Covid-19 Is Nature's Wake-Up Call to Complacent Civilization

By George Monbiot, Guardian UK

25 March 20

A bubble has finally been burst – but will we now attend to the other threats facing humanity?

e have been living in a bubble, a bubble of false comfort and denial. In the rich nations, we have begun to believe we have transcended the material world. The wealth we’ve accumulated – often at the expense of others – has shielded us from reality. Living behind screens, passing between capsules – our houses, cars, offices and shopping malls – we persuaded ourselves that contingency had retreated, that we had reached the point all civilisations seek: insulation from natural hazards.

Now the membrane has ruptured, and we find ourselves naked and outraged, as the biology we appeared to have banished storms through our lives. The temptation, when this pandemic has passed, will be to find another bubble. We cannot afford to succumb to it. From now on, we should expose our minds to the painful realities we have denied for too long.

The planet has multiple morbidities, some of which will make this coronavirus look, by comparison, easy to treat. One above all others has come to obsess me in recent years: how will we feed ourselves? Fights over toilet paper are ugly enough: I hope we never have to witness fights over food. But it’s becoming difficult to see how we will avoid them.

A large body of evidence is beginning to accumulate showing how climate breakdown is likely to affect our food supply. Already farming in some parts of the world is being hammered by drought, floods, fire and locusts (whose resurgence in the past few weeks appears to be the result of anomalous tropical cyclones). When we call such hazards “biblical”, we mean that they are the kind of things that happened long ago, to people whose lives we can scarcely imagine. Now, with increasing frequency, they are happening to us.

In his forthcoming book, Our Final Warning, Mark Lynas explains what is likely to happen to our food supply with every extra degree of global heating. He finds that extreme danger kicks in somewhere between 3C and 4C above pre-industrial levels. At this point, a series of interlocking impacts threatens to send food production into a death spiral. Outdoor temperatures become too high for humans to tolerate, making subsistence farming impossible across Africa and South Asia. Livestock die from heat stress. Temperatures start to exceed the lethal thresholds for crop plants across much of the world, and major food producing regions turn into dust bowls. Simultaneous global harvest failure – something that has never happened in the modern world – becomes highly likely.

In combination with a rising human population, and the loss of irrigation water, soil and pollinators, this could push the world into structural famine. Even today, when the world has a total food surplus, hundreds of millions are malnourished as a result of the unequal distribution of wealth and power. A food deficit could result in billions starving. Hoarding will happen, as it always has, at the global level, as powerful people snatch food from the mouths of the poor. Yet, even if every nation keeps its promises under the Paris agreement, which currently seems unlikely, global heating will amount to between 3C and 4C.

Thanks to our illusion of security, we are doing almost nothing to anticipate this catastrophe, let alone prevent it. This existential issue scarcely seems to impinge on our consciousness. Every food-producing sector claims that its own current practices are sustainable and don’t need to change. When I challenge them, I’m met with a barrage of anger and abuse, and threats of the kind I haven’t experienced since I opposed the Iraq war. Sacred cows and holy lambs are everywhere, and the thinking required to develop the new food systems that we need, like lab-grown food, is scarcely anywhere.

But this is just one of our impending crises. Antibiotic resistance is, potentially, as deadly as any new disease. One of the causes is the astonishingly profligate way in which these precious medicines are used on many livestock farms. Where vast numbers of farm animals are packed together, antibiotics are deployed prophylactically to prevent otherwise inevitable outbreaks of disease. In some parts of the world, they are used not only to prevent disease, but also as growth promoters. Low doses are routinely added to feed: a strategy that could scarcely be better designed to deliver bacterial resistance.

In the US, where 27 million people have no medical cover, some people are now treating themselves with veterinary antibiotics, including those sold, without prescription, to medicate pet fish. Pharmaceutical companies are failing to invest sufficiently in the search for new drugs. If antibiotics cease to be effective, surgery becomes almost impossible. Childbirth becomes a mortal hazard once more. Chemotherapy can no longer be safely practised. Infectious diseases we have comfortably forgotten become deadly threats. We should discuss this issue as often as we talk about football. But again, it scarcely registers.

Our multiple crises, of which these are just two, have a common root. The problem is exemplified by the response of the organisers of the Bath Half Marathon, a massive event that took place on 15 March, to the many people begging them to cancel. “It is now too late for us to cancel or postpone the event. The venue is built, the infrastructure is in place, the site and our contractors are ready.” In other words, the sunk costs of the event were judged to outweigh any future impacts – the potential transmission of disease, and possible deaths – it might cause.

The amount of time it took the International Olympic Committee to postpone the Games could reflect similar judgments – but at least they got there in the end. Sunk costs within the fossil fuel industry, farming, banking, private healthcare and other sectors prevent the rapid transformations we need. Money becomes more important than life.

There are two ways this could go. We could, as some people have done, double down on denial. Some of those who have dismissed other threats, such as climate breakdown, also seek to downplay the threat of Covid-19. Witness the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, who claims that the coronavirus is nothing more than “a little flu”. The media and opposition politicians who have called for lockdown are, apparently, part of a conspiracy against him.

Or this could be the moment when we begin to see ourselves, once more, as governed by biology and physics, and dependent on a habitable planet. Never again should we listen to the liars and the deniers. Never again should we allow a comforting falsehood to trounce a painful truth. No longer can we afford to be dominated by those who put money ahead of life. This coronavirus reminds us that we belong to the material world.

