There’s an instructive NY Times article on the amount of potential emissions reductions we may see in the weeks and months ahead of this global slowdown. Obviously, nobody wanted this virus which is easily communicable and deadly for vulnerable subsets of our population to spread as widely as it has. I am struck by how quickly we seem to have adapted to the new normal and the sense of communal solidarity I often bemoan in our culture seems to be slowly coming back.
We have often argued here about taxing cars to fund expanded public transit and what kind of regulations can help our region, nation, and planet avert a climate catastrophe. Things this article brings up that well could become permanent would be shifting the amount of work we do in the office to a 60/40 or 50/50 or even 40/60 split to remote work. Costly conferences can become teleconferences saving on airline and cab emissions. The daily commute could be halved which will improve public and personal transit alike in this the most congested of cities. This will also make biking safer and easier for those who do live closer to the office. Shifting to satellite offices so our hub and spoke system can be given a break, or office shares in the sleepier suburbs that can become valued third spaces where coffee, pints, work, and childcare could all interact.
I think the days of having a horrible commute in the morning and afternoon, the time spent away from family, and the real damage to both our social and ecological fabric these things can do could be coming to an end. It may not require new taxes or official regulations (although they may be helpful down the road).
Simply shifting workplace culture to encourage working from home more can have these positive ripple effects without a virus forcing it on us. It will also gives us resiliency and experience in case we need to switch back to it, particularly for schools which have been somewhat caught unprepared with how to keep class cultures going remotely. Maybe once a twice or even thrice a week where most of us stay home for the climate could be a new normal we can embrace.
This is already torture. Let’s please not celebrate it as the new normal!
If you think this is “torture”, then what word would you choose to describe the climate change scenarios that we face if we continue on the path we’re on?
Do you think the sea level rise will happen somewhere else?
What do you think happens to your life and mine when tens of millions of Americans are dying from wild fires, drought, and flooding? I don’t think you have children — I do. I am a grandfather. Even if you and I are dead and buried by the time these scenarios unfold, I am not willing for these nightmares to be my legacy to my progeny.
We have been living in climate change denial for two decades now. We certainly better find some sort of “new normal”, because THAT normal is a death sentence for hundreds of millions of people world-wide and at least tens of millions of Americans.
I was specifically referring to being confined to my 320 square foot studio with half a kitchen that I already referred to as my cell before this week. There’s lots we can and should be doing regarding climate change that doesn’t keep us from being the social animals we naturally are. Off the top of my head more renewable energy sources, more public transit (which is now ironically being discouraged to create social distancing), greater mandated fuel efficiency standards. You’re right that I don’t have children (or a wife). Most of the time that’s fine with me, but right now that means nobody to interact with while I’m stuck at home. I thrive on a full schedule of places to go, people to see, things to do, but now all of a sudden nothing. Even under normal circumstances if I get to suppertime without having left my apartment during the day I make a point to go out to eat just for the change of scenery, but now I can’t do that. I can’t substitute teach because the schools are closed and can ill-afford to sacrifice that paycheck (which I guess makes it just as well I can’t go out to eat). The most “exciting” thing I did today was give my mother a ride home from work. Overall I get the distinct impression I am taking these new restrictions harder than most.
I sympathize with you. I miss my students a lot and feel like I loose a little bit of my identity as an educator each day I am prevented from being in my classroom. In the long run, there is a lot we can do remotely, but I still feel that the in classroom experience cannot be beat for socialization. If you want to arrange a skype or facetime chat, by all means email me. Happy to provide company.
So far as I know, there have been no suggestions that you stay confined to your home unless you are self-quarantining or self-isolating.
I did not intend to suggest that you or anybody be confined to home as part of a “new normal”. I apologize if I was unclear.
I’ve been working from home on and off since 1992, and have done so full time since 2013. I’ve made it a habit to make myself walk around outside for an hour or so each day. I have several regular routes. Since I live near the Ball Square GLX construction site in Somerville, I frequently walk a mile or so along each side just to “supervise”. The workers and several of the MBTA/Amtrak engineers recognize me (I tend to wear distinctive hats).
I join you in missing the social aspects of going out to eat and out to bars. That will return as we get past this pandemic in a few months.
Well, I am getting out to walk more than before, something Lord knows I should have been doing anyway. I’m not self-quarantined and there is at least yet not a total lockdown in place in MA, but with so many places closing and all my various meetings and activities being cancelled (including both my current and potential jobs) I’m left with almost no place to go. Even the activities that I’m not interested in such as sporting events bug me for being cancelled because to me that represents something that should IMO never have to happen here, and I still have constitutional questions regarding such cancellations being mandated by government.
I hope this does not come off as overly picky, but in the world of climate-change policy, “adaptation” has to do with things like hardening shorelines, moving wastewater plants, improving stormwater systems, and abandoning oceanfront homes. Some of that is also called “resiliency.”
“Adapting” in that sense to the coronavirus would be a combination of letting it kill as many people as it has to, slowing it to improve the survival rate, etc. Pretty grim stuff.
