Coronavirus and the Climate Crisis: A Discussion Among Editors
The climate movement can learn lessons from the coronavirus pandemic—especially regarding capitalist elite strategies and our own organizing strategies.
Photo by Marcel Strauß
The grounding question that guides The Trouble is, how should we, leftists, think about and act on the climate crisis? We're committed to increasing the political and economic power of the working class while mitigating the effects of the climate crisis, both the production and consumption of emitting activities.
This is the (edited) transcription of a conversation between some editors about the many angles on the coronavirus situation and what it means for climate politics, in an effort to continue many sub-discussions already happening online, frame them differently, and start new ones.
Lynn Wang (LW, she/hers): Every crisis is more than meets the eye. And I think whenever we get into situations where the stakes are really high, we learn things about the system, about the politics, and about our own interests that suddenly gain new relevance. What is it about the coronavirus pandemic that makes you connect to climate politics, even though they’re not really related?
Sam Zacher (SZ, he/him): The first thing that I think of when we started experiencing the coronavirus crisis is that a lot of the same political-economic forces that have prevented us from making serious progress on the climate crisis—like corporate power—are also the kind of forces that make it so that when a virus like this hits the world, and the United States, the damage it does to particular groups is horrendous. Of course, people with the lowest incomes, the least political power, black, brown and indigenous people, get hurt the most.
Amelia Diehl (AD, she/hers): What jumps out to me about both of these crises is how they have really messed with time. I definitely have been struggling with planning for the next few months. With this quarantine it’s been not knowing when I can move back to Chicago, what the landscape is going to look like; there’s this weird cloud over everything. But I already had that about decades of my life because of climate change. We're entering this really uncertain territory, and it’s creating this reckoning with how nebulous time is. And now we're talking about sacrificing our grandparents for the economy, when many other groups are being affected by the coronavirus. There are really sick parallels in this way that capitalism shrinks our sense of time. It's all about the short term. Now we have this direct, immediate crisis to reckon with, sort of like a micro scale of the climate crisis.
Emma Herman (EH, she/hers): This crisis really underscores the amount of resources that we can pull out from the government if people consider there is a serious enough crisis to justify doing so. I mean, we just pulled out $2 trillion from the federal budget. Where that money is going to go and who it’s going to help is still kind of an open question, and obviously that's something that we want to be paying a lot of attention to. And for me it opens up a whole world possibility of what climate activism could look like if we could garner that same kind of mass attention and mass focus. We can pay for the things that we prioritize.
LW: I think this point about artificial scarcity is really profound in this time of crisis because we're constantly told that there's not enough, whether there's not enough money or there aren't enough supplies, but there really is always enough. We see it not just in these massive bailouts that we're giving to the wealthiest people, but also the fact that all of these concessions are suddenly on the table. For instance, housing advocates have for such a long time, looked at rent freezes as this far-off, radical dream. Now all of a sudden, a total rent moratorium is on the table in some cities and we’re actively fighting for it in others. I do think that is the result of the work that people have put in for all these years. But it really was jarring to see all of a sudden, ‘Oh, yeah, rent moratorium, of course.’
According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly a third of people—myself included—have not paid April rent. I hope that this is a sign people are really waking up to the fact that the right thing to do in this crisis is also what will make our lives so much better, in general. All of our objections to actually doing these things and making them features of the system are just excuses.
SZ: I wanted to circle back on one point that Emma brought up, which is that in this time of crisis, we see Congress deciding to just spend a bunch of money right away. We basically realized that it's us versus this virus. In the climate movement, there have been attempts to analogize the climate crisis as like war, the crisis like the enemy that we're fighting, and presumably one of the reasons is because in wartime, society has to do collective action. It hasn't really been super successful. People haven't really bought the analogy of climate as like war. But we're seeing that happen right now with this virus. There may be a lesson there for the climate movement. I'm not sure it's this virus as the other but we're seeing this happen right now as us versus a virus and maybe we can use that.
I think this is a time when a lot of people are probably more open to political persuasion than in status quo times, so I think that's a particular kind of argument that needs to be pulled out more, that when there's this enemy, we can really defeat this enemy. And also all this shit isn't so finite. We can pull together these solutions when we need to.
