Joel Kotkin For most people around the world, the Covid-19 pandemic seems a great human tragedy, with deaths, bankruptcies, and fractured mental states. Yet for some, especially among the green Twitterati and in some policy shops, the pandemic presents a grand opportunity to enact permanent lockdowns on economic growth, population growth, and upward mobility. Pointing to reductions in greenhouse gases due to the lockdowns, some see the pandemic’s wreckage of much of the economy—including the mass destruction of businesses and family budgets—not as a plague of its own, but, as a British Climate Assembly put it, as a “test run” for a new climate-driven economy. “We have an ‘incredible responsibility’ to ‘actually converge the solutions—at least the financial solutions—to coronavirus to the financial solutions for climate,’” hyperbolized former U.N. Climate Chief and U.N. Paris pact architect Christiana Figueres, “‘because what we cannot afford to do is to jump out of the frying pan of Covid …