I think you are talking about adapting to social distancing, teleworking, and self-quarantine. Hey, we really don’t need to drive those cars so much!
Fair enough. But (1) it is early days and (2) the massive preparedness deficit that free-market fundamentalism has bequeathed us has yet to be felt.
To Christopher’s broader point above and to the other responses, I think I am talking about a cultural shift. I do not want a shelter in place kind of environment to become the new normal, least of all for all the workers and small businesses in the service, restaurant, and entertainment industry. Traveling abroad the five times I’ve done it has been one of the privileges of my life, and one I am saving up to repeat for trips to other destinations. I definitely do not want to ground planes or go back to the 19th century and a time before cars.
I do think there is a lot of unnecessary commuting, corporate travel by plane, and a troubling blurring between the lines of work and home. Childcare costs are becoming a crippling burden for the two income household, just as much as housing and student debt. So I think a more expansive welfare state on the one hand and a commensurate reduction in workism on the other could do our own personal health a lot of good and the health of our climate.
By all means, I want Christopher to substitute teach (and we could use you in Revere!) and go out socially. What I would like is if more companies were like the biotech company my brother works for, which made Friday a work from home day for everybody and gave individuals additional flex days they could use to work remotely. My brief foray into corporate consulting involved a lot of trips from Chicago to the Twin Cities that were largely a waste of time and money. Easily could have sat in on those meetings via teleconferencing. Some kind of structure like that becoming the new normal would reduce the cars on the road and planes in the air substantially while increasing family time. That’s my hunch anyway. Meatless Mondays and Stay at Home Thursdays and Fridays would be a great plan for the planet.
I am confident that a lower-impact sustainable approach to climate change will increase, rather than decrease, casual socialization and interpersonal exchanges.
Tens of millions of American workers will discover that they can telecommute from local storefronts just as easily as from home. We already see a little bit of this as remote workers take over every Starbucks. I certainly hope that new public spaces will emerge to support this kind of place. “WeWork” was one example that, although rather badly mismanaged, was still on the right track.
American men and women will rediscover the joys of walking rather than driving places. If we but look around while walking — take off the earbuds, put the cellphone back in the pocket, and pay attention to what’s around us — we discover an astonishing richness and variety all around us. People do still sit on porches and weed their gardens. Most smile and wave back when greeted. I’ve befriended dozens of neighborhood cats by simply stopping, kneeling down, and waiting for His or Her Majesty to approach me.
The social distancing, quarantining, and isolation is short term pain caused by the pandemic. It is not a part of addressing climate change and I hope NEVER becomes “normal”.
Exactly where in the line of royal succession do those cats fall?:)
Heh. THAT information is known only to felines.
Yes, this is adapting (one, hopes, temporarily) to pandemic mitigation efforts, not to the virus itself. Adapting to the virus itself would, as you say, mean allowing many to die while the species creates a ‘herd immunity’ by virtue of most people surviving.
We don’t necessarily have to go that path.
I heard a fantastic thing: scientists had successfully sequenced the Coronavirus genome by mid January and in February had published, without any access restrictions, to the world. There is, to my knowledge, at least one candidate vaccine already. This is an amazing thing. The probability of eventually producing a vaccine is exactly 100%. The probability of eventually producing enough vaccine is, likewise, exactly 100%. It’s the space between now and ‘eventually’ that has got us all on edge.
My wife and I were discussing herd immunity this morning. I think there’s a middle ground between attempting to completely stop the virus and letting nature take its course.
We’ve been hearing for the past few days increasingly urgent warnings from experts and professionals about the shortage of trained staff and about the long-term impact of all the closings and shutdowns. I think this misses an important point.
Our best efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19 have already failed. We now aim to slow that spread, in hopes that the resulting pandemic will not overwhelm our limited therapeutic resources. That means that we should be looking at what happens to people AFTER the infection.
Most people who are infected with COVID-19 will survive it, many without developing symptoms. Each person who is infected will carry antibodies to the particular strain of COVID-19 that they survived. We don’t know how long the resulting immunity lasts, but is very likely to be months or years based on similar bugs. It is also possible to develop a test that flags the presence of those antibodies in an individual. In addition to being a useful surveillance tool, such a test opens several doors that I’ve heard NOBODY talk about yet:
1. Health professionals who have survived the COVID-19 infection can freely treat victims without fear of infection themselves. This may be one way to provide staffing in the 8-12 week timeframe.
2. Authorities could issue a bar-coded tag to each person who has tested positive for the antibodies. Those people can freely gather in public and interact with the public, including in restaurants and bars. They will no longer be contagious themselves, and they are immune to new infections.
3. The widespread availability of antibody testing therefore provides a mechanism to identify those people who need not fear COVID-19 at all. Over time, this group will grow into the herd immunity you mention.
Recently published reports say that such antibody tests are already being made available in the Netherlands.
It is time that we — and especially our media and political officials — start focusing rather more on solutions and rather less on hysteria and fear.
“the sense of communal solidarity” is real. I learned a lot about that by reading Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, a book about how disaster often bring some happiness by reminding us what is really important. Here’s an excerpt.