Does every cloud has a silver lining? It may be argued that Covid-19 has in a couple of months produced more action on the environment than international treaties have in many decades. Air pollution has precipitously dropped around the world. Skies are no longer lacerated with contrails as aircraft remain grounded. Roads are largely car free and quiet. Most significantly of all, 2020 is on course to join the very select ranks of years in which global carbon emissions go down.
The cost of such developments is tens of thousands of people dead with much of the global economy crashing to a halt. To attempt to highlight positives side-effects from the Covid-19 crisis may not only be crass but counter-productive. Because it sets up attempts to avoid environmental impacts as being in direct opposition to the welfare of people. If you ask someone to choose whether millions of people should succumb to a lethal virus now, or resources be spent on say avoiding climate breakdown in a few decades time, almost everyone will say they put people before the planet.
But what they are really responding to is the sense of urgency. Right now we have to be subjected to mass social isolation and all its economic impacts, because this is the only way to save lives. The assumption here, is that we will have time to solve environmental challenges. That is dangerously misguided. Unless huge efforts begin immediately, then we face incredibly grim futures. Unfortunately, we preferentially trade off impacts years or decades in the future for things that affect us today or tomorrow.
The trade off that is most exercising some people right now is that between people and the economy. In reflecting about the economic impacts of social distancing in the US, President Trump said “The cure cannot be worse than the problem” and has begun to argue that some measures should be relaxed in order to allow people to get back to work. How many of the most vulnerable people in society should be sacrificed in order that economies can grow again, is a distasteful question. This has not stopped some people asking it. Lt. Govenor of Texas, Dan Patrick has argued that grandparents would be willing to die in order that the US economy is not destroyed.
Imploring octogenarians to give up their life in order to protect America sounds more noble than suggesting an entire generation should be decimated so some of the richest people on earth do not have to pay more in taxes. But that really is the trade off here. There are sufficient resources in the US and elsewhere to ensure that no one need go hungry, be harmed or die as a consequence of the economic calamities social distancing is producing. Indeed, recent actions by Governments around the world have shattered assumption about what is possible. Since the 1980s, The UK has been governed by political parties that all subscribed to free market ideologies. This has not stopped Johnson’s government enacting a programme of direct government intervention that surpasses the fevered dreams of even the most fervent socialist.
This begs the question, if we can do these things now, why can’t they be extended into the future? If the purpose of an economy is to provide the necessary goods and services for people to have good, flourishing lives, then when the crisis is over why shouldn’t such principles should still apply? It is here that we will find the resolution to the apparent trade off between people and planet that the Covid-19 crisis brings into sharp relief.
We must acknowledge that there can be no future for humanity if the life support systems of the Earth are continually degraded. Dragging economies from the brink over the next 12 months only to have them rebound and crash through any safe boundary for climate change or biodiversity loss is simply setting up humanity for an even greater fall. We should take this opportunities to reimagine and repurpose our economies so that they provide for all. This must include our children and future generations. In that endeavour, planetary health and people’s health are two sides of the same coin.