If only Owen Jones could understand

Of course this is the usual reaction to any statement from Owen Jones but still, the point is particularly stark here. We’re asked why climate change is being treated quite as urgently as coronavirus:

Coronavirus poses many challenges and threats, but few opportunities. A judicious response to global heating would provide affordable transport, well-insulated homes, skilled green jobs and clean air. Urgent action to prevent a pandemic is of course necessary and pressing. But the climate crisis represents a far graver and deadlier existential threat, and yet the same sense of urgency is absent. Coronavirus shows it can be done – but it needs determination and willpower, which, when it comes to the future of our planet, are desperately lacking.

The answer being that climate change isn’t an urgent problem like coronavirus.

Staying within that IPCC scientific consensus that Owen thinks we should all sign up to climate change is a chronic problem which will take decades to deal with and which we’ve got decades to deal with. Therefore there’s a certain difference in the urgency with which we deal with it as opposed to something that might put entire percentage points of the population into hospital beds in the next week or three.* It’s differently urgent which is why we’re dealing with it with a different urgency.

We do assume that logic exists somewhere in OwenWorld it’s just that we’ve not seen all that much evidence of it.

*Yes, alarmist and over sensational but absurdist rhetoric….