Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Coronavirus has prompted millions of people to get back on their bicycles. We need to get out and exercise, have fun with our families, avoid the risks of mass transit. It’s the biggest boom in bicycles since the 1970s. Sales are skyrocketing, cities are painting bicycle lanes, car traffic is down. Will it last? (First in a series)
Back in March, I wrote that the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic would likely
shape its economic, political, and geopolitical fortunes for years or decades to come. Four
months later, it’s time for a check-in. How’s that pandemic response going? … Keep an eye on that snow-covered mountainside.
As long as we think of COVID-19 as simply an implacable foe that must be vanquished, it is unlikely that we will learn to live with it or to deal effectively with the next pandemic.
It has been an awful and amazing two weeks – a time of reckoning that is long overdue, a time of coming together that, despite the tragic circumstances, has been enlivening. What is so remarkable is that the Black Lives Matter protests have been nested within a larger, unprecedented trauma, the pandemic.
With global demand having fallen by about 29 million barrels per day from a year ago, it seems like this pandemic might delay peak oil production while the pandemic and consequent depression lasts, since so much less oil is being consumed.
The oil, gas, and petrochemical industries have taken a massive financial blow from the COVID-19 pandemic, but its financial troubles preexisted the emergence of the novel coronavirus and are likely to extend far into the future, past the end to measures aimed at curbing the spread of the disease.
If you are a chemist, you know very well how catalysts can work small miracles: you had been trying for some time to have a reaction occur, without success, then you add a little pinch of something and – suddenly – things go “bang.” In no time, the reaction is complete. Of course, as a chemist you know that catalysts don’t really work miracles: all they can do is to accelerate reaction that would occur anyway.
How quickly, in peacetime democracies, are people prepared radically to change their behaviour? The Covid-19 pandemic provides some clues. One of the most common measures introduced to control its spread has been the ‘stay at home’ order. Normally known as ‘lockdown’ … To an extraordinary degree, people have complied, and this is not the first time populations have accepted and adapted to suddenly introduced behaviour changes.
Besides lessons in ethics (and in Asher’s case, lessons in the English language), the Brady Bunch offers up a metaphor about the fault lines in American politics — fault lines that include the undermining of government, extreme individualism, race and class divides, and capitalist and corporate excesses.
Our findings show that the annual average CO2 concentrations will still increase through this year, even though emissions are reducing. Across the whole year, we estimate CO2 levels will rise by 2.48 parts per million (ppm). This increase is 0.32ppm smaller than if there had been no lockdown – equivalent to 11% of the expected rise.
The days ahead will be days of pushing, struggling, campaigning and fighting. The old order does not let go easily. But they must also be days of attention, care, beauty, imagination. These days may prove to have just been the calm before the storm. But oh, what a calm it was.
A few weeks ago, I posted a video about the silver linings to this crisis and quarantine. Now that countries are either opening up or announcing plans to do so, I wanted to make another video looking back on what we’ve learned from this.
