Former Hillary Clinton Policy Director: Some Coronavirus Effects ‘Good for the Planet’

Anne-Marie Slaughter, who served in the Obama administration as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Director of Policy Planning, wrote a Sunday column in the New York Times saying some coronavirus effects might be beneficial to our planet.

“We are also suddenly living in a world that the United States government long insisted was impossible — one of drastically reduced plane and car emissions,” Slaughter wrote in her column.

“That is terrible for the airlines but good for the planet. It may be good for us, too,” she added.

But while Slaughter says the coronavirus-prompted drop in emissions might be good for our planet, experts say the drop in emissions will not have much of an impact when we go back to “business as usual.”

“The damage from CO2 just accumulates, so every ton we don’t release is not inflicted on the environment, but if everything goes back to business as usual when this ends, it won’t have much of an impact,” said David Archer, a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago.

Slaughter went on to say that many changes that were predicted to happen over a span of decades are happening over “the span of weeks.”

“The coronavirus, and its economic and social fallout, is a time machine to the future. Changes that many of us predicted would happen over decades are instead taking place in the span of weeks.”

As for some of those changes, she called in her column for a shift from working in an office environment to a work-from-home environment:

And now that we’re all at home, what to do with our empty office buildings? Given the housing crises in so many cities, the answer seems obvious. Much commercial real estate could be transformed into apartments. All the municipalities that are imposing moratoriums on evictions should be willing to experiment in the months ahead.

She also criticized the Trump administration and Fox News for what she says is their lack of response to the crisis, saying “it took Fox News weeks to realize that the coronavirus was not a Democratic hoax to make people mad at President Trump.”

“This crisis has exposed the deep fissures and failures in our culture and the incompetence of so many of our federal leaders,” she said.