Alex SteffenVerified account

For many years, doctors and public health experts have been warning about our vulnerability to novel viruses, and the risks of pandemics catching us unprepared. We didn't listen. Those with other agendas, like Trump, actually undermined our existing preparations. 2/

Even now, with billions of people at risk and the global economy shuddering, there's still a false debate. How far we should go in tackling the pandemic? How much disruption we should accept as inevitable? Should stimulus be a way to prop up the status quo or begin the new? 3/

It seems clear to me that the debate we're having is not taking seriously enough the extent of the damage already unleashed, especially in the US, by our failure to prepare and act. Measures that three months ago would have been sufficient and effective no longer matter. 4/

It looks pretty clear that—no matter what we do now—this pandemic has sunk its fangs in deep: Perhaps 100,000s of people will die unnecessarily. The economy is headed into a dire recession. Our societies will never return to the way things were in 2019. 5/

We are now in a situation where we are forced to deal with the damage and volatility created by the worsening of the pandemic, while also implementing new, perhaps unprecedented measures—from public health to economic policy to social welfare—to head off even worse problems. 6/

I suspect that in the aftermath of this pandemic, we're going to find that politics have tilted in new directions, major industries have been permanently shifted, and the very nature of the debate about how we care for one another and work together on global problems has morphed.

Take that kind of shift, and jack it up a couple orders of magnitude, and you have the climate emergency. As humanity starts to grasp that the ecological crisis is not an issue, but an era, we're going to start to understand something else, as well: It's later than we think. 8/

The huge sets of systems that make up the climate emergency—not just climate change itself, but the whole host of interrelated sustainability challenges of which it is a part—are already in a greater state of destabilization than most people understand. 9/

We're still talking about the climate emergency like it was a distant, possible disease threat—or, for the more advanced among us, as if a few cases had been reported in our nation—while in reality, the hospitals are already overwhelmed and whole retail districts are shuttering.

The climate emergency has already transformed everything, but we continue to not take it seriously enough, blinding ourselves to the impacts that are already here, ignoring the seismic changes it is bringing to our economies, politics, communities and lives. 11/

One serious parallel is that in both, there is an inflection point—a moment where the nature of the situation, and particularly of the fact that a discontinuity has occurred, becomes unavoidable for more and more people. We've hit that point with the pandemic. 12/

When we hit inflection with climate reality is anyone's guess, but the nature of the situation makes hitting it inevitable. I personally suspect that the pandemic has brought us much closer to that collision, but these kinds of cultural shifts are beyond prediction. 13/

More thoughts on taking the climate emergency seriously enough here:https://twitter.com/AlexSteffen/status/1220443151250481152 …

And some thoughts on taking care of yourself and your mental health here:https://twitter.com/AlexSteffen/status/1240464065069076480 …