In “Coronavirus Holds Key Lessons on How to Fight Climate Change”, Gardiner talks about the similarities between the coronavirus pandemic and climate change, and how they are both problems that grow exponentially. Gardiner claims that “The coronavirus pandemic and the slower-moving dangers of climate change parallel one another in important ways, and experts say the aggressive, if belated, response to the outbreak could hold lessons for those urging climate action.” Simply put, by they time we see the impact of these issues, it’s already too late for preventative measures, and we’ve already seen the effects of climate change in the record floods and droughts and other extreme weather conditions happening around the world.
We’ve watched politicians learn from the effects of compounding growth as the pandemic played out over a matter of weeks, but climate change takes centuries. It doesn’t help that fighting the fossil fuel industry, both a major cause of CO2 emissions and where many of our politicians’ loyalties (and funding) lie, is a decades-long struggle against large businesses trying to protect their profits.

In “This “Changes Everything”, Klein expresses similar sentiments about the willingness of politicians to fund the economy, but not to fund measures with the potential to lives on a greater scale than the collapse of banks. Klein highlights how businesses, and the politicians they fund, are able to exploit the “opportunities” created by droughts and floods, and profit from issues dramatically impacting those entrenched in poverty.
Klein says “We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe— and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.” The elite minority choose not to take action for the benefit of the majority because they do not profit from that action, and instead lose money in trying to fix climate change.