Lethal Heating

28/03/2020

Here’s What The Coronavirus Pandemic Can Teach Us About Tackling Climate Change

The Conversation - Natasha Chassagne

James Ross/AAP

Dr Natasha Chassagne is a University Associate, University of Tasmania.
Dr Chassagne holds an undergraduate with Honours in International Studies from the University of South Australia and a Master's in International Law & International Relations from the University of New South Wales.
She is currently writing a book titled 'Buen Vivir as an Alternative to Sustainable Development: Lessons from Ecuador', to be published by Routledge later this year.

Every aspect of our lives has been affected by the coronavirus. The global economy has slowed, people have retreated to their homes and thousands have died or become seriously ill.

At this frightening stage of the crisis, it’s difficult to focus on anything else. But as the International Agency has said, the effects of coronavirus are likely to be temporary but the other global emergency – climate change – is not.

Stopping the spread of coronavirus is paramount, but climate action must also continue. And we can draw many lessons and opportunities from the current health crisis when tackling planetary warming.

Action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions must not be compromised by the coronavirus pandemic. EPA/MAST IRHAM

A ‘degrowing’ economy
S&P Global Ratings this week said measures to contain COVID-19 have pushed the global economy into recession.

Economic analyst Lauri Myllyvirta estimates the pandemic may have reduced global emissions by 200 megatonnes of carbon dioxide to date, as air travel grinds to a halt, factories close down and energy demand falls.

In the first four weeks of the pandemic, coal consumption in China alone fell by 36%, and oil refining capacity reduced by 34%.

In many ways, what we’re seeing now is a rapid and unplanned version of economic “degrowth” – the transition some academics and activists have for decades said is necessary to address climate change, and leave a habitable planet for future generations.

Degrowth is a proposed slowing of growth in sectors that damage the environment, such as fossil fuel industries, until the economy operates within Earth’s limits. It is a voluntary, planned and equitable transition in developed nations which necessarily involves an increased focus on the environment, human well-being, and capabilities (good health, decent work, education, and a safe and healthy environment).

Such a transformation would be profound, and so far no nation has shown the will to implement it. It would require global economies to “decouple” from carbon to prevent climate-related crises. But the current unintended economic slowdown opens the door to such a transition, which would bring myriad benefits to the climate.

The idea of sustainable degrowth is very different to a recession. It involves scaling back environmentally damaging sectors of the economy, and strengthening others.

Reduced air travel is helping drive global emissions down. James Gourley/AAP

A tale of two emergencies
Climate change has been declared a global emergency, yet to date the world has largely failed to address it. In contrast, the global policy response to the coronavirus emergency has been fast and furious.

There are several reasons for this dramatic difference. Climate change is a relatively slow-moving crisis, whereas coronavirus visibly escalates over days, even hours, increasing our perception of the risks involved. One thing that history teaches us about politics and the human condition in times of peril, we often take a “crisis management” approach to dealing with serious threats.

As others have observed, the slow increase in global temperatures means humans can psychologically adjust as the situation worsens, making the problem seem less urgent and meaning people are less willing to accept drastic policy measures.

The human ability to adapt to climate change can make it seem less urgent. CHAMILA KARUNARATHNE/EPA

Key lessons from coronavirus
The global response to the coronavirus crisis shows that governments can take immediate, radical emergency measures, which go beyond purely economic concerns, to protect the well-being of all.

Specifically, there are practical lessons and opportunities we can take away from the coronavirus emergency as we seek to tackle climate change:

Act early: The coronavirus pandemic shows the crucial importance of early action to prevent catastrophic consequences. Governments in Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore acted quickly to implement quarantine and screening measures, and have seen relatively small numbers of infections. Italy, on the other hand, whose government waited too long to act, is now the epicentre of the virus.

Go slow, go local: Coronavirus has forced an immediate scale-down of how we travel and live. People are forging local connections, shopping locally, working from home and limiting consumption to what they need.

Researchers have identified that fears about personal well-being represent a major barrier to political support for the degrowth movement to date. However with social distancing expected to be in place for months, our scaled-down lives may become the “new normal”. Many people may realise that consumption and personal well-being are not inextricably linked.

Stimulus spending should be directed to clean energy. EPA

New economic thinking is needed. A transition to sustainable degrowth can help. We need to shift global attention from GDP as an indicator of well-being, towards other measures that put people and the environment first, such as New Zealand’s well-being budget, Bhutan’s gross national happiness index, or Ecuador’s social philosophy of buen vivir (good living).

Spend on clean energy: The International Energy Agency (IEA) says clean energy should be “at the heart of stimulus plans to counter the coronavirus crisis”.

