When countless millions put their lives and careers on hold to blunt the exponential fury of Covid-19, they also idled their cars, boats, and planes. Likewise trucks, power plants, factories, container ships, trains — all the engines driving global industry and climate change — fell still, and quiet, and idle, if only for a moment.

People took to social media to celebrate the cleaner, fresher air (China! United States! India! Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia! Planet!), and even anecdotally cleaner water (Venice!), along with fun anecdotes about animals returning to old habitats and even our depopulated cities. Meanwhile in the macroeconomy, oil demand collapsed, economies sputtered helplessly, and conversations began in earnest about what the world should look like in the wake of so much change.

Is it possible to sustain reductions in energy demand? Should we rebuild our old lives as they were? Or, should we try to create something new and different to stave off climate change, mass extinction, and resource depletion?

Since calls for change didn’t prevail, we’ll have to assume the world will revert largely to what it was before: after social distancing, human appetites will return more-or-less to the 2019 version (China!) and we will continue our brisk stroll toward the +2°c climate cliff.

But even though we don’t harbor any illusions of a deliberate correction to prevent further calamity, we do have three reasons to be optimistic that life won’t completely revert to the pre-Covid Way.

1) Solar Is Officially Cheaper Than Dinosaur Fuels

The pandemic has coincided with the demise of coal as a cost-competitive energy source. Over the past few years, one report after another has concluded that sustainable energy sources (on the heels of natural gas) have reached or are about to reach cost parity with coal and oil. As the costs of windmills, solar panels, energy storage, and wave energy plummet, planners are able to factor them into their ledgers without pleading with accountants and budget-obsessed politicians. In fact, it should now be budget-obsessed policymakers who will drive the move to alternative energies: in November 2018, the Carbon Tracker Initiative even determined that it is cheaper per energy unit to build and use new solar plants than to run existing coal plants.

This January, to help lead a painless transition from coal, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Sierra Club, and the Carbon Tracker Initiative published “How to Retire Early: Making Accelerated Coal Phaseout Feasable and Just,” laying out…

an integrated three-part approach: 1) refinancing to fund the coal transition and save customers money on day one, 2) reinvesting in clean energy, and 3) providing transition financing for workers and communities.

Oh, how we look forward to retirement!

If Covid-19 changes human behavior enough to reduce energy demand even slightly, municipalities and power companies should grab the opportunity to take on this transition in earnest. We can certainly see that happening now with the new $1 billion Gemini solar plant with built-in energy storage outside Las Vegas, a city that is virtually synonymous with electricity use. (Say what you like about Las Vegas, but it already has a proven commitment to emission-free sourcing of its power.)

The solar thermal Ivanpah Solar Power Facility lies in the California Mojave within eyeshot of the western-themed casinos of Primm, Nevada, and generates 400 kilowatts of energy. In our opinion, “The Ivanpah Solar Power Facility Is at Home in the Mojave Desert.” But “home” is complicated.

2) Some Social Distancing Habits Will Stick

Some of us already lived on Zoom before social distancing brought the rest of the world to that unglamorous and sterile meeting venue. Now that everybody else’s laptop cameras and microphones are also trained to meet us there, will they remain so once the virus is gone… or will people return to corporate conference rooms and freeway-convenient meeting centers with their stacks of sandwich boxes and a faithful Keurig slowly and noisily bleeding in the corner?

If this virus has indeed ended the traditional handshake, it’s hard to believe that people will return en masse to their old lives of flying across the country to sign an agreement, driving across town for a lunch meeting, or commuting thousands of collective miles to assemble a complete office staff every day. No doubt working and happy-houring in person has substantial benefits (efficient! collaborative! social! psychological!) but the efficiency of popping up a meeting window to meet with the Tbilisi, Georgia team an hour before a meeting with the Atlanta, Georgia team, cannot be denied.

On a bigger scale, will our new patterns be different enough to impact how many cars we will own, how we will invest in infrastructure, how commercial developments will be zoned and built, how concrete and steel will be distributed, how manufacturing and labor trends will trend?

In 2021, might we might see our species slow down and extract fewer resources from the ground, water, and air, for the first year in its modern history?

3) The Young Will Not Stand Idly By

The generation rising now through the unprecedented, destabilizing shock of a global pandemic has already cast off the “entitled” and “lazy” labels that older generations always love to throw at the young.

Greta Thunberg has stood out among them for the brilliant, brutally honest spotlight she shines on the condition of the world we’ll leave them. Her “How Dare You” speech at the UN Climate Summit last September and “Our House Is On Fire” speech the previous January at the World Economic Forum are devastating condemnations of the global community for our bureaucratic paralysis and collective lack of willpower. They should be required watching by any among us who find themselves flirting with a “go-slow,” passive approach to righting the ship of climate.

But she’s just one of many around the world who are combining a native understanding of modern media with youthful passion and a clear undiluted perspective on the world around them. There was already reason for hope in the willingness of thousands to risk detention for the climate strike; but now, as we are forced by circumstance to recognize the global and lethal nature of the threats we face, it is the young who are not as deeply entrenched in habit, not as likely to try to hang on to the comforts that we need to kiss goodbye in order to move forward. If this year’s protests are any guide, this generation may power us all past life as usual, while there is still time to preserve as much of the usual that we need.

Last month we mentioned young Ugandan activists working in this vanguard; later this summer we’ll assemble more young voices here as we continue to learn how to stop talking and listen to the people who are living the impact of climate change and leading the way out of it.