COVID-19 and Climate Change: Three Critical Lessons
INDY VOICES: Brenda Freije
Blog Post
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May 18, 2020
Unfortunately, tragedies often make good teachers, alerting us to our failures and forcing us to change. COVID-19 is one of those teachers. We have so much to learn from the pandemic. The challenge is to not squander this painful learning opportunity and to appreciate that the lessons of COVID-19 extend far beyond this particular virus. COVID-19 can teach us a lot about our response to another health threat – one that may seem less dramatic now but eventually may have even more severe consequences: climate change.
Lesson #1: It is Time to Start Trusting Science (Again)
It has become too easy for elected officials, special interest groups, and, frankly, all of us to disregard science. According to published reports, health experts began sounding alarm bells about the seriousness of the novel coronavirus in the U.S. weeks before the President and states took action to enforce social distancing. At first, when asked, the President said nothing or tried to change the subject. Then, when the reality of what was happening around the world was too much to downplay, he told us not to worry despite scientists saying we should. Other elected officials failed to correct his message. Senators were briefed in January about the dangers of an outbreak in plenty of time for a handful of them to sell off stocks before their shares plummeted in value a month later as the stock market crashed in the face of a global pandemic. Shouldn’t their haste have included pressure to prepare the general public for the impending health risks? If elected officials had been more forthright with the American public, maybe hundreds of people wouldn’t have crowded into a gymnasium in Indianapolis on March 6 to watch two boys’ high school sectional basketball games. The packed house created a fertile environment for the spread of the virus, and five people who attended died from Coronavirus complications. Several others (possibly dozens) there that night, including several friends and acquaintances, became sick. My husband and 86-year-old father-in-law would have attended those games had my husband not had a work conflict. Thank God for work conflicts.
We have to ask, however, if the warning bells had sounded earlier and more clearly, would the general public have listened? If the behavior of spring breakers in mid-March is any indication, probably not. Despite health experts’ directives to maintain social distance, people of all ages (not just college students) headed to beaches and filled up bars as if in defiance. The science just wasn’t compelling enough to change their plans or behavior. Or, maybe it’s because the voices of scientists have become lost in our mass “news” media. With 24-hour shows sending sensationalized messages often scripted to play on fears and play up particular viewpoints, we can become like the townsfolk in the folktale who heard the little boy cry wolf too many times. We stop listening, unable to discern when we are being told an unbiased assessment of risks.
What makes our current state of affairs so discouraging is that we seem so willing to believe talking heads and politicians who “translate” science to serve their agendas instead of expert scientists who dedicate their lives to their studies and subject their research to high standards of review and critique. Most ethical scientists do not have agendas other than to reveal the truths that science provides, and scientific experts are now almost unanimous about the risks of climate change. According to historians, our questioning of science in North America began with tobacco companies who disputed scientific consensus about the dangers of smoking to avoid liability for their products. The tactics they employed are now commonplace, and we see it playing out with climate change. Why are the tactics so effective? Maybe it’s because scientists’ warnings can sound overwhelming, even exaggerated. Or, perhaps it’s deeper. Maybe, it’s because responding to scientists’ warnings would require us to change how we live, and we don’t like to change.
Lesson #2: Climate Change Has to Overcome a Formidable Enemy – Our Resistance to Change
Most of us prefer not to change. In reality, most of us won’t change until the pain of the status quo is greater than the pain of the change. We saw this play out in people’s resistance and frustration with social distancing. We were only willing to stay home and stay apart after it became clear that those measures were critical to stemming the progression of COVID-19. In other words, the pain of the status quo (not social distancing) became greater than the pain of change (social distancing). For some, it took the threat of legal action to raise the pain of the status quo high enough. All of this may help explain why elected officials tend to preserve the status quo. They are more likely to be popular (and keep their jobs) if they don’t try to change things too much.
