Will the coronavirus crisis trump the climate crisis?

BRUSSELS — With the global paralysis induced by the coronavirus, levels of pollution and carbon emission are dropping everywhere — leaving bluer skies, visible mountains, splendid wildflowers. Even Venice’s famously murky canals are running clear.

After decades of industry and government slow-walking the climate issue, for some it is proof that effective action can be achieved.

But nature’s revival has come at enormous cost, with Europe’s economy projected to decline 7.4% this year. So for many, like the suddenly unemployed, concerns about climate — which seemed urgent just a few months ago — can seem less so now.

Those competing camps are now locked in debate over how and what to rebuild — between those who want to get the economy moving again, no matter how, and those who argue that the crisis is a chance to accelerate the transition to a cleaner economy.

Jean Pisani-Ferry, an economist and former aide to President Emmanuel Macron of France, described this as the struggle that “will define the post-pandemic world.”

For green militants, the virus “only strengthens the urgent need for climate action,” he wrote recently. “But die-hard industrialists are equally convinced: There should be no higher priority than to repair a ravaged economy, postponing stricter environmental regulations if necessary. The battle has started.”

As European governments squabble bitterly over a virus recovery fund and the next sevenyear budget, the issue is front and center.

The European Union began the year promoting a plan for a rapid transformation of the economy toward a carbon-neutral future — “the Green Deal” — as its flagship theme and engine for renewed growth.

European leaders insist that some form of it will remain paramount, but the new coronavirus has complicated matters.

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission — the EU’s important bureaucracy — said late last month that the bloc’s green goals should be “the motor for the recovery.” She has important support from Macron and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

The question is how far anyone is willing to go now as political leaders across the continent come under pressure — from citizens for economic relief as well as from industries desperate to get their old factories running again.

The bloc is debating a law to enforce carbon neutrality by 2050, but many want to toughen targets for 2030 — by moving from a proposed 40% reduction from 1990 levels in the next decade to as much as 55%. They argued that the pandemic is an opportunity to use new money to accelerate the transition away from carbon.

European climate and environmental ministers from 17 nations signed a statement urging governments to “make the EU’s recovery a Green Deal” and “to build the bridge between fighting COVID19, biodiversity loss and climate change.”

But even the commission’s first vice president and the man in charge of the Green Deal, Frans Timmermans, is worried.

“The climate crisis that was upon us before the corona crisis is still there and has lost nothing of its urgency,” he said. “But in the foreseeable future it will no longer rank first on people’s priority list. It will tumble down.”

The “big question,” Timmermans said in an interview, is, “will politicians stay the course and keep their eyes on the long-term crisis or short-term electoral considerations?”

If the recovery is slow, “then people are in the streets, and politicians will start throwing money at businesses to keep them afloat, whether the businesses are solvent or not, green or not,” he said. “That’s why I push for a bigger societal involvement” from young people focused on the future.

But with global climate negotiations known as COP-26 already postponed, there is significant skepticism.

“I suspect the next value clash in politics will be between environmentalism and those who favor economic growth, and I fear the economy will be the winner in this,” said Anand Menon, professor of European politics at King’s College London. “We will see enormous debt, and I have the feeling that everything will be drowned out by the economic argument.”