If you are serious about man-made climate change, then you would be asking all generations to use less energy, consume less and put pressure on governments to move to sustainable energy generation & storage. This ridiculous notion that the "climate emergency" is a recent thing, & that it can be stopped just by stopping flying is about as daft as people panic buying loo roll, and as about effective. The impact of thousands of years of agricultural & industrial revolution is what has got us where we are, and it will take centuries to right.
As for covid-19, all this sudden urgency to contain it is way too late. It is now in most parts of the world, so like climate change we will have to learn to manage it because there is no magic pill to make it go away.
Indeed there is a lot more that needs doing to cut climate change than reducing flying, but that's for another topic. I would point out however that if we didn't have the number and range of international flights we do today, the virus would have spread much more slowly and those outside China would have had a much better chance of containing it.
I believe there is still a need to adopt these containment measures, and potentially also restrictions on movement in the near future even though the virus is now present virtually everywhere. In most places the numbers are still very low and reducing the rate of infection will mean that the cases are spread over a longer period even though nearly everyone will probably be infected eventually. This has several benefits:
- More of the cases are delayed into the spring/summer period, when it's possible (but not proven) that the virus will be less transmissible…
- …but it's certain that by then the NHS and other health providers in the northern hemisphere will be through the normal peak of winter flu cases so will have more resources available...
- …and it will be easier to detect individual cases when there are no seasonal coughs and colds to confuse it with.
- Any delay at all will allow more time to prepare and ultimately to get a vaccine into production, although that seems to be a year or more off
- Any spreading over a longer period will reduce pressure on health services and probably on society in general
It seems to me that this virus has a greater propensity to be transmitted, a longer non-symptomatic period, and a lower mortality rate than the previous outbreaks of SARS, MERS, "swine flu" and Ebola. All three of these makes it more dangerous, even the lower mortality rate because something like Ebola became evident very quickly and tended to kill its victims before they infected too many other people. So I believe we are right to be very concerned about this outbreak.
I consider however that any movement restrictions will be fairly short-lived because once there is enough spread that the chances of infection are about the same everywhere, then staying in one place doesn't reduce that risk.