Nationalize the Airlines

By Paris Marx, Jacobin

25 March 20

The airline industry will not survive the coronavirus. Now is the time to nationalize it — and use this moment to chart a course to a low-carbon future.

he rapid growth in the number of cases of the novel coronavirus, known as COVID-19, has quickly cratered air traffic as people cancel their holidays, postpone business travel, and avoid close contact with others to limit its spread. Airlines around the world are now facing severe financial pressures and are responding by cutting flights, laying off workers, and begging governments for financial assistance.

In the United Kingdom, IAG, which owns British Airways, has announced its flight capacity will be cut by 75 percent and Virgin Atlantic will cut 80 percent of its flights — with staff asked to take eight weeks of unpaid leave. Ryanair, EasyJet, and Norwegian are also cutting most of their flights and their workers face layoffs, pay cuts, and potentially even job losses. Similar announcements are being made by airlines throughout Europe, North America, and Australia and New Zealand as the Centre for Aviation estimates most airlines could be bankrupt by May without government assistance.

Airline share prices are falling dramatically: British Airways down almost by half, Lufthansa down 41 percent, and Air-France/KLM down 56 percent. Even before the coronavirus, the airline industry was in a fragile position — with smaller airlines like Flybe and Wow Air hitting the wall and larger airlines often hopelessly over-leveraged. This crisis calls for a radical reassessment of the sector as a whole, and a means for governments to plan a way forward.

Even in the face of the climate crisis, air travel remains an important part of the economy — but that does not mean it must continue in the same way it has in the past. Instead of simply bailing out the airlines so they can resume operations once the virus is cured, we need to rethink the role that airlines play in our transportation networks and take them into public ownership so they can be democratically planned to achieve social and environmental goals.

Major airlines used to be owned by national governments until a few decades ago and many continue to operate under public ownership, or at least with a significant stake owned by governments. In response to the coronavirus crisis, Italy has already renationalized Alitalia. It will be the first of many countries to make similar moves.

Clearly, action needs to be taken today to protect airline workers’ jobs — but it must be strategic. Handing over huge sums of public money to wealthy airline investors or celebrity billionaires like Richard Branson without securing additional powers for the state in terms of input into the future of the industry, improving conditions for workers, and meeting urgent climate targets would be a foolish mistake.

If airlines are truly poised to go under, they should be nationalized at a significant discount. If assistance is provided, it cannot be without strings, which must include an ownership stake along with a commitment to meeting public goals that would include integrated planning, a better passenger experience, and protections for workers.

(Re)nationalized airlines should be planned as part of a broader transportation system, with the goal of reducing unnecessary air travel, particularly on short-haul routes, to achieve emissions reductions. Ideally, this would be in conjunction with a rail system that is also returned to public ownership, which would allow for improvements to reliability, frequency, and a reduction in ticket prices to encourage people to use trains instead of cars and planes. This would enable a public intercity transport authority to effectively plan for the public’s mobility needs by diverting more resources into the rail system, while eliminating short-haul flight routes where the same trip can be taken on a train in a reasonable time.

In practice, a focus on reducing emissions while keeping trips affordable and ensuring people can reach their destinations in a similar time frame as an entire air journey, including time to and from the airport and going through security, would allow for resources to be diverted from air to improving rail service throughout the United Kingdom and on many routes to the continent. Train services are already competitive with flights between major centers in the United Kingdom, and that will only improve with HS2 and High Speed North. A public rail system could also improve services to smaller cities and communities around the country.

Already, train services are time-competitive with flights to cities in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and even parts of western Germany. However, reaching those destinations by train can often cost more than booking a discount flight. An intercity transport authority, in cooperation with partners on the continent, must work to change that by pricing in the externalities of air travel and reducing the price of train journeys in recognition of the broader social and economic benefits of increasing access to transport services and connections between peoples.

But there will be some routes that simply won’t be able to be serviced by trains because the distances are too long. For those routes, the air travel experience must improve with greater comfort and space for passengers, instead of making people feel like sardines packed into a metal tube, and fewer punitive fees for everything from a bag to a forgotten boarding pass. Private jets, which emit much more per passenger than a conventional flight, must also be banned, with the rich forced to fly in the same planes as everyone else.

Thousands of airline workers are being thrown to the wolves today, with mass layoffs already in Norwegian, Scandinavian Airlines, and KLM. To prevent the same in the United Kingdom, we need action today. That means government recognizing the particular problem the airline industry faces — not just today, but over the coming years in the context of the climate crisis — and its strategic importance to both the economy and society. Any such recognition would make the case for nationalization at substantially reduced cost clear.

Airline workers have contributed to the incredible wealth of the executives and shareholders of major airlines, and if the companies themselves can’t afford to pay their workers without going bankrupt, the government must. But in exchange, they have to insist on airline executives and wealthy investors taking a very significant hit. Golden handshakes and vulture profiteering as thousands of workers lose jobs will rightly infuriate the public.

As concern about air travel emissions has grown in recent years, especially given they’re rising at a much faster rate than in other industries, those concerned with climate change have been wondering how air travel might be curbed in a sustainable future. The crisis brought on by COVID-19 is stark — but it offers an opportunity to break with the status quo. Policies which last week seemed impossible are now being implemented in countries around the world to combat the economic fallout.

With planes grounded around the world, it’s time to rethink the structure and incentives of our transportation networks — and for governments to take decisive action not only to protect workers today but to determine how people travel in the future.