If BHP has legal rights, why shouldn’t the Great Barrier Reef? Rights of nature is an increasingly mature legal field, instituted from New Zealand to Bolivia, India to parts of the US. We can and should at least insert them as a normative principle in the goals of the EPBC.

While we’re thinking at that level, a new ecological political settlement will need a rethink of federalism. Our system sees national and state governments cooperating to shut out community participation and scientific advice to facilitate destructive development. An effective regime based on a presumption of protection would see federal, state, territory and local governments enabling communities to collectively develop creative ideas at their local level, within the context of expert scientific advice, and coordinating those ideas at a regional and continental level.

If we shift environmental regulation from a process that is primarily responsive to demands of developers into a proactive, constructive, community-led system, we can see it morph from a defensive protection stance into one of active restoration, repair and regeneration. It can lead to the greening of cities and towns as we embrace the fact that habitats are not just “over there” but among us. It can create industrial jobs in coalmine rehabilitation. It can support regenerative agriculture, and cooperative sharing of scarce water. It can even open space for community-led conversations about relocation as the overheating world retreats from rising seas and inland desertification is inevitable.

Supporting and enabling communities to make decisions is also vital for rebuilding confidence in democracy, which has collapsed in recent years. The ongoing panic-buying response to Covid-19 suggests that the abject failure of government to provide leadership through the fires worsened this further. This is now an opportunity to rethink governance, reclaim agency for communities, build practices of trust and social cohesion, embedded in respect for expert advice.

Now it’s important to recognise that with this government we’re not going to get these kinds of changes. At best we might hold off the push to weaken the EPBC even further. But that shouldn’t stop us advocating for what we need. Quite the opposite.

Politics, like the natural world it operates within, is a system. It works in complex ways because all it is is the collected actions of humans, influenced by each other and by external impetuses such as the weather. Or viruses.

Donella Meadows, the modern mother of systems thinking, wrote that the most effective leverage point to change a system is “the mindset or paradigm out of which the system ... arises”. It’s critical, then, that we confront the paradigm which sees environmental protection as of marginal importance at best, and as a barrier at worst. It’s vital that we challenge the mindsets of human disconnection from and dominance over nature.

Over the past three months, a huge number of people made that conceptual leap. In recent weeks the crisis has become such that even mainstream politics finds it impossible to ignore.

At the same time, over this period numerous people decided to just get on with it, without waiting for government. In both bushfire response and the tremendous mutual aid response to Covid-19, millions of us are setting up local projects, or joining existing ones, that make life better, generate social cohesion, reduce our footprint, and cultivate an ethic of care – for ourselves, for each other, for the natural world we are part of.

If enough of us start doing this in our communities, and if enough submissions to the EPBC inquiry call for reforms that are embedded in ecological thinking, we will be putting a whole lot of small chocks under the lever. Each of those chocks is tiny. But together they can tip the balance.

All of a sudden, especially at a moment like this, change will come.

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The Coronavirus Outbreak Is Part Of The Climate Change Crisis

Al Jazeera - 

Therefore, climate action should be central to our response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Greenpeace activists display a banner near logging trucks during a protest against forest destruction at Bukit Tiga Puluh in Indonesia''s Jambi province on August 5, 2010 [File: Reuters/Beawiharta]


Vijay Kolinjivadi is a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Development Policy at the University of Antwerp.
The speed and scope of the coronavirus outbreak have taken world governments by surprise and left the stock market reeling.

Since the virus first appeared in China's Hubei province, it has infected over 700,000 people and killed more than 33,000 across the world in less than six months.

The interconnectedness of our globalised world facilitated the spread of COVID-19. The disruption this continues to cause has made evident societal dependence on global production systems.

The pandemic has forced governments into a difficult balancing act between ensuring public safety and wellbeing and maintaining profit margins and growth targets. Ultimately, the prospect of a large death toll and the collapse of health systems have forced countries to put millions of people on lockdown.

These sweeping and unprecedented measures taken by the government and international institutions could not but make some of us wonder about another global emergency that needs urgent action - climate change.

The two emergencies are in fact quite similar. Both have their roots in the world's current economic model - that of the pursuit of infinite growth at the expense of the environment on which our survival depends - and both are deadly and disruptive.

