Instead, we conformed to the classic V-curve, an immediate plunge followed quickly by a similar surge. Spending and consuming shot straight back up once confidence (and income) returned. Even if Covid-19 produces a U-curve, in which economies stay at the bottom for longer before eventually returning to health, will the final stage of the recovery look different to what came before?
According to forecasts, global emissions are projected to go down by approximately 4-8% this year. The extent of the challenge the world faces with the climate emergency is such that that level of reduction will be needed every year for the next 30 years in order for the net-zero carbon emissions target to be reached by 2050. Even then, such a consistent transformation in the way we lead our lives would only succeed in keeping the temperature rise below 1.5°C.
The trouble is we don’t want to be locked up any more. We will certainly appreciate more cycle lanes and many city authorities, including London’s mayor, are using the crisis to fast track such plans. That is a long-term trend driven both by our consciences and by state action (making car driving ever slower, more expensive and more unpleasant). We might fly less, taking the train more or relying on stay-cations. But aviation accounts for no more than 3% of total emissions. We might eat less meat, particularly beef… it all helps.
But something different will be needed that many people will say they are unwilling to bear. As the Economist put it: “The pandemic is not, as some say, ‘nature’s reset’. Such thinking easily slips into the misanthropy that can lead environmentalists to see people themselves as the problem.”
One of the problems of the Green movement is its cultural associations. Attendance at Extinction Rebellion protests or Greta Thunberg rallies has in some quarters become just one more virtue signal. In an essay in The National Interest, the academic and author Anatol Lieven argues that climate change denial has become “a cultural marker of conservative identity”, particularly in the United States during the dystopian era of Trump:
“These Republican prejudices have been exacerbated by the way in which the Left has loaded onto the agenda of fighting climate change economic, political and cultural issues that are either irrelevant to climate change or directly opposed to action: the abolition (as opposed to reform) of capitalism, and a whole rag bag of identity politics and demands for minority ‘empowerment’.”
Lieven calls for environmentalism to be recast as a national, patriotic issue: in other words, sugar the pill to win red necks over to the cause. To a degree he is right. The green agenda needs to be broadened, to include folk who choose not to associate themselves with “green issues”.
To a degree that’s already happening. Germany’s Greens have extended their reach beyond metropolitans to include traditional more socially conservative voters in small towns and villages, particularly in Bavaria. Austria, too, where the Greens are in government. What they share with the urban hipsters is an antipathy towards globalisation and a yearning for a slower and more traditional way of life.
Local, in this case, does mean global. Confining Green issues to the nation state is to miss the point. International collaboration is the only sensible means of tackling the climate emergency — just as a failure to coordinate the global response to Covid-19 exacerbated the problems the world is facing.
Will voters be more amenable to making the necessary huge changes to their lives needed to tackle not just this crisis, but the one lurking a few down the road? Will they, in practical terms, accept a fiscal system that punishes hypermobility and a social value system in which “excessive” consumer durables are regarded as unacceptable? Will they stay at home more and buy less — not because they are forced to, as now, but out of choice?
In theoretical terms, are they more amenable to a different kind of capitalism and consumerism? Have they moved beyond the era when Gordon Brown told people that shopping was a patriotic duty? They might, possibly, but it will need a particularly deft set of politicians around the world to convince them that the traumas of 2020 were not a one-off. And it is likely that those politicians may not come from the newer order of parties, but from the old established mainstream: safety-first people better trusted to introduce radical policies.
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