By Minttu Monika Marjomaa
Global carbon dioxide emissions are down. Habitants of the world’s biggest cities are seeing the air clear up right before their eyes. Flights are cancelled and coal-powered factories closed. Wildlife is returning to urban areas.
So why isn’t the environmental movement rejoicing? The obvious answer is that this has come at a cost of a horrifying number of deaths, lost livelihoods, fear and panic.
But also because governments are bailing out big companies and talking about returning to normal - but “normal” is what caused massive inequality and degradation of the living world in the first place.
“For me, it’s difficult to see my taxes going to bail out the airlines - an industry that causes so much damage to our environment and which we really should be transitioning away from,” says Anna Hughes, 52, who is a Green Party campaigner and founder of Flight Free UK.
Just, green, sustainable
Hughes, along with other environmentalists, advocates for a Green Recovery after the Covid-
19 crisis, which means boosting the economy by investing in decarbonising projects, such as investment into renewable energy grids, retrofitting houses so they’ll use less energy and supporting local food infrastructure.
This idea emerged 12 years ago, during the global financial crisis. A group of economists and environmentalists in the UK came up with a framework for a group of policies called The Green New Deal, which would transition the economy out of fossil fuels.
Lizzie Allen is a BBC producer who became a volunteer Greenpeace speaker after she realised how our consumerist lifestyles affected the natural world.
“Weirdly, although there’s this tragedy going on, it’s also a massive opportunity,” says Allen, 46. “We don’t need an economic recovery - we need a full system change. We believe that the burden should fall upon the rich, instead of the poor, which it did in 2008.”
Greenpeace organisers are pushing their respective governments to adopt the policies originated by the Green New Deal group- or at least make sure the bailout money the polluting corporations are getting will come with the condition that they will green up their act.
This might sound far-fetched, but Allen thinks the public opinion has gone through big changes during the crisis:
“We live in a moment when the average Joe has seen all the new legislation put in place to fight coronavirus - based on scientific advice - and started to think: ‘Huh, why don’t we do the same against climate change?’ It’s a huge shift in consciousness.”
If politicians aren’t willing to act out of their love of the natural world, Allen thinks that they might do so out of purely practical and economic reasons.
Renewable energy projects, such as solar and wind create more jobs per investment than oil and gas. Re-insulating homes and building new green transport and food infrastructure would also require a new workforce, which could raise thousands of people out of unemployment.
The end of growth?
On 8 May, major business leaders, including high-level executives from Ben & Jerry’s and Iceland signed an open letter to the PM urging the government to embrace green investments and rule out no strings attached bailouts for polluting companies. As the idea of a green transition has become mainstream, it has faced criticism from left-leaning environmentalists.
Labour MP Clive Lewis for Norwich South dislikes the term “green recovery” because it implies going back to business as usual afterwards.
“Our current system, where we rely on constant economic growth, is killing the planet - it’s not just about carbon emissions, it’s also about other natural boundaries, like biodiversity,” says Lewis, speaking to a webinar hosted by Positive Money.
“When we as politicians talk about green growth, it’s a copout - it’s because we’re not brave enough to talk about the structural changes that actually need to happen. This crisis can be an opportunity for a more radical shift, a post-growth economy.”
If a complete, publicly funded decarbonisation of the economy sounds radical, what about a steady-state economy when increasing the GDP has become the main political goal for decades?
But times are changing. On 10 May, a YouGov poll was released saying that the majority of Britons want the government to value citizens’ wellbeing above economic growth. Maybe everything will return to the status quo post-Covid, but now seems to be as good a time as any for new, revolutionary ideas to take hold.
Video - The Green New Deal: Explained
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