Better than fixing Covid-19, swing for the fences. Use Covid-19 to fix climate change instead. This disaster is showing us that the goal of cutting emissions a

Better than fixing Covid-19, swing for the fences. Use Covid-19 to fix climate change instead. This disaster is showing us that the goal of cutting emissions and saving our planet, while still sitting down and having a beer and watching Netflix at night is real - it can be done. Of course it's tempting, compelling to try and fix Covid-19. It's a real shit show, and it's here and now and it's cutting people down around us. It's tearing the economic fabric of our world apart. How could we not want to throw everything into solutions? But the hard fact is that even if we were to lose one or two percent of the older slice of the global population to Covid-19, on the other battlefront climate change will keep coming for our youngest generation, and it will be immeasurably harder to stop. Our experience of Covid-19 presents an incredible opportunity - the biggest there's ever been - to launch a full frontal attack on climate change - to really move the needle. We know our current ways of living are unsustainable. But up until now, no-one has known what the alternative was. Now, in Italy, and soon in the US, we're living that alternative as a society. And under that alternative, we are cutting emissions - enormously. It's claimed [1] that "the pandemic ultimately could trigger the most significant reduction of greenhouse gas emissions of the past century". And life is going on. There have been economic lockdowns before, but this is the first one that's happened while there are virtual alternatives and even improvements for the things that we've lost in the physical world. We now have the internet. For the first time, giant corporates can continue to function with their employees locked down in a physical quarantine. Not just FAANGs but all sorts of businesses and organizations. Could we make any of this way of living stick? After Covid-19 has swept overhead past us on its first go-round, can we somehow break our patterns and not jump back into our cars, or onto our cruise lines, or into planes to hotel rooms on the other coast? Can many of us keep living these low energy, virtual lives - even after the virus? That's the long game. Instead of joining everyone in trying to flatten the curve of Covid-19, look for innovations that could somehow lock in these healthy new ways of living that the virus is showing us - flatten our emissions curve. [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/03/13/italy-emissions-coronavirus/?arc404=true https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/03/1...