With the coronavirus now dominating all media and all discussion, we risk forgetting about the much larger crisis posed by climate change.
We should remember that while the current pandemic is indeed terrible, we can recover from it; if left unchecked though, we won’t be able to say the same of climate change.
With few people flying all around the world and commuting to work for fear of infection, our carbon emissions are dropping substantially and things are looking much better for the climate. For now.
Although it saddens me to hear about all those who we have lost to the coronavirus and all those who we will continue to lose to it, still nothing gives me the same feeling of unbearable sadness that comes from watching people continue to ignore the climate crisis, which will without a doubt cause far more disruptions in our daily lives and claim far more lives than the coronavirus ever could.
Our objective at the end of the coronavirus crisis must not be to simply return to a dubious ‘normalcy’, with its unsustainable resource use and greenhouse gas emissions, but to understand that this has been but a tiny prologue to the much graver and all-encompassing crisis posed by climate change.
Nicholas Fairfield-Carter
Victoria
