The coronavirus has halted our lives. Stores and restaurants are closed, and in some areas, people are even prohibited from leaving their houses. Meanwhile, the economy has tanked. Governments around the world have implemented massive economic stimuli and draconian regulations on public life normally only seen in wartime. Thousands have died, and hundreds of thousands have been infected.
Despite the magnitude of this tragedy, which will haunt us for a long time, some people see a silver lining. Indeed, some are seemingly almost happy that the virus has come along.
Environmental activists have been cheering. The rivers in Venice, they say, are finally clear again. Dolphins have returned to Italy. Nitrogen dioxide emissions have fallen sharply, and in China (particularly in Wuhan), carbon emissions have plummeted so much that a study suggests that the virus lockdown in China has saved 77,000 lives.
As one zealous commentator writes, “We’ve been talking for years about how to take bold enough action to stem climate change.” Now, the answer is in front of us and would make our children’s lives far better.”
Another tweet that has garnered over 1.4 million likes at this point simply states: “We. Are. The. Problem.” Indeed, a response to this noted, “this whole situation could be a turning point for our society, to make things right.” And as “Earth is recovering,” one thing is clear: “Coronavirus is Earth’s vaccine. We’re the virus.”
There is something macabre about the exultation of these activists and their millions of supporters of this crisis while thousands die, millions are isolated, and millions more are financially ruined amid a major recession. The environmentalists’ claim that “the answer in front of us” is a complete and indefinite lockdown of our everyday life. Their answer is to make permanent the mass unemployment, mass poverty, and massive economic decline we experience now.
This anti-prosperity and, in many regards, anti-human approach is not new, even if it is now louder and more extreme than in the past. Many environmentalists have long argued that Earth would be a peaceful place if it wasn’t for us destroying or even just altering it.
Yet, humans are hardly outside intruders to this world. We have sometimes changed it for the better, sometimes for the worse, but we’ve been here for a very long time. As Shawn Regan from the Property and Environment Research Center writes, “Virtually all the world’s landscapes have been shaped, and are continuing to be shaped, by human action.”
This is also true of areas of the world that we don’t think of when we consider human influence upon nature. National parks such as Yellowstone are heavily managed by human hands, and as Regan shows, even when early nature lovers first stepped into Yosemite Valley, “the tranquil meadows seen by Muir and Olmsted were as much the product of human action as they were the glory of nature” after Native Americans had managed the valley by setting fires to clear forests.
Beyond that, however, the zero-sum basis in the degrowth thinking of these environmentalists is utterly misguided. It is simply not true that all economic growth comes at the cost of greater pollution and environmental destruction. Growth, innovation, and technological progress based on free-market principles are also the best avenue of progress for environmental health.
This may seem paradoxical at first — the more growth, the more we use the resources of the world, right? But through economic growth, we don’t necessarily use more resources — in fact, innovation often allows us to do much more with much less.
Private ownership creates incentives to be good stewards of what one owns. Entrepreneurs are incentivized through the profit motive to use resources more efficiently for their own interest. Indeed, entrepreneurial actions are often about producing more from less — i.e., making production more sustainable. New innovations and technological progress can and, in fact, already have led to a greener economy.
This can be seen in the real world, where free economies are much cleaner than totalitarian ones. This often takes time, particularly in developing countries such as China that have especially dirty economies. It is no surprise that formerly heavily polluting countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe in general are reducing carbon emissions now without slowing their economies.
Economic growth and environmental health do not always go hand in hand, it is true. But they often do, and in the long run, they certainly do. Moreover, they increasingly correlate today and will do so even more in the future, thanks to pro-market principles and institutions that incentivize entrepreneurs, businesses, and individuals to act in a green and clean way.
Meanwhile, the coronavirus cheerleaders for the planet look back at a supposedly beautiful past that never existed. It might be better for everyone if they were looking for realistic policy options instead of rejoicing over a pandemic.
Kai Weiss is the research and outreach coordinator of the Austrian Economics Center and a board member of the Friedrich A. von Hayek Institute.