The IEA has called on governments to launch sustainable stimulus packages focused on clean energy technologies. It says hydrogen and carbon-capture also need major investment to bring them to scale, which could be helped by the current low interest rates.

Governments could also use coronavirus stimulus packages to reskill workers to service the new “green” economy, and address challenges in healthcare, sanitation, aged care, food security and education.

More people are shopping locally during the pandemic. AAP/STEFAN POSTLES

Looking ahead
As climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe said this month:

What really matters is the same for all of us. It’s the health and safety of our friends, our family, our loved ones, our communities, our cities and our country. That’s what the coronavirus threatens, and that’s exactly what climate change does, too.

The coronavirus crisis is devastating, but failing to tackle climate change because of the pandemic only compounds the tragedy. Instead, we must draw on the lessons of coronavirus to address the climate challenge.

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(US) The Analogy Between Covid-19 And Climate Change Is Eerily Precise

Wired - Gilad Edelman

First deny the problem, then say the solution is too expensive? The playbook here is all too familiar.

Photograph: SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP/Getty Images

Gilad Edelman is WIRED's politics writer, based in Washington, D.C. Before that, he was executive editor of the Washington Monthly. He has a degree from Yale Law School.

For a brief moment there, it looked as though the coronavirus pandemic might escape the muck of partisanship.

It’s true that President Donald Trump, wary of a recession during a reelection year, had first tried to talk the virus into submission. His counterfactual insistence that the situation was under control did nothing to slow the viral spread through February and early March. It did, however, seem to influence the party faithful, as polls showed Republican voters were taking the pandemic far less seriously than Democrats. In other words, the facts of Covid-19 were already politicized. As I suggested last week, it looked as though this process were unfolding just as it had for climate change—but at 1,000x speed.

Then Trump began to shift his message. Suddenly he seemed to grasp the need for drastic measures (while claiming that he’d never hinted otherwise). The White House started repeating the advice from public health experts: Social distancing would be necessary, maybe through the end of summer. In my last piece, I wondered if this new acceptance of reality might keep an epistemic crisis from developing. Perhaps Americans would coalesce into a common understanding of this public health disaster.

But coronavirus denialism wasn’t in remission; it was only mutating. After a weekend of reported clashes among economic and health officials in the White House, and a spate of skeptical op-eds musing on whether social distancing was really worth its economic cost, Trump laid out a new approach by presidential tweet: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”

By Monday evening, Trump was promising to wrap up social distancing in weeks, not months. “I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” he declared on Tuesday, during a virtual town hall on Fox News. Meanwhile, a rising chorus of Trump followers have been suggesting that some folks will simply have to die to save the economy. “Let's get back to living,” Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick of Texas told Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “Those of us who are 70-plus, we'll take care of ourselves. But don't sacrifice the country.” Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University announced that it’s expecting students and faculty to return from spring break. “Even if we all get sick, I would rather die than kill the country,” said right-wing talk host Glenn Beck. “Because it’s not the economy that’s dying, it’s the country.”

The parallel to climate change, in other words, was even tighter than I realized.

“We went through the stages of climate change denial in the matter of a week,” said Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, who studies how misinformation spreads. Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science who has studied the origins of climate disinformation, spelled out the pattern in an email: “First, one denies the problem, then one denies its severity, and then one says it is too difficult or expensive to fix, and/or that the proposed solution threatens our freedom.”

These strategies, Oreskes explained, can exist side by side, depending on the context. The crudest skeptics, like the snowball-wielding senator from Oklahoma, Jim Inhofe, still deny the phenomenon itself: Humans aren’t warming the planet, look how cold it is outside! More sophisticated players, confronting a tidal wave of scientific data, may accept that the Earth is warming, but they argue that the ill effects are overstated and incommensurate with the costs of aggressive action. As a Wall Street Journal op-ed from 2017 put it, the economic damage one might expect from climate change “does not justify policies that cost more than 0.1 percentage point of growth.”

Now we’re faced with the threat of another global catastrophe arising from the clash of nature and modern human activity. As with climate change, the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic are difficult to predict with confidence. As with climate change, the uncertainty interval encompasses utter cataclysm. As with climate change, any serious effort to mitigate or stave off this disaster will require major economic disruptions. And, as with climate change, such efforts to save the world must be put in place before any of the experts’ doomsday warnings could ever be proved true.

So we see the same pattern of skeptical response from Republican elites. Whether it’s driven by self-interest (corporate profits, a president’s hopes of reelection) or by small government ideology, the approach sends a powerful signal to the party’s voters. If you take this problem seriously, you must be one of them, not us.