In fact, one may argue that the pandemic is part of climate change and therefore, our response to it should not be limited to containing the spread of the virus. What we thought was "normal" before the pandemic was already a crisis and so returning to it cannot be an option.

The common roots of COVID-19 and climate change

Despite the persistent climate denialism in some policy circles, by now it is clear to the majority across the world that climate change is happening as a result of human activity - namely industrial production.

In order to continue producing - and being able to declare that their economy is growing - humans are harvesting the natural resources of the planet - water, fossil fuels, timber, land, ore, etc - and plugging them into an industrial cycle which puts out various consumables (cars, clothes, furniture, phones, processed food etc) and a lot of waste.

This process depletes the natural ability of the environment to balance itself and disrupts ecological cycles (for example deforestation leads to lower CO2 absorption by forests), while at the same time, it adds a large amount of waste (for example CO2 from burned fossil fuels). This, in turn, is leading to changes in the climate of our planet.

This same process is also responsible for COVID-19 and other outbreaks. The need for more natural resources has forced humans to encroach on various natural habitats and expose themselves to yet unknown pathogens.

At the same time, the growth of mass production of food has created large-scale farms, where massive numbers of livestock and poultry packed into megabarns. As socialist biologist Rob Wallace argues in his book Big Farms Make Big Flu, this has created the perfect environment for the mutation and emergence of new diseases such as hepatitis E, Nipah virus, Q fever, and others.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that three out of four new infectious diseases come from human-animal contact. The outbreaks of Ebola and other coronaviruses such as MERS, for instance, were triggered by a jump from animal to human in disturbed natural habitats.

In the case of COVID-19, it is suspected that the virus was transmitted to humans at a "wet market" in the city of Wuhan, where wildlife was being sold.

The mass-scale breeding of wild animals, including pangolins, civet cats, foxes, wild geese, and boar among many others is a $74bn industry in China and has been viewed as a get-rich-quick scheme by its rural population.

The origin of the virus makes it a perfect example of how the way capitalism commodifies life to turn it into profit can directly endanger human life. In this sense, the ongoing pandemic is the product of unrestrained capitalist production and consumption patterns and is very much part of the deleterious environmental changes it is causing.

The failure to contain it is also due to the capitalist drive of the global economy. In the United States, some have claimed that profit losses from the freezing of economic activity are not worth closing the country for business for more than 15 days.

The World Bank Group has also recently stated that structural adjustment reforms will need to be implemented to recover from COVID-19, including requirements for loans being tied to doing away with "excessive regulations, subsidies, licensing regimes, trade protection...to foster markets, choice, and faster growth prospects."

Doubling down on neoliberal policies which encourage the unrestrained abuse of resources would be a catastrophic prospect in a post-COVID-19 world. The suspension of environmental laws and regulations in the US is already a frightening sign of what returning to "normal" means for the establishment.

Climate change is happening

Although both COVID-19 and climate change are rooted in the same abusive economic behaviour and both have proven to be deadly for humans, governments have seen them as separate and unconnected phenomena and have therefore responded rather differently to them.

The vast majority of countries around the world - albeit with varying degrees of delay - have taken strict measures to curb the movement and gathering of people in order to contain the virus, even at the expense of economic growth.

The same has not happened with climate change. Current climate change measures have taken little heed of the scale and progression of the environmental changes we are experiencing. Climate change does not follow four-year election cycles or five-year economic plans. It does not wait for 2030 or 2050 Sustainable Development targets.

Various aspects of climate change progress at different speeds and in different locations and although for some of us these changes might not be obvious or palpable, they are happening. There are also certain thresholds which if crossed will cause change to be irreversible - whether in greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere, the loss of insect populations or the melting of the permafrost.

And while we do not get daily updates on the death toll caused by climate change, as we do with COVID-19, it is much deadlier than the virus.

Global warming of 3C and 4C above pre-industrial levels could easily lead to a series of catastrophic outcomes. It could severely affect our ability to produce food by decreasing the fertility of soils, intensifying droughts, causing coastal inundations, increasing the loss of pollinators, etc. It could also cause severe heatwaves across the world, which have already proven increasingly deadly both in terms of high temperatures and the wildfires they cause, as well as more extreme weather phenomena like hurricanes.

