The madness of Brian Cox

Brian Cox, the softly spoken TV professor and former keyboard player for D:Ream, has found a ‘silver lining’ to the coronavirus crisis.

Appearing on Good Morning Britain yesterday to mark Earth Day, Cox said that the coronavirus crisis has ‘shown us what a future with less pollution and more active wildlife could be like’.

'It's shown us what a future with less pollution and more active wildlife could be like.'@ProfBrianCox highlights the effects of lockdown on the environment and hopes this will encourage us to continue working to reverse the effects of climate change in the future. #EarthDay pic.twitter.com/wQ9l77eaI3

— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) April 22, 2020

It is certainly true that emissions have enormously declined over the past few months. And for Cox, coronavirus ‘could change how we think about our impact on the environment’ because it has revealed what a world looks like ‘with lower pollution’ and ‘without aircraft flying overhead’. This is a ‘future we could choose’, he says.

Of course, all it took to bring about this reduction in emissions was a novel virus that has ravaged the world, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and a political response to this crisis that has put billions of people under house arrest and sent the global economy into free fall. We have no idea how devastating the economic, social and political fallout could yet be.

So, has Cox lost his mind? Environmentalists have always been cavalier about the human costs of their desire to rein in economic progress for the supposed good of the planet. But this is surely a new low.