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10 Leaders
2 So far, the pandemic has revealed more bigotry than bene-
volence. An mp in Kuwait wants to “purify” the country of illegal
workers. “Put them in the desert,” says a famous Kuwaiti actress.
A viral video in Bahrain featured a man complaining of migrants
being treated next to citizens—never mind that half the nurses in
Bahrain come from abroad. In hospitals across the region for-
eigners are on the front line fighting the virus.
Discrimination is bad enough, but the dormitories where mi-
grants live are incubators for covid-19. With four or more to a
room, there is no space for social distancing. At a big labour
camp in Qatar one infection quickly became hundreds. Far from
the Gulf, Singapore, which treats migrant workers somewhat
better, thought it had the virus under control until it broke out in grants are still working—building stadiums for the World Cup in
their dormitories. Now infections are rising fast and the authori-
ties have had to extend restrictions on work and travel.
Neglecting migrants hurts citizens, too. The dormitory out-
breaks stand a good chance of spreading to the permanent pop-
ulation, lengthening lockdowns. Xenophobes see this as yet an-
other reason to banish foreigners. But countries such as India,
which have their hands full, are not co-operating with efforts to
Climate change
An Earth Day in the life of a plague
The challenge of covid-19 must neither distract people from action on climate change nor confuse them about it
pril 22nd was doubly disrupted. If it had not been messed
Aup by the covid-19 pandemic, as all days now are, parts of it
would have been brought to a halt by activism about the climate.
This was the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day, a festival of
demonstrations, marches and teach-ins that took place mostly
in America and is widely seen as marking the birth of modern en-
vironmentalism. Organisers had hoped that this year’s would
see hundreds of millions take to the streets around the world. A
huge school strike of the sort pioneered by Greta Thunberg, a
Swedish activist, was planned, as well as who-knows-what by
way of direct action. A new generation of environmental activ-
ists intended to demand a better future more loudly than ever.
The pandemic means that this widespread
and co-ordinated youthful passion, one of the
most striking developments in recent climate
politics, is instead being expressed indoors and
online. This in itself will inevitably lead some to
contemplate how climate change and covid-19
fit together. One of the slogans of the first Earth
Day was what the pioneering environmentalist
Barry Commoner called “The first law of Ecolo-
gy”—that “Everything Is Connected With Everything Else”.
Both scourges bear this out. Some 200,000 deathbeds in 170
countries have been connected by an unbroken web of viral
spread. So have bat caves in China and test tubes in California, as
well as silent airports, deserted shops and crowded food banks
all across the planet. The connections which underlie climate
change are even more pervasive. They tie together almost all the
21st century’s means of transport, manufacture and growth, its
buried geological past and its melting Arctic ice. The workings of
the great round world, as revealed by pictures of the blue-white
filigreed Earth from space that were so inspirational in 1970, real-
ly do link all its components.
The Economist April 25th 2020
return their jobless, potentially ailing expatriates.
The Gulf states are at last taking steps to stem the virus in mi-
grant areas. Some have launched mass-screening and are testing
those with symptoms. Temporary housing has been set up to al-
low social distancing. Most countries are treating covid-19 pa-
tients, including migrants, without charging them. Saudi Arabia
has also released dozens of migrants held for minor immigration
offences, so that prisons do not become plague factories. The
United Arab Emirates is automatically renewing the paperwork
for migrant workers so that they don’t find themselves on the
wrong side of the law just because they are locked down.
That is all to the good, but more needs to be done. Some mi-
2022 or facilities for the World Expo next year. Employers should
be held accountable for their safety. Many migrants cannot work,
though, and states should care for them, too. Gulf countries can
afford to guarantee a portion of their wages during the outbreak.
That will not only ensure that they do not go hungry—it will
mean that someone is there to turn the lights back on when busi-
nesses start to open up again. 7
Covid-19 and climate change are both global problems, and
proper responses to both require levels of co-operation that the
countries of the world find hard. Responses to the effects of co-
vid-19 on the coal industry, among others, or to the need for eco-
nomic stimulus once the virus has abated, will offer opportuni-
ties to further or impede decarbonisation. And both have their
origin in a strange mixture of human action and the unbiddable,
indifferent forces of nature, provoking contradictory feelings of
culpability and a complete lack of control.
Connectedness, though, is no excuse for sloppy thinking. The
two scourges are not usefully treated as the same problem—of
excessive economic growth clogging the sky as it encroaches on
the wildernesses where new pathogens lurk.
There is no single rethinking or rejection of the
way humans live today that will solve both. Nor
is the pandemic a response to environmental
degradation. To hear sweet birds singing in the
streets of Vancouver as fish swim the unsilted
canals of Venice and goats throng the streets of
north Wales lifts locked-down spirits. But the
pandemic is not, as some say, “nature’s reset”.
Such thinking easily slips into the misanthropy that can lead en-
vironmentalists to see people themselves as the problem.
To help readers appreciate each challenge for what it is, this
week our newspaper, full of covid-19 news, makes room for the
first of a series of six climate briefs. We begin by looking at the
politics of climate change. Later themes will include climate sci-
ence, carbon cycles and the energy transition. When they started
in the 1970s, “Schools briefs” were intended as primers for stu-
dents; this year they will be more along the lines of “Home-
school briefs”. We hope they will help all generations seized with
the importance of climate change—and not just Ms Thun-
berg’s—to further their understanding of what lies ahead. 7