The coronavirus pandemic has seduced policy analysts into drawing parallels between the current state of the world and a crisis they envision unfolding due to global warming. For Yale’s climate-change center, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and Vox, among others, this analogy has proven tempting. Even NYU professor and renowned climate economist Gernot Wagner has drawn the parallel, writing at Project Syndicate that “a good way to think about the coronavirus pandemic is that it is like climate change at warp speed.”
But the coronavirus-climate analogy is too clever by half. Eager to draw attention to their fields of interest, these analysts have disregarded two significant differences between our ability to deal with epidemiological risk and with climate risk. The first difference arises from the time-scales on which pandemics and climate change occur. The second difference is the degree to which a local, regional, and even national government can institute effective mitigation policies.
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