Asked in an interview about what global drops in air pollution due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic can tell us, energy and public policy professor Dan Kammen, chair of Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group, says: "Well, it shows how quickly we can change our system. We've seen 30% to 40% drops in pollution over many of the world's cities. And it also shows us how quickly we could switch to clean energy if we took climate change as seriously as coronavirus. ... But it also shows us that actions do matter. Our individual decisions, whether we take an extra trip, whether we just drive to go get one thing at the store and come back, those actions all add up. And we scale it up to industry and to countries and regions. It really shows us that if we put our mind to it and if we invested in science we could not only do a far better job on climate change but we could also do it in a much more equitable way than we're doing now." Warning that overconsumption and its attendant pollution resurged after 9/11, and the same thing could happen when the coronavirus threat subsides, he says we'll be battling climate change for decades. "And so the real question is can we learn the positive lessons out of this horrible experience with coronavirus and say we want to switch to clean energy now? It's cheaper in many places and we want to invest in better systems so that low-income communities can actually generate their own power. Make themselves more resilient. And we're not doing that with coronavirus today by denying some of the poorest communities testing and respirators. And we're doing the same thing on climate. So we're making a natural disaster into a social disaster when we have all the tools to make this into a chance to really build a green stimulus." Link to video.