Why Covid saved the planet
With over 1 million dead and many more infected it seems preposterous to suggest that Covid could be something good. But please bear with me. I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories and I don’t believe in higher powers directing our future. I simply try to look at the chain of events now unfolding before our very eyes — how they are linked and how they will ultimately lead to a positive outcome.
Seeing the bigger picture — The start of WW1
The start of the World War 1 has been a fascinating subject for historians. The interconnections in the world’s first global economy and the ripple effects of military alliances were not understood by the politicians and decision-makers of the times.
Only in retrospect, historians have been able to understand how the shot in Sarajevo set off a chain of events that sent the world into war in a matter of weeks. Europe is said to have “sleepwalked into war”.
I’d like to take the role of a future historian looking back at our times, trying to see the links between the passing of events and understand how they will shape the outcomes in our history to be.
The Climate Crisis — Humanity’s do or die moment
Let’s first agree that the climate crisis is the premier challenge of our times. Of course, there are also possible future pandemics, resistance to antibiotics, nuclear proliferation and many more challenges. But if our planet keeps warming at the pace which it is right now, we won’t even have a planet populated by humans to fight those challenges.
A couple of degrees warming of the average day in your neighbourhood doesn’t seem like a big deal. But it is. Here’s why:
We are pushing the planet’s system to some severe tipping points where more heat will create more warning and when more heat is released even more warming and so on. The most prominent of these effects are the melting of the polar ice sheets, which no longer will deflect the incoming sun rays and the thawing of the permafrost which will release methane, a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Here is a good article that describes all this in more detail:
Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against
Donald Trump — the most dangerous man on the planet
If you’re with me so far (with the climate crisis being our biggest challenge — check?). Then it should be easy to accept that the person who back-pedalled on the Paris climate agreement as one of the first things he did in his presidency, is the most dangerous man alive.
With Donald Trump at the wheel humanity is set to sleepwalk into extinction.
He is sitting at the top of the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, and his government does not even except the scientific consensus on this matter. Mike Pence said in the vice presidential debate with Kamala Harris, that the origin and cause of warming was still a matter for dispute — it is not. With Donald Trump at the wheel humanity is set to sleepwalk into extinction.
How Donald hacked himself into the White house
A key point for any future historic recount is also the way that Donald Trump got elected. In 2016 a company called Cambridge Analytica, had figured out a way to essentially “hack” Facebook, by using collected user data in ways that were not intended. This allowed the Trump campaign to target only voters that were “sitting on the fence”, spending absolutely nothing on those already convinced or on those who were out of reach for persuasion. If you want to learn more about the details of this, I recommend the Netflix documentary — The great hack.
Add to this the Russian intervention in the election which has been all but officially admitted.
- “The Russians said to us: ‘You guys left yourselves open.’ They were admitting it essentially. They said it’s on you that this got so out of hand.”
(from The Guardian)
Four more years with Donald — Shall we?
US selections are often won and lost around the economy.
-“It’s the economy stupid!!”, was the catchphrase that won Bill Clinton the 1992 election. And the economy under Donald Trump’s reign has been doing well. It was going to win him four more years in the White house. Please keep in mind, this is not an election between Trump and Biden, it’s a referendum on Trump staying or leaving.
As long as it’s “good for the economy”, nothing else matters.
Never mind that he’s been boosting the economy by taking the future of his country to the pawn shop. Too many voters have financial issues right here and right now, and can’t worry about the future.
In the second presidential debate he was asked about the negative environmental impact on socio-economically weak groups that live close to industries where environmental regulations have been eased. He said they should be grateful because they’ve been able to make so much money from working at those industries. As long as it’s “good for the economy”, nothing else matters.
This is the key defining trait of the Trump presidency:
— “It’s the re-election stupid”.
Everything is a mean to the end of getting Donald four more years.
A growing itch
Trump’s core voters believe more in him than in other media, as demonstrated by many surveys (like this one by The Independent). But just like when Trump won the last election, the firm believers aren’t the important ones in the re-election. It’s the undecided voters, and they have a growing itch.
In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, Sean Mac, the owner of a pretzel company in Atlanta Georgia, said that he voted for Trump but then he added -”I wouldn’t say to my kid — I want you to be like him”.
So, people are still for Donald for the sake of the economy. In polls, a majority of voters think he will do a better job with the economy, and still it looks like he is about to lose. This is unheard of! There must be something weighing very heavily in the other end of the scales, and now we finally come to the main character of this story — The Corona virus.
Enter Covid19
It’s well known that Donald Trump treats truth and facts lightly. The Washington Post tracked 22 247 false or misleading claims in his presidency, until they just gave up and stopped in August this year. But just like Sean Mac, many have been willing to diminish the importance of this, look the other way, turn a blind eye, because they believed he still would deliver the politics they wanted.
Then Covid arrived and just super-charged the whole thing. Trump and his administration tried to downplay the pandemic, pursuing the “It’s the re- election, stupid!” strategy. But as the downplaying continued, the gap between Trump’s world and what was happening in the real lives of real Americans became wider for each day we came closer to the election.
–“A vaccine is weeks away”, we heard months ago.
–“We’ve rounded the corner”, as daily new infections reached new highs.
or when Donald Trump Jr claimed that — “deaths… are almost nothing”, on a day when over a 1000 people died.
Faced with these alternative realities, more and more people grew uncomfortable with accepting Donald’s pussy-grabbing, corona-downplaying, lock-them-up rhetorics.
In psychological language this is called “cognitive dissonance”. Cognitive dissonance arise when your actions are not in line with your values and beliefs. — “I know I shouldn’t be doing this but I really have no choice right now”. Covid pumped up the volume on that dissonance until it became intolerable.
I believe that history will show that the Covid downplaying strategy was the decisive force in pushing American voters over to the Joe Biden side of the fence.
It’s amusing that Donald Trump has been comparing himself to “Honest Abe” Lincoln who said:
— “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”.
In reality Donald Trump has been fooling some of the people (roughly 50%) some of the time (4 years), but the Covid crisis ended it.
So if you’re with my arguments so far, the only logical conclusion is that Covid will push Donald Trump out of office, and put Joe Biden in his place. Joe Biden will launch the New Green Deal which might be humanity’s last chance to curb the worrying development of the planets’ warming. As horrendous as this might sound — millions of Covid deaths is the small price we all have to pay to save the lives of billions.
Millions of Covid deaths is the small price we all have to pay to save the lives of billions.
Here it is then — the future historians recount of our times as it will be told in our kids’ history books (if they still have books):
From hack and back
In the beginning of Facebook’s history, the platform was easily exploited and often used for manipulation with political purposes. This was used to “hack” the 2016 US presidential election and Donald Trump was elected. Donald Trump jumpstarted his presidency by pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, a decision which in hindsight could have been disastrous for the planet.
In 2020 Donald Trump could very well have been re-elected for a second term, based on the very strong US economy at the time. But in the beginning of 2020 the world was struck by the first global large-scale pandemic in almost 100 years — the Covid19 virus, where over 20 million people died. The mismanagement of the pandemic in the US is widely believed to have costed Donald Trump a second term. The democrat Joe Biden was instead elected and he jumpstarted his presidency with getting back into the Paris agreement, launching a “New Green Deal” committing the US to be carbon neutral by 2050. With the US now as a driving force behind the transition from fossil fuels, most countries in the world were able to re-unite around the actions needed, which eventually led to reducing global warming to 1.5 degrees compared to pre-industrial levels.
“Fingers crossed…”
