TIME - Justin Worland
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Sunrise over a power station in Adelaide, Australia, in 2019. City skies across the world have been clearer during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that’s unlikely to last. Trent Parke—Magnum Photos
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From our vantage point today, 2020 looks
like the year when an unknown virus spun out of control, killed
hundreds of thousands and altered the way we live day to day. In the
future, we may look back at 2020 as the year we decided to keep driving
off the climate cliff–or to take the last exit. Taking the threat
seriously would mean using the opportunity presented by this crisis to
spend on solar panels and wind farms, push companies being bailed out to
cut emissions and foster greener forms of transport in cities. If we
instead choose to fund new coal-fired power plants and oil wells and
thoughtlessly fire up factories to urge growth, we will lock in a
pathway toward climate catastrophe. There’s a divide about which way to
go.
In early April, as COVID-19 spread across the U.S.
and doctors urgently warned that New York City might soon run out of
ventilators and hospital beds, President Donald Trump gathered CEOs from
some of the country’s biggest oil and gas companies for a closed-door
meeting in the White House Cabinet Room. The industry faced its biggest
disruption in decades, and Trump wanted to help the companies secure
their place at the center of the 21st century American economy.
Everything was on the table, from a tariff on
imports to the U.S. government itself purchasing excess oil. “We’ll work
this out, and we’ll get our energy business back,” Trump told the CEOs.
“I’m with you 1,000%.” A few days later, he announced he had brokered a
deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman to cut oil production and rescue the industry.
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Art by Jill Pelto for TIME
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Later in April, Ursula von der Leyen, the president
of the European Commission, in a video message from across the
Atlantic, offered a different approach for the continent’s economic
future. A European Green Deal, she said, would be the E.U.’s “motor for
the recovery.”
“We can turn the crisis of this pandemic
into an opportunity to rebuild our economies differently,” she said. On
May 27, she pledged more than $800 billion to the initiative, promising
to
transform the way Europeans live.
For the past three years, the world outside the
U.S. has largely tried to ignore Trump’s retrograde position on climate,
hoping 2020 would usher in a new President with a new position,
re-enabling the cooperation between nations needed to prevent the worst
ravages of climate change. But there’s no more time to wait.
We’re standing at a climate crossroads: the world
has already warmed 1.1°C since the Industrial Revolution. If we pass
2°C, we risk hitting one or more major tipping points, where the effects
of climate change go from advancing gradually to changing dramatically
overnight, reshaping the planet. To ensure that we don’t pass that
threshold, we need to cut emissions in half by 2030. Climate change has
understandably fallen out of the public eye this year as the coronavirus
pandemic rages. Nevertheless, this year, or perhaps this year and next,
is likely to be the most pivotal yet in the fight against climate
change. “We’ve run out of time to build new things in old ways,” says
Rob Jackson, an earth system science professor at Stanford University
and the chair of the Global Carbon Project. What we do now will define
the fate of the planet–and human life on it–for decades.
The time frame for effective climate action was
always going to be tight, but the coronavirus pandemic has shrunk it
further. Scientists and policymakers expected the green transition to
occur over the next decade, but the pandemic has pushed 10 years of
anticipated investment in everything from power plants to roads into a
monthslong time frame. Countries have already spent $11 trillion to help
stem the economic damage from COVID-19. They could spend trillions
more. “It’s in this next six months that recovery strategies are likely
to be formulated and the path is set,” says Nicholas Stern, a former
World Bank chief economist known for his landmark 2006 report warning
that climate change could devastate the global economy.
We don’t know where the chips will fall: Will a
newfound respect for science and a fear of future shocks lead us to
finally wake up, or will the desire to return to normal overshadow the
threats lurking just around the corner?
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One of Los Angeles’ most crowded highway interchanges was nearly empty during rush hour on April 24. Stuart Palley
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We find ourselves on the brink of
climate catastrophe in large part because of the decisions made during a
past crisis. As the world came out of the Great Depression and World
War II, the U.S. launched a rapid bid to remake the global
economy–running on fossil fuels. In the first postwar years, Americans
moved to suburbs and began driving gas-guzzling cars to work, while the
federal government built a highway system to connect the country for
those vehicles. The single biggest line item in the Marshall Plan, the
U.S. government program that funded the European recovery, went to
support oil, which ensured that the continent’s economy would also run
on that fossil fuel. Meanwhile, plastic, an oil derivative, became the
go-to building block for consumer goods after the U.S. had developed
production capacity for use in World War II.
