Abacus | Climate change: China must seize the day on coal, or a toxic cocktail of winter smog and coronavirus awaits

I am not a particularly religious person, but I do feel like there is some kind of reckoning going on. Over the past four or five years, we have witnessed a series of intensifying weather-related natural disasters, from the fires that ravaged Australia and California, the vicious typhoons that chewed through Southeast Asia and Japan, right up to the monsoon rainfall that currently threatens the structural integrity of the Three Gorges Dam. At the same time, we are roasting in Hong Kong, breaking records in daily temperatures. And somehow there’s snow in Beijing?

The scientific consensus says climate change is to blame. And on that score, it seems that when the coronavirus stopped the world’s industry in its tracks, it did more to clean up the earth in a couple of months than Swedish activist Greta Thunberg achieved being a thorn in President Donald Trump’s side. In Greta’s defence, she was asking nicely – the virus didn’t wait for an answer.

As the second and third waves of Covid-19 are hitting trouble spots around the globe, pretty much everyone is getting rather fed up, hoping scientists can come up with a vaccine so we can rid ourselves of this plague and get back to normal as soon as possible. Yet, although I’m firmly in the “fed up” camp, the environmental impact from quickly returning to the old normal could be quite severe and extremely dangerous, not only because of what it would mean for the climate but also local pollution.