Covid-19 Reminded Us of the Most Powerful Weapons in the Fight Against Climate Change
The dismal planning failures can’t be repeated if we want to survive on this planet
Los Angeles, California, April 14, 2020. Photo: David McNew/Getty Images
In March, global emissions dropped as a result of Covid-19 shutdown orders. Carbon emissions dropped by as much as 17% in some countries, scientists reported, because so many of us weren’t on the road. People celebrated clear skies in normally smog-filled cities like Los Angeles and Beijing. Some claimed the planet was healing itself.
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At the time, I wondered: Was this a temporary blip or something that could actually change our approach to climate change in the future? In an ideal world, Covid-19 would show us how much we could live without consuming fossil fuels and maybe even convince us to pass legislation to stop using them sooner than 2030 or 2050.
In May, I asked people working on the front lines of the climate crisis what we could learn about handling climate change from Covid-19 shutdowns. They said that the decline in emissions we were seeing was just a brief dip. As ever, we needed long-term shifts in environmental policy to address the climate crisis. The federal response to Covid-19, much like its handling of the climate crisis, was insufficient in that elected leaders denied the severity of the crisis and failed to prepare the public for it by wavering on masks and failing to send adequate PPE to states.
“We have now seen emissions more or less fully return to pre-pandemic levels, which is sad.”
“In this moment, we don’t have a government response [to either Covid-19 and the climate crisis] that’s adequately rising to the level of chaos that is happening,” Sofie Karasek, a spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate action organization, told me in May.
Now, the pandemic is poised to reach into 2021, and parts of the United States have moved back into shutdown. From where we stand, emissions appear to be in a slightly better state: Carbon and nitrogen dioxide emissions, created by burning fossil fuels, continued to decline from February to December. In August, a Nature Communications study showed that global carbon dioxide emissions dropped 8.8% in the first half of this year. In November, NASA researchers used modeling to show that global nitrogen dioxide emissions dropped by nearly 20% since February, compared to what would be expected in a “business as usual” year.
Despite these encouraging statistics, it’s important to remember: We are still in the middle of a climate crisis. The first Covid-19 vaccines are being administered and may mark the beginning of the end of shutdowns, and when pandemic-related restrictions lift, we will see a return to normal levels of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.
Christoph Keller, PhD, an atmospheric and climate scientist at NASA who led the agency’s study of nitrogen dioxide emissions, tells Future Human that nitrogen dioxide pollution levels have “steadily recovered after the sharp initial declines following the lockdowns.” They’re still 10%–20% lower than expected in many areas of the country, though, “suggesting that emissions have not yet fully returned back to normal.”
The case is the same with carbon emissions. Despite the mitigating effect of shutdowns, by July “the pandemic’s effect on global emissions had diminished,” according to the Nature Communications study. While preliminary data published last week in Earth System Science Data showed that global carbon emissions dropped 7% for the year, Lesley Ott, PhD, a research meteorologist at NASA who didn’t work on that study, tells Future Human that this dip is small and temporary. “Carbon dioxide continues to increase in the atmosphere, but at a slightly lower rate than we would have expected in a non-pandemic year.”
Daniel Kammen, PhD, associate professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, tells Future Human that “we have now seen [daily global] emissions more or less fully return to pre-pandemic levels, which is sad.”
Now, at least 18 of the world’s biggest economies are investing heavily in fossil fuel companies in an attempt to recover from the pandemic, The Guardian reported in November. These heavy investments include bailouts for oil companies or spending on infrastructure projects that consume high amounts of carbon, all written into Covid-19 recovery bills. According to The Guardian’s analysis, these investments will outweigh any positive impacts of any green spending in Covid-19 recovery bills.
Activists and scholars like Karasek and Kammen advocated for the opposite to happen as early as May. They called for policies and spending that would create millions of green jobs and more government investment in solar energy. Though they got some of that — like investments in green transportation and clean energy — much more was spent on fossil fuel companies.
Sadly, as we look back on the positive changes humans made and erased this year, it seems like the pandemic won’t leave a lasting impact on climate change. Over 1.6 million people died of the coronavirus over the last year and despite a brief historic drop in emissions this year will likely go down as the hottest on record. As Karasek said, the link between Covid-19 and climate change is that we don’t have government responses to either crisis that are sufficient.
That will change once Joe Biden is in office, Kammen says, as the president-elect has promised to listen to scientists on matters of public health and the environment. “Biden’s commitment to an administration that… listens to science is the biggest benefit and gift to a world that must fight climate change with all the tools we can,” he says. “The Biden-Harris science and justice first strategy is absolutely what we need, and what we owe to low-income Americans and to the international community.”
Biden’s platform promises massive investments in renewable energy, green infrastructure and jobs, and environmental justice, though his plan is far from perfect. He’s facing major opposition in Congress to his pledge to end subsidies to oil and gas companies, and he’s already angered climate justice activists by appointing Cedric Richmond (D-LA), who’s taken donations from the fossil fuel industry, to lead the Office of Public Engagement.
So things may improve sooner rather than later on the Covid-19 front, and Biden’s environmental policies are for sure an improvement on Trump’s (which is to say, he has policies other than deregulating industries). But like environmental justice activist Dallas Goldtooth told Future Human in November, voters will likely have to hold Biden accountable for his campaign promises on climate and the environment in order to see them materialize.
And he’s right. Elected officials at all levels of the U.S. government wavered between enacting restrictions to mitigate the coronavirus and reopening the economy, even after watching other countries like China, Italy, Spain, and New Zealand squash the virus by imposing tough shutdown measures. That goes for elected officials across the political spectrum — not only President Trump and Republicans. As a result, over 300,000 Americans died this year of Covid-19, and that number is climbing.
We couldn’t save ourselves, and we still can’t. If this year is a test case for how much we can rein in dangerous behavior in order to save ourselves, the United States failed.