The underlying philosophy of economic development
in this time period was a focus on gross national product, a term
developed by U.S. government economists during the Depression, which
included consumption as a proxy for prosperity: the more we consume, the
better off we are, according to this model, which, in the postwar era,
the U.S. assiduously spread abroad. The promise of endless growth also
required an endless supply of oil to power factories, automobiles and
jet planes. In 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sealed a deal with
Ibn Saud, the first King of Saudi Arabia, trading security for access to
the country’s vast oil reserves. Every U.S. President since, implicitly
or explicitly, has continued that exchange.
The coronavirus pandemic is the most significant
disruption yet to the postwar fossil-fuel order. The global economy is
expected to contract more than 5% this year, according to the
International Monetary Fund (IMF). This is a challenge so big that it
has also created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change direction.
This moment comes just in time. In 2018, a landmark
report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.’s
climate-science body, warned that allowing the planet to warm any more
than 2°C above preindustrial levels would drive hundreds of millions of
people into poverty, destroy coral reefs and leave some countries unable
to adapt. A 2019 analysis in the journal Nature identified nine tipping
points–from the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet to the thawing
of Arctic permafrost–that the planet appears close to reaching, any one
of which might very well be triggered if warming exceeds 1.5°C. “Going
beyond 2°C is a very critical step,” says Johan Rockstrom, director of
the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, “not only in terms of
economic and human impact but also in terms of the stability of the
earth.”
To keep temperatures from rising past the 1.5°C
goal, we would need to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions 7.6% every
year for the next decade, according to a report from the U.N.
Environment Programme (UNEP). That’s about the level the COVID-19
pandemic will reduce emissions this year, but virtually no one thinks a
deadly pandemic and accompanying unemployment is a sustainable way to
halt climate change–and recessions are typically followed by sharp
rebounds in emissions.
To achieve the 1.5°C goal without creating mass
disruption has always meant thoughtfully restructuring the global
economy, moving it away from fossil-fuel extraction slowly but surely.
Scientists and economists agree this is the last opportunity we have to
do so. “If we delay further than 2020,” says Rockstrom, “there’s
absolutely no empirical evidence that it can be done in an orderly way.”
As of late June, countries had spent some $11
trillion on measures to halt the pandemic and stem its economic impact,
according to the IMF. Economists say that’s not enough, and countries
and central banks plan to keep doling out money to help the global
economy stay afloat. There are lots of things we could be buying with
that money that would make our lives better and protect us from climate
disaster. In recent months, leading institutions across the spectrum
have offered approaches that are varied in their specifics but generally
similar in philosophy: invest in greener infrastructure.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), for example,
calls for an annual $1 trillion investment in clean energy for the next
three years. At a cost of about 0.7% of global GDP, this would
represent a small portion of the funds spent to combat COVID-19 but
could be transformative. Expansion and modernization of electric grids
would allow for easier flow of renewable energy. Governments could buy
out gas-guzzling vehicles, pushing consumers to go electric. Homes and
buildings could be retrofitted to consume less energy.
This spending would also help solve the immediate
problem of lost jobs and economic stagnation by creating nearly 10
million jobs worldwide and increasing global GDP by 1.1%, meaning it
would add more to the economy than it costs. Importantly, green
investment would result in a slew of “co-benefits.” For example, some
rural communities would receive access to electricity for the first
time. For another, air pollution would decline all over the world. “If
governments do not make use of this opportunity, they may miss a very
important tool for the economic recovery,” says Fatih Birol, head of the
IEA.
But this moment is not just about opportunity; even
maintaining the status quo is dangerous. Research from the UNEP
released last year shows that if nations stick with current plans to
reduce emissions, global temperatures will rise more than 3°C by the end
of this century.
For the past five years, climate
advocates had positioned 2020 as critical in the fight against climate
change. Under the Paris Agreement, countries are required to submit new
plans to reduce emissions in 2020, and climate diplomats had planned a
series of meetings around the world this year to build momentum,
culminating with the U.N. climate conference in Glasgow, in November.
The Glasgow event was postponed a year, but the
coronavirus pandemic has created a new sort of momentum. Empty city
streets have been transformed into pedestrian space with cars banished,
and many cities say they’re not going back.
The oil industry has faced a reckoning,
with the U.S. benchmark price at one point in mid-April dropping into
negative territory and investors fleeing the industry; smaller firms
filing for bankruptcy; and some of its biggest players writing down
assets they say have lost their value.
With the writing beginning to appear on the wall,
many countries are starting to build a different world. In South Korea,
the newly re-elected government has promised a $10 billion Green New
Deal to invest in renewable energy and make public buildings energy
efficient. In Costa Rica, one of a few developing countries to commit to
eliminating their carbon footprint by 2050, leaders have created a new
fee on gasoline to fund social-welfare programs and are planning to
issue new green bonds to fund the next stage of climate adaptation
programs. Rwanda, which has a GDP of roughly $9 billion, has adopted an
$11 billion plan to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change, which
includes a push for buses, cars and motorcycles to go electric. “We
cannot afford to have the same mode of recovery, the same mode of doing
business, the same mode of economic activity,” says Juliet Kabera,
director general of the Rwanda Environment Management Authority.
