After the virus...
Local businesses have been praised in the crisis, butchers, bakers and corner shops providing vital supplies and delivery services to the vulnerable in their own communities.
How often have we heard complaints about giant supermarket chains - often out-of-town, accessible only by car - obliterating businesses like these by offering almost everything to almost everybody, self-service and at a very nice price?
We can't have it both ways.
Covid-19 won't happen every year - it is to be hoped - but how much worse could it have been if the major supermarket chains could not scale up and local businesses were just not there any more. Local shops can sometimes find a niche to protect themselves in competition with the giants, but it is a rare thing and many local butchers and bakers are just more boarded-up premises on the village high-street.
If we want this fixed, want to protect this local resilience, it will not happen without policy and eventually law. Free market forces will ensure that only the premises financially optimum for the shareholders on a six to twelve-month timescale will survive. The supermarket giants, stacking shelves high and selling it "cheap" though often at margins the local shops would not dare to hope for.
In 20, 40, maybe 50 years from now, the consequences of our unrestricted growth in use of fossil fuels is going to have poisoned the atmosphere to the extent that life in many inhabited parts of the world will become unsustainable.
Unlike Covid-19, with a doubling time from a few to five days, man-made climate change might have a doubling time of 35 years. Imperceptibly slow on the scale of a human life. Yet we already see wildfire seasons in Australia, Indonesia, Spain and California that have the locals saying "no-one alive has ever seen it this bad". Floods that year-after-year have exceeded records, temperatures and rainfall records the same.
If anything good comes of Covid-19, could it be that we finally recognise the scale of the threat and decide to take real action. Introduce strong controls or a levy system to drive reduction in carbon emissions. Measures strong enough to zeroise humanities carbon emissions by 2030, even 2025?
It's unlikely.
Problem is, even if we do, my children's children are very unlikely to be able to see the magic of a living coral reef...
How often have we heard complaints about giant supermarket chains - often out-of-town, accessible only by car - obliterating businesses like these by offering almost everything to almost everybody, self-service and at a very nice price?
We can't have it both ways.
Covid-19 won't happen every year - it is to be hoped - but how much worse could it have been if the major supermarket chains could not scale up and local businesses were just not there any more. Local shops can sometimes find a niche to protect themselves in competition with the giants, but it is a rare thing and many local butchers and bakers are just more boarded-up premises on the village high-street.
If we want this fixed, want to protect this local resilience, it will not happen without policy and eventually law. Free market forces will ensure that only the premises financially optimum for the shareholders on a six to twelve-month timescale will survive. The supermarket giants, stacking shelves high and selling it "cheap" though often at margins the local shops would not dare to hope for.
Pollution.
Figures recently issued that the reduction in pollution due to Covid-19 restrictions amounted to an equivalent of 70,000 lives saved over a year.
It is unclear yet, but not impossible that across the world, Covid-19 will take less lives than would have ended early due to the pollution we normally emit from vehicle exhausts, airplanes and other sources.
Recovery.
What will happen in recovery from the virus. Will we start our engines and rush back into 9-5 traffic queues, daily getting almost nowhere?
The bigger threat.
I'm over 50, over the hill. I have nearly grown-up children.In 20, 40, maybe 50 years from now, the consequences of our unrestricted growth in use of fossil fuels is going to have poisoned the atmosphere to the extent that life in many inhabited parts of the world will become unsustainable.
Unlike Covid-19, with a doubling time from a few to five days, man-made climate change might have a doubling time of 35 years. Imperceptibly slow on the scale of a human life. Yet we already see wildfire seasons in Australia, Indonesia, Spain and California that have the locals saying "no-one alive has ever seen it this bad". Floods that year-after-year have exceeded records, temperatures and rainfall records the same.
If anything good comes of Covid-19, could it be that we finally recognise the scale of the threat and decide to take real action. Introduce strong controls or a levy system to drive reduction in carbon emissions. Measures strong enough to zeroise humanities carbon emissions by 2030, even 2025?
It's unlikely.
Problem is, even if we do, my children's children are very unlikely to be able to see the magic of a living coral reef...
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