By Paul Homewood
A welcome return to the fray for Davis Rose, with this piece in the Spectator:
As we contemplate the havoc being wrought by the coronavirus, most of us see mainly sickness, death, and economic ruin.
Dr. Rupert Read, spokesman for the climate protest group Extinction Rebellion — plus sometimes Green party candidate and associate professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia — has rather a different view.
In this pandemic, he writes, ‘there is a huge opportunity for XR… It is essential that we do not let this crisis go to waste.’
Read’s thoughts are set out in a paper entitled ‘Some strategic scenario-scoping of the coronavirus-XR nexus.’ The paper is not meant to be widely read. ‘NB, this is a confidential document for internal XR use, NOT for publication!’ he writes at the head.
Small wonder. After all, says Read, even if the gloomiest projections of national and global mortality turn out to be accurate, ‘the direct risk to most of us from [coronavirus] is low, and the direct risk to humanity is low in the sense that even a very bad case scenario of a hundred million deaths, though horrible, would hardly break us.’
Read says that the virus ‘may overwhelm some healthcare systems’, including Britain’s NHS — in which case, ‘many of those who then need medical treatment, ill and old people especially, will not be able to get it, and some/many of them will die.’
But there is a bright side, he insists, because the virus will also test the ‘vulnerable, just-in-time systems’ of trade.
This, in turn, ‘might set off cascading breakdown effects, given how interconnected we have allowed our global system to become, how fragile and un-resilient many of our systems are, and how close to the edge some of them are already. Corona might lead indirectly to partial or complete collapses, especially in more vulnerable countries.’
That is a prospect Read seems to relish.
Full article here.
Much of the stuff about XR we already know, but it is his finishing comments which strike home:
Extreme as Read and his cohorts are, there is every sign that other influential figures are beginning to argue on similar lines — that the post-crisis world needs to be both different and less enjoyable, with things such as cheap foreign holidays, easy mobility and rising standards of living consigned to the past.
‘When the corona crisis is over, we’ll remember there’s something infinitely worse and more destructive hanging over us: the threat to our planet,’ the veteran BBC reporter — and inveterate earner of air miles — John Simpson tweeted last week.
According to the Oxford historian Peter Frankopan, the days of a ‘me-first world’ may be over, and if they are, ‘one beneficiary will be the climate: after all, the world’s lungs are already breathing more easily thanks to the collapse of industrial production’.
How a populace picking itself up after months of lockdown to survey a bleak vista of impoverishment and economic devastation may view such messages when the time comes remains to be seen.
It may depend on whether, with hindsight, the measures now being taken are seen as justified — or, as some are already arguing, as a catastrophic overreaction, which slightly prolonged the lives of a relatively small number of old and infirm people at an almost unimaginable cost.
Either way, Read’s thoughts are a guide to the coming battlelines.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
April 8, 2020 at 04:51AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 