The structural similarities between Australia’s two 2020 emergencies means that coronavirus offers a terrifying glimpse of the future, allowing us to see what might happen as catastrophic manifestations of climate change – such as prolonged bushfires – become commonplace.

In December masks didn’t protect from air pollution, any more than toilet paper wards off Covid-19 today. But, as the skies in Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra turned yellow from carcinogenic smoke, after years of public policy failing the most vulnerable, much of the public no longer trusted the government.

If you could afford a fancy air purification system – or if you could flee to a Hawaiian beach – you could breathe freely. If you couldn’t, you scrambled to get a cheap face mask … because what other choice did you have?

The folk hoarding toilet rolls today make the same calculation.

It’s increasingly clear that Scott Morrison’s disastrous reaction to the 2019-20 bushfire season prefigured a deeper ineptitude.

“Going to be a great summer of cricket,” the PM tweeted at the height of the blazes, “and for our firefighters and fire-impacted communities, I’m sure our boys will give them something to cheer about.”

The same priorities led him to insist briefly that he would attend an NRL match last Saturday, even after he’d issued a ban on non-essential public gatherings of more than 500 people the following week.

But, in many ways, Morrison represents merely a local manifestation of a rottenness apparent everywhere, with the highest offices the world over filled with weak, shallow leaders who govern by spin and bluster, and cannot address any issue of substance.

Scientists warned that Australia would be particular susceptible to a changing climate that would bring a longer and more intense fire season. Morrison waved a lump of coal at his parliamentary opponents.

In 2018 the World Health Organization predicted a threat from what it called “Disease X”, on the basis that “a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease”. At the same time the global pandemic director for America’s National Security Council resigned – and then his entire team was disbanded by Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton.

Trump, of course, told reporters he took “no responsibility” for cutting the global health security team – and tweeted: “I encourage you to turn towards prayer as an act of faith.”

The echo of the “thoughts and prayers” sent out by Morrison during the height of the fires is not accidental.

As the last glacier melts away, a politician somewhere will be clasping his hands together, simply because “thoughts and prayers” offers a zero-cost alternative to expensive climate action.

Mind you, the problem isn’t simply money.

The Trump administration’s negotiating a treaty that formalises the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The war the US and its allies fought in that country cost the US some $2tn dollars, more or less entirely wasted.

But war is good for business – and saving the planet isn’t.

Indeed, the coronavirus highlights the awful paradox that makes global heating feel so inevitable.

A pandemic-induced recession will ruin people’s lives. If the economy ceases to grow, some of us will lose jobs and others our homes. Many more will have to work harder for less pay, abandoning dreams and ambitions to struggle for bare survival.

Yet a recession almost certainly also means that carbon emissions will fall, just as they did during the 2008-09 financial crisis.

That’s because the economic expansion on which we depend requires that, each year, industry consumes more and more natural resources.

A healthy economy means a growing economy – and a growing economy makes demands on the planet that it can no longer sustain.

A slump, by contrast, reduces that pressure.

To be clear, a recession isn’t good news, in any way, shape or form. Aside from anything else, expect governments across the world to now abandon whatever commitments they’ve made to long-term decarbonisation as they scramble to get the wheels of industry turning again.

But you can see the fundamental contradiction on which we’re caught.

Capitalism must expand or lapse into crisis. But an economy dependent on perpetual growth must, at some stage, come into conflict with the limits of the natural world.

The characteristic ineptitude of today’s politicians – the deep rottenness pervading our societies – reflects, in part, the impossibility of squaring that circle.

In developing nations, for instance, the relentless expansion of capital means that cities now encroach more and more on wilderness and peasant holdings. With factory farming replacing traditional agriculture, viral outbreaks become more likely. As the evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace explains:

Growing genetic monocultures of domestic animals removes whatever immune firebreaks may be available to slow down transmission. Larger population sizes and densities facilitate greater rates of transmission. Such crowded conditions depress immune response. High throughput, a part of any industrial production, provides a continually renewed supply of susceptibles, the fuel for the evolution of virulence.

The emissions pumped into the atmosphere represent another facet of the same problem: an increasingly obvious incompatibility between economic and natural cycles.

Scientists tell us that, if we continue on this path, extreme weather events and other disasters will become more and more common. The experience of the past weeks shows precisely what that means.

Capitalism pits humanity against nature. It will destroy both, if we let it.