Emergency Mode

I am a sucker for any article in a reputable publication called "We Can't Go Back To Normal:  How Will Coronavirus Change the World?"  However, I am usually disappointed, and generally, this one also falls into the "wouldn't it be great" category - more specifically, "Here's what I have wanted to happen in the world for a long time. Wouldn't it be great if the pandemic, in some unexplained way, somehow brought this dream to fruition?"

I was struck by this, however:  emergency mode.  The term came up in a comparison of the pandemic to the crisis of climate change:

“We’ve been trying for years to get people out of normal mode and into emergency mode,” said Margaret Klein Salamon, a former psychologist who now heads the advocacy group The Climate Mobilization. “What is possible politically is fundamentally different when lots of people get into emergency mode – when they fundamentally accept that there’s danger, and that if we want to be safe we need to do everything we can.

Emergency mode is when the river is rising and the levees are crumbling.  Emergency mode is what gets everyone - everyone - up on the levee, filling sandbags.

I have never wondered why climate change has not triggered emergency mode.  It's long-term, abstract, somehow connected with those environmental extremists.  It's elitist intellectuals telling us what to do.  And it's not going to make any difference here, anyway, as long as here isn't sea level in a third world country.

The problem with the pandemic, so far at least, is that it hasn't triggered emergency mode either.  The President keeps forgetting about it; the Senate stalls "emergency" stimulus legislation; nobody's willing to tell anyone to put on a mask.  In a bizarre and horrific conflation of the two crises, we are using the pandemic as an excuse to eliminate environmental regulations which are vital in our attempts to adapt to climate change.

Emergency mode means stopping everything and going full out against the danger, putting smaller differences aside in a cooperative effort to keep the river on the other side of the levee.  We will certainly not get to the new world in any kind of shape to take on climate change unless we stop everything now and fill sandbags.