“The climate change issue has been transformed into a badge of who people think they are,” said Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist and environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “So if you’re a good card-carrying Republican in the Midwest, then you’d better be against that climate change stuff. And if you're a West Coast liberal, or you live in Boulder, like me, of course you support fighting climate change.” When scientific questions become political issues, he added, people’s beliefs become statements of identity. “To some extent we see that with the coronavirus.”

This partisan bubble effect is only amplified by the situation on the ground, where the distribution of infections has been anything but politically neutral. The worst-hit areas so far are deep blue cities in deep blue states: Seattle and New York, as well as San Francisco. For that reason, Pielke holds out hope that the coronavirus debate might not devolve completely into partisan identity signaling. “I’m not ready to say this fits our conventional motivated reasoning model of Republicans and Democrats that we’ve seen on other issues,” he said. As the disease spreads and hits its peak in different places, the impact of direct experience could overwhelm the power of identity.

There is some early evidence for this: A daily tracking poll by Civiqs shows a pronounced rise in concern among Republican voters over the past two weeks. On the other hand, the increase doesn’t directly track the spread of Covid-19: Republican voters in Wyoming (29 confirmed cases), for example, express far more concern than those in Wisconsin (more than 400 cases).

There’s a lot riding on the outcome of this looming clash between partisanship and reality. At minimum, the politicization of pandemic makes it even harder to evaluate the costs and benefits of the radical policy prescriptions currently on the table. (This is perhaps even harder than it is with climate change: None of the leading proposals to address global warming involves tanking the national economy and launching millions into unemployment.) Debates in good faith will be impossible if positions harden into partisan commitments, and social distancing won’t work very well if Trump keeps urging Americans to get back out there, and half the country listens.

It’s frightening to think what the pattern of climate denial means for the coronavirus crisis. But it might be even more terrifying to think what the pattern of coronavirus denial means for the climate crisis. If a plea to sacrifice human life for the sake of the economy becomes Republican dogma, this does not bode well for our ability to handle the even greater threat of rising temperatures around the world. After all, the worst effects of global warming are still decades away. Our elderly ruling class, and the elderly voters who elect them, may be dead and gone by the time Miami is underwater. But those same old folks are precisely the ones who are most at risk from Covid-19.

“I think what [all this] illustrates is the depth of the problem we’re facing with climate change,” said Pennycook of the University of Regina. “If we can’t get bipartisan agreement on a global pandemic that’s presently spreading, it’s making me less optimistic that we’ll ever see any change on people’s attitudes toward climate change until it’s too late.”

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$2tn US Coronavirus Relief Comes Without Climate Stipulations

The Guardian - Emily Holden

Airlines get $60bn bailout, but Pelosi’s proposal on halving of emissions by 2050 not included

American Airlines aircraft at Ronald Reagan Washington national airport, Arlington, Virginia. The US aviation industry is to receive $60bn in the government’s coronavirus relief package. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

A $2tn US coronavirus relief package will dole out billions to struggling airlines and offer low-interest loans that fossil fuel companies could compete for – without requiring any action to stem the climate crisis.

The legislation, passed by the Senate late on Wednesday, includes a $60bn bailout for airlines. Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrat-controlled House, had proposed a requirement for airlines to cut their planet-warming emissions in half by 2050, but that provision is not in the bill.

The House is expected to vote on the package on Friday. It also includes nearly $500bn in lending authority that one environment group, Friends of the Earth, called a “corporate slush fund with insufficient guardrails to protect workers, taxpayers and the climate”.

Congressional Republicans have accused Democrats of taking advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to pursue climate policy. The Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said this week that Democrats were “bargaining as usual” with “counter-offers that demanded things like new emission standards or tax credits for solar panels”. Multiple Republican politicians tweeted accusing Democrats of trying to usher in a Green New Deal with massive climate spending during a crisis.

In the end, the stimulus package focused on direct aid to individuals and the worst-hit industries, while setting climate considerations aside.

Annie Petsonk, international counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, said that while the situation for airlines and their workers was dire, the industry should have had to commit to slashing emissions as a condition of the aid.

“The provisions we were focused on simply would hold the airlines to what they already said they’re going to do,” Petsonk said. “People do not want to solve one crisis by making another crisis worse.” The 2008 auto industry bailout, in comparison, led to stricter rules for pollution from vehicle tailpipes.

The bill, the third in a series of stimulus packages, offers virtually nothing to climate advocates, but it is not the last word. Scott Segal, a lawyer and lobbyist with the firm Bracewell LLC, which represents energy industry clients, said a fourth stimulus deal was likely to involve “significant discussions of green objectives”.

“Was this a missed opportunity for climate? I think the answer to that is no,” Segal said. “This stimulus package was primarily about getting money into the hands of individual households and workers and in some service sectors that were particularly hurt.”

Kevin Book, the managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a research firm, said: “Congress is going to be making more deals, and as long as there is a deal to be made, Democrats have made clear what they want.”