Pursuing the UN Sustainable Development Goals, carbon offsetting schemes, incremental eco-efficiencies, vegan diets for the wealthy and other similar tactics will not stop climate change because they do not discourage mass industrial production and consumption but simply shift their emphasis. Such approaches will never work because they do not entail the necessary radical change of our high-powered lives that is required to force us to slow down and reduce our emissions.

The rapid response to COVID-19 around the world illustrates the remarkable capacity of society to put the emergency brake on "business-as-usual" simply by acting in the moment. It shows that we can take radical action if we want to.

Lockdowns across the world have already resulted in a significant drop in greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants. In China, for instance, the lockdown caused carbon dioxide to drop by at least 25 percent and nitrogen dioxide by 37 percent.

Taking action

Yet, this temporary decrease in greenhouse gases should not be a cause for celebration. The fact is that as a result of the lockdowns, millions of people have already lost their jobs and billions will probably struggle amid the economic downturn the outbreak is causing.

While some have called for climate change to be just as drastic as the one undertaken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it should not be. We need a just climate transition which ensures the protection of the poor and most vulnerable and which is integrated into our pandemic response. This would not only reverse the climate disaster we are already living in but also minimise the risk of new pandemics like the current one breaking out.

The just climate transition should involve economic reforms to introduce "planned degrowth" that puts the wellbeing of people over profit margins. The first step towards that is ensuring the stimulus packages that governments are announcing across the world are not wasted on bailing out corporations.

We must avoid at all costs a situation where unscrupulous big businesses and state actors are allowed free reign to reinforce appalling global inequality while the rest of civil society is quarantined at home.

We should demand that government funds are instead allocated to decentralised renewable energy production in order to start implementing the Green New Deal and create new meaningful jobs amid the post-COVID-19 economic crisis. In parallel, we should ensure the provision of universal healthcare and free education, the extension of social protection for all vulnerable populations and the prioritisation of affordable housing.

The current response to COVID-19 could help usher in some of these changes. It could get us accustomed to lifestyles and work patterns that minimise consumption. It could encourage us to commute and travel less, reduce household waste, have shorter work weeks, and rely more on local supply chains - i.e. actions that do not hurt the livelihoods of the working classes but shift economic activity from a globalised to a more localised pattern.

Obviously, the conditions surrounding COVID-19 are not ideal, but the rapid and urgent actions in response to the virus and the inspiring examples of mutual aid also illustrate that society is more than capable of acting collectively in the face of grave danger to the whole of humanity.

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How Coronavirus Could Help Us Fight Climate Change: Lessons From The Pandemic

Forbes - David Vetter

Crisis factors: the global response to coronavirus could teach us much about how we should deal with climate change. Getty

It is a truly global emergency. By March 30, 2020, the coronavirus pandemic had claimed more than 35,000 lives worldwide, with about 750,000 confirmed cases across more than 170 countries.

The speed with which the virus has spread has taken most governments apparently by surprise: in less than three months, the outbreak has all but shut down economies worldwide, putting millions of people into isolation, emptying the streets and the skies.

In this rapidly emerging new reality, lessons are being learned. Coronavirus, constituting an emergency unprecedented in modern times, has much to teach us about how civilization should deal with global crises. And in the view of Brazilian economist and former chief financial officer of the World Bank Dr Joaquim Vieira Ferreira Levy, the immediate danger of coronavirus has a great deal in common with the threat of climate change.

“One: it’s global. Two: it affects different people in different ways. Three: it shows the importance of government,” Levy says.

The first point is obvious: climate change and coronavirus share a similar magnitude, affecting every country on earth. With regard to the second, Levy notes that both crises affect different nations, and different communities, with varying degrees of severity.

British Airways planes sit grounded at Bournemouth Airport on March 28, 2020, in England. As of March 30, coronavirus had claimed more than 35,000 lives worldwide. Getty Images
British Airways planes sit grounded at Bournemouth Airport on March 28, 2020, in England. As of March 30, coronavirus had claimed more than 35,000 lives worldwide. Getty Images

“For example, wealthy people in wealthy societies are able to simply go home and not worry too much about their jobs, while there are multitudes that are much more vulnerable than us,” he says. The same calculus applies, in broad strokes, to climate change, which affects disproportionately the developing world—in particular Asia.