Our reluctance to social distance is not unique. We have many examples of how we do things that are not good for us and fail to do things that are good for us because we don’t like change. Think about the number of people who know they should eat healthier or exercise more yet have difficulty building these practices into their lives. Often, it takes a poor health diagnosis to provide motivation. Now shift the goal to changing behavior and ways of living and working that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We may know that we have to make changes for a sustainable future, but until the pain of climate change (the status quo in terms of our behavior) exceeds the pain of making changes, we are likely to choose the status quo. Unfortunately, for parts of the country the pain of the status quo from sea level rise, rampant fires, extreme storms, and other climate change impacts is becoming more costly. (Please do not believe the special interests and supposed “experts” who will try to convince you there’s no connection between these weather extremes and climate change. According to NASA, 97% of the world’s actively publishing climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming and extreme climate phenomena are a consequence.) This is why thoughtful regulation that provides nudges, incentives, or penalties is essential. It can increase the pain of the status quo (or, in the case of nudges, make the status quo less easy to maintain) so that changing now before too many people lose their homes or lives makes sense.
Lesson #3: Address Climate Change as a Health and Equity Issue
For too long, naysayers have characterized climate change as an environmental issue separate from health, making it easier to discount or put off addressing. As COVID-19 has demonstrated, dramatic health issues get our attention and our response. We have to help people understand that changing our climate has serious and well-documented health consequences. Those consequences include increased incidences of disease-causing viruses like COVD-19. Unfortunately, too many people, particularly in privileged areas of the world, live with a false sense of disconnection from the natural world and do not understand how small changes in the climate can profoundly affect our ability to live healthy lives. It’s not until we have raging wildfires or deadly storms that we remember how dependent on nature we are. As John Fullerton writes in his white paper on Regenerative Economics, “Modern science and holistic thinking teach us that we are an integral part of the interconnected web of life, and there is no real separation between us and it.” We need to start accepting our part in that web and acknowledge that our actions are stretching it beyond its capacity to hold us. Extreme weather events are a symptom of that over-stretching.
Climate change as a public health issue has two important corollaries. First, we have to better fund our public health system. As we continue to change our climate, we can expect more frequent storms, droughts, heatwaves, and diseases. Some say we are at (or beyond) a tipping point and that with continued warming, we can expect exponential growth in these health risks. Unfortunately, we have a hard time with the concept of exponential growth and an even harder time in the U.S. time committing resources to health risk preparedness. Our ability to test for COVID-19 was a sobering example as Dr. Aaron Bernstein, Interim Director of The Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, noted in an interview in mid-March:
Our elected officials and federal government should prioritize and invest more in public health. South Korea has tested 12,000 to 15,000 people in a day. The U.S. should be able to do the same, but we are currently unable to because of our slow response and decisions to not invest in testing capacities.
Investing in our public health capacity has to go well beyond our ability to test for viruses and prepare for pandemics. Once we get this virus under control, we have to fund climate-change-related public health and preparedness. Not doing so means we’ve failed to learn from COVID-19 and will suffer consequences we could have anticipated and avoided.
Second, climate change, like COVID-19, will continue to expose racial and socioeconomic inequities. Data has revealed that COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted African Americans. As of April 6, 70% of the dead in Louisiana were black while making up only 33% of the population. Other states have reported similar percentage disparities. In Indiana, black people are 2.4% more likely to test positive for Coronavirus than white people. These disparate outcomes are tied to a complex host of factors but, like climate change, many of those factors speak to inequitable economic opportunity and access. For example, researchers and health experts anticipate that heatwaves will be one of the deadliest results of climate change, and historically underserved black neighborhoods in urban areas have the highest risk. In a study of 108 U.S. cities, researchers found a direct connection between historically underserved urban areas previously subject to redlining practices and factors that contribute to the urban heat island effects of climate change. Basically, historically black neighborhoods in Indianapolis and other cities in Indiana and the country have fewer trees, more impervious surfaces, more roadways, and more large building complexes than wealthier and majority white-identifying neighborhoods. This means when temperatures soar, black communities will suffer more. It also means that addressing climate change as a health issue is not enough. We have to consider it a health equity issue and dedicate more resources to communities that have been disadvantaged.
These are three of the difficult lessons COVID-19 can teach us about climate change. There are more. Fortunately, as long as we have the capacity to learn, we have the capacity to change. It is not too late. We are headed currently toward a future nobody wants. If we learn our lessons, we can choose a different course and head instead toward a better future for everyone now and for generations to come.
Brenda Frejie is a scholar in the New America - IUPUI Public Problem-Solving Partnership focused on sustainable development and on how values intersect with economics and policymaking to shape well-being. Before joining the American Studies PhD program, Brenda spent for 25 years as a lawyer, nonprofit executive, pastor, and community builder.