Owen Jones: Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?
It is a global
emergency that has already killed on a mass scale and threatens to send
millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it could destabilise
entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and
infrastructure. But this is the climate crisis, not the coronavirus.
Governments are not assembling emergency national plans and you’re not getting
push notifications transmitted to your phone breathlessly alerting you to
dramatic twists and developments from South Korea to Italy.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/05/governments-coronavirus-urgent-climate-crisis
More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to
the World Health Organization, air pollution alone - just one aspect of our
central planetary crisis - kills
seven
million people every year. There have been no Cobra meetings for the
climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency
action being taken to reassure the public. In time, we’ll overcome any coronavirus
pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are already out of time, and are now left
mitigating the inevitably disastrous consequences hurtling towards us.
While coronavirus is
understandably treated as an imminent danger, the climate crisis is still
presented as an abstraction whose consequences are decades away. Unlike an
illness, it is harder to visualise how climate breakdown will affect us each as
individuals. Perhaps when unprecedented wildfires engulfed parts of the Arctic last summer there
could have been an urgent conversation about how the climate crisis was
fuelling extreme weather, yet there wasn’t. In 2018, more than 60 million
people suffered the consequences of extreme weather and climate change,
including more than 1,600 who
perished in Europe, Japan and the US because of heatwaves and
wildfires. Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe were devastated by cyclone Idai, while hurricanes Florence and Michael
inflicted $24bn (£18.7bn) worth of damage on the US economy, according
to the World Meteorological Organization....https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/05/governments-coronavirus-urgent-climate-crisis
see also
The Amazon
is burning. The climate is changing. And we're doing nothing to stop itKeeping up
with China: US Navy orders $22 billion worth of submarines // World military
expenditure grows to $1.8 trillion in 2018
