'Lessons of COVID-19 Echo in the Climate Crisis' | David Wallace-Wells with Samira Ahmed

In partnership with Southbank Centre & Cambridge Literary Festival, we join bestselling author David Wallace-Wells in discussion with journalist Samira Ahmed on how Coronavirus will affect the climate crisis, and the lessons we can learn.

The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.

Over the past decades, the term "Anthropocene" has climbed into the popular imagination - a name given to the geologic era we live in now, one defined by human intervention in the life of the planet. But however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. In the meantime, it will remake us, transforming every aspect of the way we live-the planet no longer nurturing a dream of abundance, but a living nightmare.

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[dianewallace]

I'm so glad for David Wallace-Wells as a leader on climate change.

[jssandler]

I grew up in Northern California. I never "smelled" a forest fire until about 3 - 4 years ago. Now, every other year there is an entire month of hazardous air. It will probably become every year soon. I have purchased two air purifiers. I am also very much thinking that I should move out of the state to a wetter climate.

[markschuette]

yes we can still have luzuries like air travel, private cars, toys but they will need to be very expensive. but keep in mind- just like an elec. car or a PV panel for your roof- it takes at least 7 years of use to re-coop the carbon footprint just to make those items!! and all this energy we expend to deal with these climate disasters is just one more positive feedback loop to creating more energy use and thus more warming!!!

[vascoapolonio]

Earth is enjoying a deep breath...
It won't last, but it will give nature a Oxigen Ballon for some decades.
But Humans won't change.
We look at the abyiss and the abyiss is looking back at you. And you will keep going until you fall.

[dianewallace]

Encouraging developments: I heard about Southpole.com from a webinar by Dr. Court Whelan about travel offsets on WWF Nat Hab Adventures. If I take a trip with them, they will offset the trip and my life footprint for a year. You can also buy individual offsets from southpole.com which are third party audited. Also, a small electric plane started flying in Dec 2019 and carbon removal machines may someday exist to offset our home emissions per the webinar. Also, the UK is researching the JetZero commercial plane (probably hydrogen fuel) by 2050 and France is researching a hybrid Airbus.

[markschuette]

i don't think we will ever be more prosperous than currently- but that doesn't matter we have to save all the ecosystems and the climate- no matter what the sacrifice we have to make pollution expensive ! Carbon Tax ASAP ! along with a Wealth Tax since all wealth can from the environment which belongs to the people and other species..

[charliebrandt]

From UK: There are other culprits. Healthy soil is the best absorber of CO2 on the planet today. Since industrialisation we have destroyed half the soil on the planet. Poverty, ignorance, greed and since World war II the new Agribusiness Chemical Farming which has added poison to the mix, which now infects our soil, rivers and coastal waters too. Regenerative farming which restores the soil and provides good chemical free food is developing in projects around the world, on a small scale. If we could scale up (but from a grass roots basis from communities) and create education facilities for new (and ancient) developments in non chemical organic techniques we could begin to drawdown CO2 into food! and employ millions too, a part deindustrialisation sort of...

[anuradhainamdar]

A rapid speaker David Wallace Wells has taken the problem of Climate change with great candour.But though he is a " Liberal Democrat ", he isn't for " Neoliberalism ", he mentions Indian author Dr. Amitav Ghosh " The great derangement ", and Dr.. Amitav Ghosh in a interview he gave on his analysis of " Jungle Nama", his versified poem on the largest delta of the world " Sundarbans ", talks about the dangerous nature of Neoliberalism that us been seen in India.

[sarahblack]

Just made my very first YouTube video on this very topic-a poem/rap. I'm a teacher from N. Ireland.