EH: I wonder if one of the reasons that it hasn't really worked as a metaphor for climate change is because on some level with climate change, we are the enemy in a way that the virus isn't. I was reading earlier today that what has worked in terms of public messaging to get people to stay inside is not to say, ‘Oh, stay inside because you might get the virus,’ but instead, ‘Stay inside because you might transmit the virus to your mother, brother, sister, someone that you don't even know.’ Which is interesting, because that's a similar kind of argument to the one that is made for fighting climate change on the grounds that you might not personally suffer from it in your lifetime, but you certainly contribute to creating causes of suffering or conditions of suffering for your children or your grandchildren. And that hasn't really worked.
I also really hate thinking about things in these militaristic metaphors. One of the things that I'm hoping is that the virus will have shifted the horizons of people's political imaginations, such that we can begin to conceive of creating something with a massive level of international coordination, which will be required to fight climate change.
LW: I also hesitate to use militaristic language. I think there's some truth to it; oppressors and oppression can be defeated and overthrown, but struggle and war are not the same thing.
Depicting this situation as a warlike situation—that's already happening. We hear the ‘China virus’, the ‘Wuhan virus’, ‘this virus originated from China’, ergo China caused this. And as we're starting to see the western response collapse and begin to fail ordinary people, I think we're starting to see more and more rhetoric about how China lied, China tried to cover up the virus, China deliberately caused this spread. And I think all of these are meant to create an enemy, but this is ultimately a diversion tactic. I hesitate to say that we need to make war against the virus because there is a shape for that enemy in some people’s minds, and that shape is China or Chinese people. And this is not unrelated to climate, either. China is made a scapegoat for environmental problems for many of the same reasons as it’s being scapegoated now.
I think for that reason it’s really important for us to keep in mind the larger geopolitical stuff that's at play, and the fact that rhetoric can inflame people's inclination to cast blame in the worst way.
AD: I think actually more than ‘us versus the virus’, I think that what would be more useful is to think these viruses happen, and actually, what is really dangerous is this hoarding of wealth. Let's point the fingers at who it really is. When we think about climate, we had to wade through decades of “change your lightbulb” bullshit, when it was like actually this whole time we knew the names and addresses of fossil fuel CEOs who were making these decisions that affected the entire world.
The roots of both of these catastrophic problems go back to who owns the value of the labor. For coronavirus, look who’s on the front lines: grocery store workers. This is about fighting the billionaires and capitalism and the root causes of so-called natural disasters, which are actually human-caused.
SZ: This seems like an opportunity for the Left. We've been hammering on arguments about wealth inequality and the climate crisis in terms of wealth inequality, and this seems like yet another opportunity, especially when everyone's focus is on this problem.
LW: What does this crisis show us about the media response, communication generally, and expertise that we rely on?
EH: This also drives home the importance of local media, which is also under threat because of the economic crisis being worsened by the virus. It is something that we should all be investing in and supporting. It's only going to become more and more important to have outlets for the kinds of local stories that aren't going to make the national news as we move into an era of climate disruption in which, the sewage leakage near six blocks down from your house isn't going to matter to anyone who’s outside your immediate bubble, but is something that you should really probably know about.
LW: The right wing has started to refer to this pandemic as a ploy to tank the economy and hurt Trump's chances of reelection, which is fucking nuts. But who gives a shit? We live in a post-truth economy, I guess. This is also bringing to light that people have very antiquated ideas about how nature works, about how health works, about how immunity works. The Federalist released this piece about what chicken pox parties can teach us about coronavirus, which was really messed up. The reality is people are not actually 100% sure that recovering from coronavirus actually gives you immunity. Deliberately getting chickenpox as a child is still not as safe as just getting vaccinated anyway.
LW: We've had a lot of high level discussions about media and science and things like that. But, what's happening in our communities? What's the more like block by block sort of interpretation of all this?
AD: I feel like now is the time to be engaged with our immediate surroundings. I'll share a small story. I lived in this three unit apartment in Chicago and I hadn't met the downstairs ones at all, but I thought, we got to do this. I wanted to work eventually towards either like a rent strike or something around rent solidarity, knowing that my roommates could not afford rent. We just found out that actually, we had been paying this arbitrarily higher amount than our upstairs neighbors.