International institutions are playing a critical
role nudging these countries. The IMF, which has said it “stands ready”
to use its $1 trillion lending capacity to stave off the effects of the
coronavirus pandemic, has made climate resilience a key criterion for
its lending. This has already paid dividends: some 50 nations, including
dozens of developing countries, committed in late June to address
climate change in their coronavirus recovery plans.
“It’s a great catalyst to think about building a
new world,” says Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado Quesada.
“Whatever we decide as a country or as a global community in the next
six or 10 or 12 months is going to determine what happens on the earth
for the next decade.”
Nowhere will such an approach have as large an
impact as in the E.U. When compared with countries, the bloc is the
world’s second largest economy and third largest emitter. Its pandemic
recovery will help achieve the proposed target of halving its emissions
in 10 years by spending $100 billion annually to make homes
energy-efficient, $28 billion to build renewable energy capacity and up
to $67 billion for zero-emissions trains. The European investment in
going green will hurt coal-mining jobs in places like Poland and the
Czech Republic, but the European recovery program will pay billions to
retrain the workers and transition them to other industries. The measure
awaits approval by the member countries, and the details are subject to
negotiation, but observers do not expect the direction of the policy to
change.
Other major players in the global economy, most
notably the U.S. and China, have not made as clear commitments to a
green-tinged recovery. Upcoming decisions in both of those countries,
which combined are responsible for nearly half of global emissions, are
urgent.
China is being pulled in two directions as it
develops a plan that will set the course of its development–and, by
extension, its emissions–for the next half decade. In March, as China’s
coronavirus epidemic began to subside, the nation’s powerful Politburo
Standing Committee, which is made up of senior leaders of the Communist
Party, including President Xi Jinping, endorsed a proposal to expedite
$1.4 trillion in spending on so-called “new infrastructure” that
includes electric-vehicle charging stations and high-speed rail, as well
as 5G technology, which wouldn’t cut emissions per se but would help
advance the country’s tech sector rather than its heavy industry,
stimulating economic growth with lower emissions.
But the degree of commitment to those green
recovery measures remains unclear. The Politburo Standing Committee’s
push is unfunded, leaving provincial governments to follow through. So
far, the evidence on the ground has not been encouraging. Local Chinese
governments have approved new coal-fired power plants this year at the
fastest clip since 2015–a surefire way to stimulate economic growth and
emissions. And the country is reportedly planning to ramp up production
of oil and natural gas. Demand has fallen, but cheaper oil and gas
typically stimulate the economy. Abroad, China continues to fund
emissions-intensive projects through its Belt and Road Initiative. In
Africa, for instance, China is financing new coal-fired power plants,
even as many international financial institutions have walked away from
the energy source.
External pressure is likely to force the issue, and
the E.U. is trying to offer just that. To push China and others along,
the bloc is crafting a new tax on imports from countries that aren’t
reducing emissions. Climate and trade are both currently being discussed
by officials behind the scenes and were planned to be on the top of the
agenda at a now postponed September summit between the E.U. and China.
“Europe is a very important market for the Chinese,” says Laurence
Tubiana, the CEO of the European Climate Foundation and a key architect
of the Paris Agreement. “China can be secured in its potential exports
to Europe by understanding that it can secure positive trade relations
by increasing its climate ambition.”
Still, when it comes to turning the climate ship
around, there’s no substitute for the U.S., and the country has already
missed opportunities. For example, before doling out bailout money,
France demanded that Air France stop operating emissions-intensive short
routes, and Austria forced Austrian Airlines to agree to cut its
emissions 30% by 2030. Contrast that with the U.S., where the government
decreed that to receive federal dollars, airlines could not drop any of
their destinations–even if that meant flying planes empty–and Congress
rejected an attempt from several Democratic Senators to attach green
strings to the airline bailout.
It’s hard to imagine anything substantive so long
as Trump is President. He and his GOP allies in Congress have an
effective stranglehold on any policy that could push the U.S. to
decarbonize, and thus far they have rejected big legislation to address
climate change–portraying it as “socialist” and part of the Green New
Deal that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party proposed last
year to the derision of Republicans. Instead, the Trump Administration
is reportedly preparing a $1 trillion infrastructure package focused on
roads and bridges. “If we label it green, that would actually probably
decrease its chances of being included,” said a Democratic congressional
aide who works on energy and climate.
So the future of U.S. emissions will likely fall to
the winner in the fall. Joe Biden, the former Vice President and
presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is well aware of the role
the pandemic recovery will play in shaping emissions. Biden oversaw the
last U.S. stimulus a decade ago in the midst of the Great Recession.