Levy’s third point focuses on the role of government in coping with crises. “The response of government can aggravate or decrease the problem. In Wuhan, for example, we saw how important public structures were, in spite of all the weaknesses: the fact that you have these hospitals; the fact that there was a rapid rush to find a vaccine; to build new facilities.” Other governments, Levy notes, have been far slower to react, leading to huge loss of life in countries such as Italy and Spain.

As with COVID-19, so with the climate emergency: the global community’s response to climate change has been slow at best; downright obstructionist at worst. Dr Barbara Buchner, Global Managing Director at the Climate Policy Initiative, says the weak response could be a consequence of contemporary society’s aversion to preparedness.

“The problem with selling prevention is that it’s very hard to see its success,” Buchner says. “I’ve been working in the field of climate change for many years and it's been the same issue: climate change is invisible. But now we’re seeing some of the implications.”

The corollary with coronavirus is that governments have shown a tendency to wait until it’s too late to take serious action. Just as it has taken many nations too long to institute emergency protocols with the approach of coronavirus, meaningful climate action has been sluggish.

“With greenhouse gases you can’t see them; you can’t smell them; they don’t have an immediate health impact. It was very difficult to make the case for why we should reduce them,” Buchner says. “So we need to do a better job of explaining why these prevention and mitigation measures are critical for the economy, for people and for the health of everyone.”
“A crisis like this brings to people's minds that maybe the risk we’ve been talking about with climate change is not so far fetched”
Joaquim Vieira Ferreira Levy
This aversion to preparedness is connected closely to a phenomenon known in public health circles as the “paradox of prevention.” In defining this term, American physician Harvey Fineberg has identified several obstacles that stand in the way of a “practical acceptance of prevention,” including the crucial fact that when prevention succeeds, that success is invisible, leading to an absence of crisis.It is a phenomenon with which Emilie Mazzacurati, founder and CEO of Berkeley-based climate risk analysis firm Four Twenty Seven, is familiar.

“Something that I'd like for us to try to explore a little more is how good preparedness pays off,” Mazzacurati says. “With coronavirus, we have a case where staying in confinement means hopefully you get the virus under control, but then you get a lot of critics saying ‘we shut down the economy for nothing.’ But had we not, we’re talking about deaths in terms of six, seven figures.

“If you do things right, it means you’re never proven right because you’ve prevented bad things from happening.”

Invest in resilience or weather the storm: Environment Agency staff check on rising floodwaters in East Cowick, northern England on March 1, 2020. AFP via Getty Images
In Mazzacurati’s view, this is the story that has played out with climate denialism.

“In the U.S. we have an administration and large parts of the media that don’t listen to science. If enough people die maybe they'll review their thinking, but that’s a high price to pay,” she says.

Levy, too, thinks the public could draw parallels between the dual crises.

“A crisis like this brings to people's minds that maybe the risk we’ve been talking about with climate change is not so far fetched; that actually all these extreme weather episodes of the last five years add up to something,” he says. “So we may see an expectation that government should respond accordingly.”

That, says Barbara Buchner, is one reason why efforts at rebuilding in the wake of the pandemic must take into account longer-term strategies, and incorporate sustainability at their core.

“Obviously the first priority here must be to protect the public health,” Buchner says. But there is no greater second priority than using this crisis to really accelerate the low-carbon transition that is already ongoing, because climate change is threatening our very civilization.”

Buchner believes that any economic stimulus plan ought to be geared not only to jump-start the global economy but to invest further in post-hydrocarbon infrastructure.

“This in turn will create new economic opportunities and also address a set of challenges—including making businesses more sustainable,” she says. “I think ultimately the real question is: do we lock ourselves into the use of fossil fuels in our infrastructure choices today, or do we instead use this crisis as a moment to accelerate the transition that is already on its way?”

Buchner and Levy point out that in both the U.S. and in Europe, employment in the renewable energy industry has been outstripping that of fossil fuel-based industries for some years.

A technician working on an EPTE electrical facility in May, 2001 in São Paulo, Brazil. A droughtthat year aggravated an energy crisis that led to an overhaul of the country's energy regulations. AFP via Getty Images
But beyond capital investment, Levy is a keen proponent of regulatory reform, particularly in moments of crisis. Brazil, he notes, learned key lessons during another environmental crisis—namely the 2001 drought, in which a lack of rainfall led to that country’s all-important hydroelectric dams drying up, bringing widespread power cuts and delivering a crippling blow to the economy.