LW: One of the people that I organize with did a spontaneous sit-in at this construction site near where they live, because this is a luxury condo that's going up in Koreatown. This really should be considered non-essential construction, but these workers are still being made to come to work. And because these workers don't have paid leave, this person who had latent tuberculosis is unable to ventilate their house in a way that would make them safe because of the dust nearby. They had no choice.
At this point, we can't travel far distances. We can't gather in large crowds, we can't actually do a lot of the things that we understand to be “actions.” Organizing on a much smaller scale, I think, gives you a much stronger sense of what it actually means to be in community with people who you can't leave, because they're your neighbors. At the start of the crisis BuildSoil, a climate educator and organizer in Oregon, said he looked at a map and drew a quarter mile radius around his home. He made a commitment to organize and raise food to feed and care for everybody in this quarter mile radius. And I thought that was really interesting because that is a form of individual action that could have huge ripple effects. I think that we have this opportunity to reconnect with the most basic thing that makes organizing and movements work, which is unity through struggle and person-to-person interaction.
SZ: I think this kind of mutual aid organizing also helps us think about the approach that we take in conversations with individuals and in the micro units of organizing. In particular, I mean that a lot of these conversations, the way they naturally have to go is “what do you need?” Too often in Green New Deal, climate justice organizing, we come in with “Here's the answer. Will you join us?” Instead of first asking, “What do you think? What are your needs? What are your beliefs?” and connecting with someone in a way that also shows that you want to be the one to build solidarity with them, that you're not just trying to use them to commit to your cause.
I think this moment forces us to think of the ways that mutual aid work can enhance potential climate work—not necessarily right now, but as we hopefully transition out of this virus period. We do mutual aid organizing in our building, in our block, in our neighborhood. That's just that's gonna build more community bonds, and particularly, you can bond with someone over mutual aid needs which might cut across categories that could prevent you from connecting with them over an issue like climate or a Green New Deal that you maybe had tried to connect with them about before. Coming out of this virus period, there could be better grassroots bonds that we can use as we're doing future organizing.
LW: One thing that I really hope comes out of this is I really hope people start to reevaluate their opinions about China. I was in China when the crisis was first starting to pick up around Chinese New Year. That was when I really really started to feel the dissonance of Western coverage versus what is actually happening. Because, like we...at around the same time that stories were starting to come out of cops welding people into their homes, if they were sick, and leaving them to starve, or “look at the Chinese government, you know, covering up or downplaying the crisis,” and just kind of seeing on the ground that that really was not what was happening at all.
There was just such a difference in the individual mentality as well. Here in the US, I feel constantly on my toes—when I go out, if I clear my throat, someone's going to give me shit. I'm constantly worried about hate crime in a way that I was not before. My racial anxiety had already been pretty high at this point, but it just got even higher when I came back.
AD: My concluding thought is that we have the power to actually shift what happens during this. Of course, we don't want this to last forever, but I think it’s gonna be hard to differentiate the crisis from its aftermath because there's going to be so much fallout, funerals, grief, and reckoning, for a while. I think you're absolutely right that we're literally seeing a transformation of our physical world, but our emotional world as well. I've only been able to get through this because I can only really take it day by day or even hour by hour.
I think actually centering us in that moment is also just helpful politically, to ask, how can I act in this moment? And what is the world that I want to create through that?
Amelia Diehl is contributing editor for The Trouble. She’s based in Chicago but is quarantined in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she grew up. She organizes for fossil fuel divestment with direct action group Rising Tide Chicago and on global climate justice work with SustainUS. She tweets @amelia_diehl.
Emma Herman is a contributing editor for The Trouble. She’s based in New York but is quarantined in Washington, D.C. She'll be starting a history graduate program next year, aiming to study the intersection of environmental history and energy politics and infrastructure. She tweets @e_lherman.
Lynn Wang is a contributing editor for The Trouble. She spent a lot of time studying climate science, doing scientific diving, before becoming involved in the climate movement, primarily with the Sunrise Movement in Los Angeles. She tweets @lynnspiracy.
Sam Zacher is a co-founder and editor of The Trouble. He’s based in New Haven, CT. He worked on a fossil fuel divestment campaign in college and most recently organizes with the Sunrise Movement. He’s doing a PhD in political science, studying climate politics. He tweets @samzacher.