Bill McKibben writes:

There’s nothing good about the novel coronavirus—it’s killing many people, and shutting millions more inside, with fear as their main companion. However, if we’re fated to go through this passage, we may as well learn something from it, and it does strike me that there are a few insights that are applicable to the climate crisis that shadows all of our lives.

Some of these lessons are obvious: giant cruise ships are climate killers and, it turns out, can become floating sick wards. Other ideas evaporate once you think about them: China is producing far less carbon dioxide, for the moment, but, completely apart from the human toll, economic disruption is not a politically viable way to deal with global warming in the long term, and it also undercuts the engines of innovation that bring us, say, cheap solar panels.

Still, it’s worth noting how nimbly millions of people seem to have learned new patterns. Companies, for instance, are scrambling to stay productive, even with many people working from home. The idea that we need to travel each day to a central location to do our work may often be the result of inertia, more than anything else. Faced with a real need to commute by mouse, instead of by car, perhaps we’ll see that the benefits of workplace flexibility extend to everything from gasoline consumption to the need for sprawling office parks.

Of course, that’s a lesson that can be learned in reverse as well. The best excuse for an office is people bouncing ideas off one another, and the best excuse for a society is just people bouncing off one another, something that’s getting harder right now, as events start cancelling. But the “social distancing” that epidemiologists now demand of us to stop the spread of infectious diseases is actually already too familiar to lots of Americans. Living lives of comparative, suburban isolation, we already have fewer close friends than we used to. (Health-care authorities warned, on Thursday, of a serious epidemic of loneliness, which older Americans are more vulnerable to. The research shows that, when controlling for all other variables, older Americans who reported being lonely are twice as likely to die prematurely than those who aren’t.) But the patterns that produce this solitude in our culture are so ingrained that we’ve come to take them for granted. Perhaps, in an odd way, the prospect of forced isolation may lead us to embrace a bit more gregariousness when the virus relents. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be penned up in a Wuhan apartment; I can guess, though, that liberation will feel sweet when it comes, not only because people presumably will be safe but because they can be social. A certain kind of environmentalist has long hoped that we’ll learn to substitute human contact for endless consumption; maybe this is the kind of shock that might open a few eyes. (Also, strained global supply chains are a good reminder that local agriculture has very practical benefits.)

This might also be the moment when we decide to fully embrace the idea that science, you know, works. [Continue reading…]