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The same theme emerged across the Atlantic last week in a Financial Times feature that presented the coronavirus “an epidemic for our times.” Writer Henry Mance said it pits pessimistic environmentalists against optimists such as Steven Pinker. Mance sided with the pessimists. COVID-19 “could, at the very least, be part of the learning curve. If we can accept cancelled flights, closed schools, postponed sporting fixtures now, perhaps we can accept restraints in the future.”

On The Climate Crisis web page at The New Yorker magazine, U.S. radical fossil fuel activist Bill McKibben wrote that “There’s nothing good about the novel coronavirus.” McKibben didn’t really mean that, because he certainly was not going to let a pandemic stand in the way of a terrific opportunity. “However,” he continued, “if we’re fated to go through this passage, we may as well learn something from it.”

What we learn, said McKibben, is that “giant cruse ships are climate killers and, it turns out, can become floating sick wards.” Maybe, too, the COVID-19 pandemic will teach us to “substitute human contact for endless consumption.”

McKibben’s message was riddled with incoherence. Still, the ever-vigilant producers at CBC Radio’s The Current noticed his New Yorker item and lined him up to tell Canadians that when the pandemic is over “we may feel real relief … and perhaps start to evaluate whether or not the satisfaction we want as human beings comes from contact with other people, not from consumption of stuff. If that message sank in, then there might be some real benefit for the larger, more enduring crisis that we face in the planet’s atmosphere.”

As the CBC interview ended, McKibben took a shot at Canada. “If we set all the oil in Alberta on fire, that CO2 is gonna travel all over the world as people burn it in gas tanks in their cars.” What that has to do with the coronavirus doesn’t really matter. For McKibben and others, this pandemic is just too terrible to waste.

Financial Post

• Email: tcorcoran@nationalpost.com | Twitter: terencecorcoran