“Human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted”
Aldous Huxley wrote these immortal words for his 1932 dystopian novel and a world blissfully ignorant to Coronavirus. But he might as well be talking about 2020 and the real-life dystopia we’re living in.
COVID-19 and the global lockdown it incurred was our “Great Pause”. A time of rare reflection where we, as human beings, saw the damage that this infinite capacity has inflicted on the world around us. In other words, to the planet we take for granted.
We saw “emboldened animals” flood into our abandoned concrete forests and claim our once bursting harbours for themselves. As if it was ours to take in the first place. Capitalism, the only world we know, crashed before our eyes. Global carbon dioxide emissions saw the sharpest drop since carbon output records began. March to May was a brief but positive snapshot of what our world could be like. A moment of hope that hung heavy when you compare it to a planet consumed in fire, as we saw in Australia only four months earlier.
An Accelerated Future
We have known long before “the Great Pause” that a brave new world was coming. COVID-19 has simply accelerated that future into the present. Living our lives online, connected only by screens, is one step closer to that automated, digitised and de-urbanised future – that or the Matrix. Either way, it has accelerated technologies that “were previously feasible” but were not yet adaptable on a wide scale. We may have not reached a robot uprising just yet but the desire to live in urban areas is already flailing.
Concerns over our hyper-globalised society are not new but Coronavirus has all but confirmed that it brings real risks. It has raised real questions over the impact of potential future geographical lockdowns. We might want to “rethink how to build resilience into supply chains” if we don’t want to haggle over toilet paper and anti-bacterial hand wash again any time soon. When we could not travel abroad, we coined a whole new word: “Staycations“, with many of us opting to explore often overlooked delights closer to home.
When Coronavirus spread into our lives, what we knew then as normal – our lifestyles, routines, priorities – changed overnight. The “drastic” lifestyle changes that we refused to implement before did not seem so outlandish anymore. COVID-19 has made the prospect of a sustainable society seem possible and even desirable. According to a report by Climate Assembly UK, eight out of ten people want the governmental measures taken to help the UK in its economic recovery to be designed to reach net-zero carbon emissions. Making COVID-19 the “Great Realisation” we needed to prioritise environmental policy and forge a green new world.
Old Habits Die Hard
If only it were that easy. If habits were easy to break, there would not be a whole cliché suggesting otherwise.
When it comes to prioritising environmental policy, some countries are better than others and some are a lot better. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, climate action has stagnated. This was about to change with the next United Nations Climate Change Conference, or Cop26, being held in November this year in Glasgow. The conference would have brought 196 countries together in the city. Unfortunately, the one thing we need to tackle climate change – a united response – is the one thing that we cannot have in the Coronavirus era.
The participating countries are supposed to submit their ‘National Determined Contributions’ (NDCs) this year even with the conference being postponed to next November. But old habits die hard as we know. The UK is yet to submit its emission-cutting targets. It has kicked the deadline down the road to some indeterminate date before next year’s conference.
Environment Versus Economy
Burying our heads (and environmental policy) in the sand happens to be our specialty. But this time, Coronavirus gives us a pretty substantial sand mountain to bury our heads under. Back in May, the Asian Development Bank estimated the global cost of COVID-19 could be as much as $8.8 trillion, which is an eye-watering amount that we cannot begin to comprehend. But it is an amount that will undoubtedly be felt by all of us, and most of all by the world’s poorest.
COVID-19 could plummet up to as many as 580 million people into poverty. It has sparked the first rise in global poverty this century. It has provoked, as Weforum described, the “greatest educational emergency of our lifetime“, with more than 1.7 billion children out of education during the global lockdown.
The world’s poorest economies cannot absorb the combined strain of COVID-19 and its aftermath, let alone for us to then to ask them to make sacrifices in the name of fighting climate change, a consideration that has long since been considered a luxury of developed economies. The conversations around green recovery fail to see the irony of what they are asking as “the impacts of climate change are already being felt by the poorest members of society” the most.
Coronavirus has exposed our society’s inequalities in more ways than one. Climate Change News has called for developed economies like the UK “to mobilise additional finance to address the losses and damages” by COVID-19. A sentiment shared by John Sauven, the CEO of Greenpeace UK, who recently expressed concern over the UK’s delay to disclose its NDCs. Sauven wants to see the UK set an example to the rest of the world, as the host of COP26, so that we do not lose momentum in the fight against climate change. To make next year’s climate summit a success, he argues that “major economies [need to] use this opportunity to build a green recovery“.
Keeping Track Of Our Green New World
Without a UN climate summit cemented into our calendars, it is difficult to keep track of which countries are making the necessary sacrifices and prioritising environmental policy in their overall COVID-19 recovery. However, a UK based website, Carbon Brief, might just have all the answers.
Carbon Brief has developed its own interactive grid that allows us to track “the measures proposed, agreed and implemented” by the world’s major economies.
The grid monitors more than the empty promises that governments often begrudgingly set out to satisfy voters. It regularly updates the world’s commitments to greener social housing like Italy’s extremely popular Ecobonus scheme or New Zealand’s $142.5 million Warmer kiwi homes programme to help give lower-income households more energy and environmentally efficient homes.
Carbon Brief’s grid also explores environmental developments across all kinds of governmental policy, such as investment in greener methods of transport like hydrogen-powered vehicles in Germany and South Korea. Not to mention commitments to greener technology and jobs in the environmental sector.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in has been praised for his commitment to green recovery and his $135 billion investment in green and digital technology, known as the “K-New Deal“. But even the Korean deal has been described as less green than it is grey.
As for the rest of the world, the rose-tinted glasses of the “Great Realisation” may be beginning to fade. Time will tell if Coronavirus will have any lasting effect. All we can do is keep pushing, hold our governments accountable and not take this new world for granted.
Rebecca Carey
Featured Image courtesy of Singkham via Pexels. Image licence found here. No changes were made to this image.
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