When reflecting on Covid-19 and anthropogenic climate change, a surprising number of parallels are revealed. This article explores some of these similarities, and considers the role of global crisis narratives in creating the conditions for increasing levels of centralised coordination and control.

Both the SARS-CoV-2 virus and carbon dioxide (CO₂) are invisible agents, which are blamed for the 2020 global pandemic and climate change respectively. Their mechanisms of action cannot be directly observed by ordinary people. German sociologist Ulrich Beck was prompted by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster to explore the societal impact of the many anonymous and invisible threats of global scope resulting from modernity. He argued that, in what he called a ‘risk society’, people had become radically dependent on specialised scientific knowledge to define what was and what was not dangerous [2]. Today, as members of the public, we are instructed to ‘trust the experts’ who tell us that these invisible agents are responsible for untold damages to human health and the Earth’s climate. We willingly consume the cartoon depictions of a malicious SARS-CoV-2 virus, and images of chimneys belching particulates as truthful illustrations of these invisible deadly enemies.¹

1. https://pandata.org/covid-and-climate-change-two-crises/ ↩︎