Angus Duncan, Chair
Oregon Global Warming Commission
Imagine this scenario.
We hear on the news of events unfolding far from our homes – China, say; or the Arctic – that are distantly concerning but aren’t disrupting our day-to-day.
There are warnings from the intelligence community, from military strategists, from medical experts and scientists. But the lives and professions of these technical experts are practiced in government offices and hospital corridors, not on main street. Besides, who believes in inconvenient science anymore?
The experts offer us guidance on protecting ourselves from the approaching threat. Some of us dispute the advice and deny the threat. Others take it more seriously, but absent national mobilization few of us feel compelled to adjust our business-as-usual routines. We have jobs and chores; we’re hitting the Blazers game this weekend, and the beach over spring break with the kids. Events in China aren’t our problem. Polar bears aren’t as immediate to us as our kids’ soccer games.
I’ve been reflecting, in this time of self-imposed isolation, on the many ways that the corona virus pandemic is like climate change on speed; and climate change seems a pandemic in slo-mo.
In both cases we Americans – unlike the poor folks in Wuhan – have been given the grace of an early warning and time to prepare. In both cases that preparation would have involved changing ways in which we go about our daily lives. Defeating the virus would mean defensive spacing, deep cleaning, building up hospital stockpiles of needed supplies and beds. Avoiding the worst effects of climate change means cleaning the fossil fuels out of our energy system, switching to electric vehicles, switching out incandescent bulbs for LED’s, tightening our building codes and retrofitting existing buildings. Not undoable asks, but interruptions in our lives, and disruptions for many businesses.
Still, with early warnings these adjustments could be ramped in over time; managed for disruptive costs, job displacement and other effects.
In neither case have we made use of the grace periods. The warnings have been widely ignored, and in some cases outright denied. Not on the evidence but because they were inconvenient, or they required the kind of collective response only effective government can supply.
About here the parallels break down.
The virus is a contagion that will pass, having done far more damage than with timely preparation it might. We’ve seen similar pandemic emergencies since at least the middle ages when a third of Europe’s population died from Yersinia pestis, the Black Death. But modern medicine, given the lead time, can keep most of us alive while it’s discovering the vaccine we’re sure it will; just a matter of months, we’re confident. The economy, jobs, prosperity may lag behind but will come back as well.
Climate change is going to be different. There’s no vaccine, for starters. No “herd immunity.” No “matter of months” either. If the world pivoted today away from its embrace of “viral” fossil fuels, we’ve already locked ourselves into decades of superstorms, wildfire, floods and droughts, sea level rise, species extinction, climate migration . . . and for that matter, encroaching diseases that can become epidemic. It’s already happening in Oregon and elsewhere around the world.
“But we could bend the curve. We could blunt the worst effects, and see past them to a happier world for our kids.”
But we could bend the curve. We could blunt the worst effects, and see past them to a happier world for our kids.
As we learn the direct lessons of the virus pandemic, we will learn to manage the next wave of the disease, and the next one. But will this current challenge divert our focus from the larger one, the remaking of our economy and our daily lives without the sickness spread by fossil fuels?
Or can we be clever enough, insightful enough, wise enough to draw on today’s lessons and apply them – along with the many emerging low carbon practices and technologies – to the greater threat looming just beyond this small but terrifying life form that is our current adversary?
I wish I were more hopeful.