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To tackle the climate crisis, the world cannot return to normal after Covid-19.

New Statesman 16th April 2020,  To tackle the climate crisis, the world cannot return to normal after
Covid-19. This moment must be used to build a new economic consensus founded on justice, care and sustainability. The same fractures exposed by this pandemic are the fault lines along which the battle for climate justice is fought.

Many of the people most vulnerable in the current crisis  will be worst affected by environmental breakdown, while those who are enriched by this pandemic are likely to benefit in the future. Reports this  week that UK hedge funds are cashing in on Covid-19 ring eerily similar to now regular stories of investors betting on climate collapse, water
scarcity and crop failure, and investing in the infrastructures and technologies of disaster.

And just as many nations and communities have been abandoned in our response to this pandemic, it is all too easy to imagine a future in which communities from Jakarta to east Yorkshire are left to fend for themselves amid accelerating climate breakdown. Indeed, to imagine it one has only to look at the present.

Post-crisis stimulus should be directed towards green infrastructure and innately low carbon forms of work like health and social care, proven so vital and so undervalued by this crisis. Debts must be written off to allow those countries most vulnerable to climate crisis to build resilience against it. And having exposed austerity as an ideological choice, rather than a necessity, we must ensure these mistakes are never repeated, and social safety nets are both valued and strengthened.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/environment/2020/04/coronavirus-environment-climate-crisis-emergency-economic-change

Rapid Transition Alliance 16th April 2020, Andrew Simms: In the debate over the global response to Covid19 a battle of hashtags has broken out between those urging a quick return to ‘normal’, and those saying that ‘normal’ had many problems and the crisis has revealed both the need and an opportunity for changing direction, and a shift of economic purpose.

April 20, 2020 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change, World