“We had to reduce the consumption of energy by 20% within the year. But instead of simply undergoing blackouts, we created market regulations. It was a huge amount of work, but it didn’t cost that much and improved the whole system. It also opened the way to renewables.” Indeed, according to analytics firm GlobalData, renewable energy now accounts for 82% of electricity consumed in Brazil.

“Reinforcing markets that are already strong; lowering trade restrictions where necessary—that’s the kind of thing that in normal times would be extremely complicated to do. But at this time, I think it’s worth taking the opportunity,” Levy says.

But do national governments have the foresight and the political will to push such changes through? This remains to be seen.

“I don’t think a lot of governments are going to feel terribly adventurous in how the money's spent,” says Mazzacurati. “Uncertainty and credit crunch means fewer investors looking for non-traditional investments like renewables or green technologies.”
“This shock is so profound, perhaps it’s going to make people rethink how we do things”
Emilie Mazzacurati
On the other hand, she says, “this shock is so profound, perhaps it’s going to make people rethink how we do things. We’re already seeing that economies can adapt when there are sufficient incentives for them to do so.” This adaptability is reflected in the willingness and ability of corporations, from LVMH and Nivea to Dyson and GM, to reconfigure to produce medical equipment.

Adaptability also applies at the government level, to the question of large-scale stimulus packages, Levy says. He notes that while governments may have at first been slow to respond with financial support, the wheels are now turning. For instance Germany, following years of austerity, has indicated it will use coronavirus stimulus cash to rebuild infrastructure while adhering to green commitments.

“Also in France,” Levy says, “if you tie in the fact that they’re very much committed with EU plans in terms of sustainability [with the European Green Deal] in terms of 2050, I’m sure they will find ways to use the money for projects that are already agreed upon—there just wasn’t this push of money.”

“For many people who experienced World War 2, they saw the importance of government for bringing business together,” Levy says, pointing to post-war schemes as the Marshall Plan, which was used to regenerate Europe after years of conflict. In that era, social programs were also expanded: in Britain, for example, the National Health Service was founded in order to meet the health needs of all Britons, regardless of their ability to pay.

Greek railway workers present U.S. ambassador Milton Katz with an olive branch to mark the European Recovery Program, otherwise known as the Marshall Plan, which was passed in 1948. Universal Images Group via Getty Images
“It’s fair to say that over the last few years we’ve been a little bit shortsighted and too complacent,” Levy says. “This doesn't mean you have to nationalize everything and become a permanent war economy, but you do have to put some value on some essential things.”

National and global crises such as coronavirus and climate change, he says, make the case for robust government, requiring coordination of invidivuals, public and private institutions. “People cannot do this on their own. It’s a common effort, and the way to organize it is through government.”

Yet there are indications that some nations are heading in another direction. The world’s largest economy, the United States, last Thursday suspended the enforcement of environmental protection rules. That, Mazzacurati says, bodes poorly not only for Americans but for the wider world.

“The suspension of the enforcement of environmental regulations by the EPA has the potential to layer on additional public health crises—for example in the event of a toxic spill or water contamination,” she says. “It may cause lasting damage to ecosystems or endangered species. It will likely drive greenhouse gas emissions because of methane leaks.”

Beyond that, Mazzacurati fears that the signal the EPA’s move sends could be harmful in the long term.

“The move creates a dangerous precedent by signaling that environmental regulations are optional,” she says. “The success of environmental regulations hinges on long-term predictability to drive investments in clean technologies and plant retrofits, so this undermines decades of efforts to shift industries towards cleaner practices.”

The coronavirus pandemic is arguably unprecedented in its rapid impact on all our lives. It is truly devastating in its consequences. But in responding to it, denying the threat of our other global emergency could prove even more deadly. For while both crises share crucial similarities, the distinctions are just as vital.

“Coronavirus is a wave, like any plague,” Levy says. “But climate change is much more permanent. When it comes, it will stay. It won’t be solved in a matter of weeks or months, but a matter of years.” Levy ends with the analogy of a porcelain cup dropping to the floor and breaking.

“You can try to stick it back together,” he says, “but it’ll never be the same again.”

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