That package totaled nearly $800 billion, with $90 billion for
clean-energy measures, and helped launch many of America’s green
advances, including funding Tesla’s transformation from a boutique car
company to the world’s most valuable auto manufacturer; funding a
program that doubled the fuel efficiency of Daimler Trucks’ Freightliner
model; and supporting the weatherization of more than a million homes
to reduce residential energy consumption. That package created 900,000
jobs and turned a profit for the government, even as it suffered
high-profile failures like the collapse of the Solyndra solar-panel
company.
Last year, Biden released a proposed Green New
Deal, calling for $1.7 trillion in spending over 10 years on everything
from electric vehicles to reducing pollution in low-income
communities–all in service of the U.S.’s achieving net-zero emissions by
the middle of the century. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, Biden
has doubled down: he’s touted his Green New Deal and has appointed a
committee that includes both longtime Washington climate advocates like
former Secretary of State John Kerry and emerging leaders of the
Democratic progressive wing like current New York Congresswoman
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to craft new climate policy. Top congressional
Democrats, signaling support for a big climate package, unveiled a
500-page legislative road map on June 30 that includes tax incentives
and infrastructure spending to eliminate the country’s carbon footprint
by 2050. It won’t become law this year, but it sends a signal that the
issue will be on the legislative agenda if Biden wins in the fall.
“We’ve got to strike now. We can’t let this go,”
Biden said at a League of Conservation Voters virtual event on June 16.
“Not because of me but because of the opportunity.” Importantly, Biden
has promised to re-engage with the rest of the world on the issue,
including by helping fund climate measures in developing countries.
China wouldn’t be eligible to receive such funding, but the nation is
keeping a close eye on how U.S. climate policy is unfolding. China has
delayed several key decisions and signaled its intention to hold off
making new climate commitments until after the U.S. presidential
election. Even after three years of Trump’s tearing down the U.S.’s
global reputation on climate, it turns out the U.S. is still leading the
world. In what direction remains to be seen.
To many who study climate, the
pandemic looks eerily familiar. At first, the new virus seemed distant
and inconsequential to most people, so long as you weren’t in the eye of
the storm. The rest of the world watched in amazement as China shut
down Wuhan. Horror stories of patients dying in hallways in Milan
shocked the U.S., but not enough to make the nation prepare. In late
February, at the last Democratic primary debate before voting in the
critical state of South Carolina, moderators didn’t ask about the issue
until one hour and 15 minutes into the discussion, and spent less than
five minutes on it.
Researchers estimate that by the time the U.S.
collectively woke up to the stakes of the pandemic on March 11–the day
Tom Hanks said he tested positive, the NBA canceled its season and Trump
banned travelers from Europe–thousands of people had already been
infected in the country. In the few months since, more than half a
million people have died worldwide, including some 100,000 in the U.S.,
and there’s no sign we’ll be rid of the virus anytime soon.
The story of climate change has unfolded over
decades, but its trajectory is much the same. For years, we’ve watched
as the evidence has grown. We’ve gaped as superstorms have battered the
globe from Bangkok to Houston and unprecedented heat waves have popped
up, killing a few thousand here and there. As I write this, it’s 100°F
in Siberia, and wildfires are raging in an area infamous for its
yearlong ice. “These are the warning signs” of cataclysmic climate
change, says Gail Whiteman, a professor at Lancaster University who runs
an Arctic research program.
If Wuhan and Milan offered a preview of what the
U.S. is now experiencing with COVID-19, where should the country look
for a glimpse of a climate-changed world? Last year, I traveled to Fiji
and found that for many of those living on the small Pacific Islands, on
the front lines of brutal storms and sea-level rise,
climate change is already the defining issue.
If a storm destroys a school, students can’t learn. If the sugarcane
crops are flooded, farmers lose their jobs. If sea levels rise too much,
entire communities disappear. Climate concerns are at the center of
their economies and the center of their development plans.
“This can’t be the purview of even 25,000 or 40,000
or even 100,000 people,” says Christiana Figueres, who led the U.N.
climate-change body during the Paris climate talks. “This has got to
permeate through every single corner, every single channel, every single
flow of economic development and modernization. It’s got to become the
new norm.”
That will come one way or another. Every country
will be combatting climate change for the foreseeable future; the change
in climate we’re experiencing today is in large part the result of
emissions that happened more than a decade ago. However, we do have a
choice of how bad it will get. If we invest in preserving nature and
transitioning our energy system today, we will stave off the worst,
giving us the ability to manage the hurricanes and floods as they come.
If we wait, we’ll be stuck flat-footed when the worst arrives, watching
in dismay as the temperature curve ticks up and up.
The choice is ours. We just don’t have much time to decide.
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