The covid vaccine gives us hope for the climate crisis

I’ve just finished watching the Novara Media 100k livestream, and one of the last questions was asking what gives them hope for the future, and I’d like to answer that for myself.

The corona vaccinations that have been announced over the last month are amazing technological achievements, but they are also a political and social achievement. They show what humanity can achieve when politicians, society, and private institutions are all pulling in the same direction.

We should, obviously, already have started working on global warming and climate change, and there have been successes, but things need to move faster. To a certain extent, the theoretical and technical problems of climate change have been solved, but have yet to be implemented.

In the same way, there’s an argument to be made that the technology behind the covid RNA vaccines was an all-but solved technology, waiting for the right combination of virus, investment, and opportunity. Once this combination arrived, everything swung into gear and, out of apparently nowhere, we have not one but three vaccines preparing to roll out in a timescale no one would’ve believed this time last year.

What this proves is that when politicians see, or are made to see, something as an urgent crisis, change happens. Greta Thunberg was right all along! We have the science, we just need to do what it tells us to do. And what it’s telling us is that we urgently need to change where we get our energy from, how we grow and move our food, and how we travel locally, nationally, and internationally.

I’ve heard people talking about how it normally takes 10 years to make a safe vaccine, and using that as a reason to say that these covid vaccines won’t be safe, but that’s a misunderstanding. The vast majority of scientific time is wasted trying to get funding and approval to do the science. Everyone agreed that covid was a crisis, and therefore all covid vaccine projects went to the top of every pile and there was a lot more money around for pushing things forward than there usually is. All the artificial barriers that are usually in place just became a lot smoother. The safety procedures have all been followed, but they didn’t have to do a 3 year funding application between each stage.

Another thing that apparently takes 10 years is stopping the sale of new fossil fueled vehicles and setting up a network of charging hubs for electric vehicles; despite the fact that all petrol stations and most homes in the UK have mains electricity, and that the UK, one of the pioneers of wind power, and earlier, of nuclear power, is in an excellent position to make the switch to electric only vehicles powered by carbon neutral electricity generation.

Our climate is in crisis. We know this. We know what we need to do to fix it. And we know that the actions of individuals will never be enough. Just on electric cars, government will need to subsidise the technology until it’s competitive, and provide highways support for roadside and service station charging technology. This is just one area where government action is necessary to move us all forward in ways that are individually unattainable.

What’s new is that we now know that, if they wanted to, our government could move forward, fast, with the collective actions needed to drop carbon emissions and mitigate the impact. They did it for corona. They have no excuse not to do it for climate change.