ABSTRACT
The deregulation of global capital in the 1980s and 1990s accelerated the consumption of carbon and growth of fossil-based industries with a devastating impact on the world’s natural environment. The costs of the climate crisis are most heavily borne by countries in the global South which lack the capacity to mitigate and rollback the effects of climate change. The consequences of climate change include migration and climate refugees caused by rising water levels and unpredictable weather systems; competition for more limited resources, particularly water; the disruption caused to traditional and sustainable forms of land husbandry and indigenous life; the social pressures of urbanisation; and the unlimited and, in many cases irreversible, costs to the natural environment.
Like climate change, COVID-19 is a global emergency but one which has already mobilised public resources and forced governments across the world into the lockdown of their citizens. It has created an unintentional experiment in the downsizing of the global economy and curtailing of public behaviour that could impact on the well-being of wider society. While COVID-19 has a terrible immediacy in the threat it represents to us all, does the global response to the pandemic hold any lessons for how we should approach the question of climate change? This chapter will consider this question and suggests that COVID-19 and climate have shared origins in the neoliberal economic system.
