By Jon Ullman
Rush hour traffic. Indoor dining. Family road trips and exotic vacations. Shopping in person. Dinner parties. Baseball stadiums. Commercial real estate ventures. We’re back to normal.
A world of motion. A world of smiling faces. A world of seeing loved ones.
This new world, just like the one before it, however, is brought to you by coal, oil and gas.
Don’t get me wrong. We’re happy to see normal. We need it. Still, something’s still wrong, and it’s not just the variants and lower-than-expected vaccination percentages. Anxiety looms. We’re disoriented. We know that getting back to normal means continuing the trend lines of climate change and income inequality.
Can we take what we’ve experienced during COVID to change our planetary fate?
In some respects, COVID mirrors climate change. Both are global problems that can sicken and kill millions and if left unchecked grind society to a halt. Both can be solved, or at least mitigated, by changes in behavior and technology. Both have people who believe or deny their existence and support or oppose their remedies.
But in greater respects, Climate is nothing like COVID. A fire, a mega-hurricane or global temperature record cannot spur the COVID-like reflex-like response in early April 2020. Climate change is not tracked daily by the number of ICU beds and morgue trailers (at least now.) Just viewing the endlessly upward Mauna Loa carbon graph will not make billions of people one day stop everything and say, OMG, we have to do something immediately!
Last year’s response to COVID gives us hope and terror.
We want a Green New Deal, called by its name or not. We want a new view of work that gives us the flexibility to use (hopefully, in the future) carbon-free video or travel to carbon-free buildings in carbon free vehicles. We want President Biden and his cabinet to write new rules and spend money to decouple our economy from fossil fuels. We want fossil fuel-friendly Senator Manchin (D-WV) to be offered multiple bridges and buildings named after him or whatever he pleases in return for his earth-surviving single swing vote. We want to enjoy our work and homes, free from the gridlock, pollution and stress that defined our old lives.
In Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, we are trying to establish a better normal. We are fighting to keep oil companies from erasing the progress the Ventura Board of Supervisors made protecting our air and water in the last two years.
We are fighting for all-electric new buildings to be powered primarily by renewable power in the City of Santa Barbara and across our area.
We are joining grassroots and allies in fighting the environmental injustice of SoCalGas’s compressor expansion and fast-tracked toxic soil remediation in Ventura’s long-overburdened Westside neighborhood.
We are fighting ExxonMobil from expanding offshore drilling in Santa Barbara Channel. We are fighting land-based drillers, which want permission from the state and federal government to slice through our drought-parched aquifers.
We are fighting to buy more public lands and provide protections for the ones we have on the coasts, foothills and mountains so we can achieve 30 percent protection (or more) by 2030 (or sooner), and we anticipate leading amazing hikes to wonderful natural places once again through our free Outings.
We are lucky to have many local governments in our region taking climate and justice seriously during and after the pandemic, but it’s not enough. Climate is not like COVID. It never was. It’s as the International Energy Agency said in its report recently: “perhaps the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced."