The Pandemic's 5 Silver Linings

You don't need me to tell you that life is pretty grim these days. Nor will it help if I remind you that the negative consequences of the pandemic will persist long after it is over. But even a realist can see glimmers of hope in today's gloomy circumstances and believe that what we are going through today could eventually have some positive consequences.

In my previous column, I offered a glass-half-full assessment of the pandemic's impact on the risk of war. In a similar spirit of optimism, and mindful of the considerable suffering with which millions of people are now dealing, this week I offer the top five silver linings from COVID-19.

1. Climate change slows down (a bit).

Putting the world economy in a coma has cut fossil fuel use dramatically, thereby reducing the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases and slowing the rate of global warming. Skies are visibly clearer, and those deeply worrisome forecasts about future warming will probably have to be revised in slightly more optimistic directions. The discovery that we can get a lot of useful work done on Zoom and other videoconferencing platforms is likely to dampen business travel in the future, thereby cutting commercial jet traffic even after recovery begins. Meat shortages resulting from the shutdown of slaughterhouses may encourage some people to shift to less carnivorous diets, which would improve public health and reduce methane emissions by all those cows.

Don't get me wrong: COVID-19 won't solve the problem; at best, it has just bought us a bit more time to deal with the problem. It's possible that it could even make things worse, either by encouraging a false sense of complacency or by poisoning Sino-American relations to the point that meaningful progress on this vital issue becomes impossible. But for the moment, the present reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is a silver lining that we should appreciate. If our leaders were smarter, we’d be moving to exploit the additional time we've gained. Maybe after November....