Stepping on the Gas

An early indication, of what is going to happen to any attempts to deal with the climate change  'pandemic', is provided by news that air pollution levels in China are already back to their pre-lockdown levels (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/03/air-pollution-in-china-back-to-pre-covid-levels-and-europe-may-follow). It is predicted that levels in Europe are likely to follow. That is in spite of our knowing that air pollution is a major cause of respiratory disease (with accompanying deaths) and clearly exacerbates deaths from infection by sars CoV-2. There have been many worthy calls to 'take this opportunity' to rethink our industrial activity, exploitation of natural resources, energy generation, travel and food production methods/dietary choices (e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/05/world-climate-breakdown-pandemic). Sad to say, I just can't see this happening. We humans (I would say) generally appear to operate in ways where any costs versus benefits analysis of our actions focuses on what happens to us (and our immediate families?). We are also fixated on the short term. This is further reflected in the ways that countries (even with their varied political systems) as well as commercial companies, seem to operate. In this way, we are not so different from any other organism ('selfish genes?), including the primitive mini-strand of RNA that makes up sars CoV-2! Changing this would be a truly extraordinary sea change.