My daughter recently traded the shit and pee jokes for the next step on the humor ladder. “Mommy, what’s the difference between a dentist and a teacher?” “Mama, what is the similarity between your buttocks and the desert?” The difference-match puzzles fly to my ears every afternoon.
when it NOS News Switched from the climate summit in Glasgow to the rapidly increasing corona infection figures this week, one spontaneously came to mind: what is the similarity between climate warming and corona?
Almost everyone is concerned about rapid global warming and wants to do something about it seriously. Eat less meat, fly less, buy less clothes, less sister, less like this. We stumble over good intentions. I know restaurants that only serve local products, company canteens that have virtually eliminated plastic. I have friends who proudly say that they had their old sofas reupholstered and acquaintances who exchanged the plane to Italy for the train. All good, and all a good feeling.
It will please Professor Jan Rotmans. The world is changing because our social norms change, not because of government intervention, he argued in Sunday Buitenhof. “Forty years ago smoking was socially enjoyable, now you’re a sucker.” with CO2emissions, it would be the same, he thought.
I do not believe it. Because if it’s up to us individuals, it doesn’t get along at all. However strong fly shame, meat fear and plastic phobia seem to become the new social norms, our waste production has never been as high as this year. Collectively, we hardly eat an ounce less steak. And if there were no lockdowns, Schiphol would probably have broken all records again this year.
I see the same in the fight against corona. As soon as the government lets loose the reins – with the warning to remain alert – we immediately jump into everyone’s arms, we are once again with three hundred people in a cramped conference room and companies demand from their employees that they are physically present again . “Anyone who dials in to the board meeting remotely from today, is not allowed to say anything to us as a punishment,” a good friend told me. When the duty was over, I abruptly saw hardly anyone with a mouth cap in shops.
I wish it were different, but in collective disasters we need a government that enforces good behavior with clear rules. The Netherlands in 2030 55 percent less CO2emissions (then in 1990) and climate neutral by 2050 – that will only be possible if the government intervenes strongly. In 2035, petrol or diesel cars will no longer be allowed to be sold. Look, that helps.
My father and father-in-law never wore seat belts, even though they knew they were risking their lives. That gradually changed when they received fines for this from 1975. I admit with some shame that twenty years ago I was very annoyed by the new gadgets in my lease car: beeps went off when I ‘forgot’ my seat belt. The number of road deaths has, incidentally, fallen steadily since 1975 from more than three thousand a year to more than six hundred (while car traffic grew strongly at the same time).
Smoking is very bad for your health, and that has not escaped anyone’s attention since the late eighties. Still, a series of government measures were needed to actually reduce smoking. Increases in excise duties, a smoking ban at work and ultimately in the catering industry.
Intrinsic motivation: it’s great, but you usually don’t win the war with it. When the need arises, it is the government’s turn. And the striking thing is: almost all of us are (secretly) happy with it. I don’t hear anyone say that the seat belt obligation was a bad idea or that the smoking ban in the catering industry should be reversed. And when last Saturday the mask was mandatory again in shops, the majority adhered to it, even though we didn’t think about it the day before.
Which of course plays a role: the obligatory government creates a level playing field for everyone. Equal monks, equal hoods; no freeriders more who benefit from the collective. I also notice that since Saturday I have been annoyed by customers in the supermarket without a mask, even though I haven’t worn it myself for weeks.
In short, the similarity between global warming and corona (and road deaths, and nicotine addicts) is that they are major social problems that can only be solved with a government as an old-fashioned strict schoolmaster. It is a pity that this realization in the Netherlands always penetrates so much later than in the countries around us.
Aylin Bilic is an entrepreneur and publicist.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of November 11, 2021
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