Silver Linings
Who doesn't love a good silver lining? During a pandemic that attacks the respiratory system, there is one ailing patient who is breathing a little easier these days: the earth. Empty roads, grounded planes and shuttered factories have been a welcome break for our pollution-choked planet. Pictures of crystal-clear Venice canals have made the rounds on the internet, satellite images of China, Italy and New York show lower levels of carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide. After the warmest land winter on record, even a brief pause is helpful, but make no mistake, the pause will be brief. Greenhouse emissions also dropped in 2009 in response to the subprime mortgage financial crisis. People drive and travel less when times are tight. However, emissions came back with a vengeance, getting back on track to where they were headed in a few years. With bailouts for oil, airline and auto companies planned, there's now reason to think we'll change our old habits.
Still, there may be lasting lessons in this that are environmentally friendly. More companies are going to normalize working from home (and new companies will think twice before building offices if they don't have to), governments may also take this opportunity to take climate-forward steps when it is time to restart their economies. According to the Economist's article on this subject, there are two tracks a nation can take: "The lazy way, the easy way, to boost countries' economies in response to the virus would be for governments to throw money at established versions of big industries like energy, transport and construction. They could, though, if they chose to do so, spend the cash instead on encouraging climate-friendly versions of these industries; more solar energy (or even, heaven forfend, nuclear power) instead of bungs to oil and gas; more batteries for cars, and money for research into hydrogen-powered fuel cells; cash prizes for ways of making steel and cement without releasing CO2; and so on." You don't have to read much further than the words "the lazy way" to guess which direction our current administration will take but there's reason to hope other nations will be more forward-thinking.
While this reprieve will most likely end up not being a reprieve at all, I'm taking heart in another area of COVID response that might well have implications in the fight against climate change. Despite its late start, the world has gotten itself in gear as far as the production of ventilators goes, with companies the world over predicting to double or triple their output by the end of the month. There's even talk of people making relatively safe ventilators at home out of windshield wiper motors and Ambu bags (emphasis on relatively, these will be last-ditch methods). Sadly, a surge like this will still be too little, too late to save all the lives that might have been saved if we had done this 10 weeks ago but it has been inspiring, nonetheless. Before we all went inside, I ended up at a talk by a scientist named Saul Griffith who compared the climate fight to World War II, saying that there is an industrial solution to the enemy we all face. At the time of Pearl Harbor, the US was woefully ill-prepared in terms of materiel, with few bullets and even fewer bombers. According to Griffith, batteries are the new bullets and electric furnaces are the new bombers. As we all know, American answered the call and produced the stuff we needed as a unified nation, with places from New York to New Orleans pitching in (in fact, the Big Easy's contribution to the war effort, as the sole producer of the LCVP Higgins Boat, the landing craft that brought US soldiers ashore in every major amphibious assault during the war, is why the National World War II Museum is in that city). Now, the world is reacting similarly when it comes to ventilators. Some day (and most likely soon), we'll need to produce clean machines quickly and en masse. The world's response to the ventilator shortage has me hopeful.
I know I started this newsletter with silver linings and am now focusing on the next terrible crisis so I'll end with this. Models for the future of both COVID and climate change are terrifying. We should trust those models and listen to experts and scientists, there are few people I trust more. That said, and honest scientists will agree with this, science is wonderful at explaining what is happening now and investigating what has happened before. Nothing is good at predicting the future. Here is a snippet from a 1948 issue of Science Digest: "Landing and moving around on the moon offers so many serious problems for human beings that it may take science another 200 years to lick them." If that was written in 1848 it would have been wrong by 79 years. And that prediction wasn't wrong (I mean, it is literally wrong of course, we went to the moon in 1969, if you don't believe that, please unsubscribe), I mean the thinking wasn't wrong. Based on aerospace technology at the time and the rate it was progressing, a 200-year timeline was a safe bet. They had no way of anticipating that getting to the moon was suddenly going to be of paramount importance to the two most powerful nations on earth. I don't know when the Pearl Harbor moment for climate change is (and many would say that it's long in the rear-view) but I know that people have a remarkable ability to rise to the occasion. We're seeing that now.