Democrats negotiated multiple measures meant to prevent abuse of the $500bn available in lending, including an oversight board, a special inspector general and provisions aimed at limiting Donald Trump’s businesses from benefiting – an issue that has already come under scrutiny.

But climate hawks said those stipulations were not strong enough. “What makes this so frightening is that there are very few binding restrictions on how this money can be used that the secretary of treasury cannot waive,” said Lukas Ross, a senior policy analyst with Friends of the Earth.

“It’s great that [Trump’s son-in-law ] Jared Kushner isn’t going to get a subsidised line of credit. It’s much more worrying in human terms that Chevron, Exxon and every other polluter you can imagine is eligible to be propped up in terms of the stimulus package.”

The bill also does not include specific assistance to the renewable energy industry, although trade associations and lobbyists expect to revisit that possibility as discussions continue about more targeted aid for at-risk sectors of the economy.

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) projects that the US wind industry could lose 35,000 jobs and $35bn in investment. Those losses could lead to lease payment and tax revenue reductions for local and state governments. No tax credit extensions have been granted for the solar and wind industries, meaning they may lose access to credits if they miss deadlines.

“Obviously of primary importance is the public health and keeping the economy moving. We applaud that big effort,” said Tom Kiernan, the chief executive of the AWEA, adding that his group would continue to push for tax provisions to stem industry losses.

The Solar Energy Industries Association said the solar sector could lose half its jobs, meaning “125,000 families who will no longer receive a paycheck”.

Abigail Ross Hopper, its president and CEO, said: “Legislators were really focused on industry-wide protections and assistance, like the unemployment insurance, like the loans for which our companies are eligible, and did not include industry-specific solutions for a couple of particularly hard hit ones.”

In one climate win for Democrats, the bill does not include a discussed $3bn to buy oil to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to lift global oil prices.

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27/03/2020

Coronavirus: 'Nature Is Sending Us A Message’, Says UN Environment Chief

The Guardian - Damian Carrington

Exclusive: Destruction of wildlife and the climate crisis is hurting humanity, with Covid-19 a ‘clear warning shot’, say experts

A tree stands alone in a logged area prepared for plantation near Lapok in Malaysia’s Sarawak State. Photograph: Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images

Nature is sending us a message with the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis, according to the UN’s environment chief, Inger Andersen.

Andersen said humanity was placing too many pressures on the natural world with damaging consequences, and warned that failing to take care of the planet meant not taking care of ourselves.

Leading scientists also said the Covid-19 outbreak was a “clear warning shot”, given that far more deadly diseases existed in wildlife, and that today’s civilisation was “playing with fire”.

They said it was almost always human behaviour that caused diseases to spill over into humans.

To prevent further outbreaks, the experts said, both global heating and the destruction of the natural world for farming, mining and housing have to end, as both drive wildlife into contact with people.

They also urged authorities to put an end to live animal markets – which they called an “ideal mixing bowl” for disease – and the illegal global animal trade.

Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said the immediate priority was to protect people from the coronavirus and prevent its spread. “But our long-term response must tackle habitat and biodiversity loss,” she added.

“Never before have so many opportunities existed for pathogens to pass from wild and domestic animals to people,” she told the Guardian, explaining that 75% of all emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife.

“Our continued erosion of wild spaces has brought us uncomfortably close to animals and plants that harbour diseases that can jump to humans.”

She also noted other environmental impacts, such as the Australian bushfires, broken heat records and the worst locust invasion in Kenya for 70 years. “At the end of the day, [with] all of these events, nature is sending us a message,” Anderson said.

“There are too many pressures at the same time on our natural systems and something has to give,” she added.

“We are intimately interconnected with nature, whether we like it or not. If we don’t take care of nature, we can’t take care of ourselves. And as we hurtle towards a population of 10 billion people on this planet, we need to go into this future armed with nature as our strongest ally.”

An orangutan seeks refuge from a bulldozer as loggers smash the base of a tree in the Ketapang district, West Borneo. Photograph: International Animal Rescue

Human infectious disease outbreaks are rising and in recent years there have been Ebola, bird flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), Rift Valley fever, sudden acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), West Nile virus and Zika virus all cross from animals to humans.

“The emergence and spread of Covid-19 was not only predictable, it was predicted [in the sense that] there would be another viral emergence from wildlife that would be a public health threat,” said Prof Andrew Cunningham, of the Zoological Society of London.

A 2007 study of the 2002-03 Sars outbreak concluded: “The presence of a large reservoir of Sars-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a timebomb.”

Cunningham said other diseases from wildlife had much higher fatality rates in people, such as 50% for Ebola and 60%-75% for Nipah virus, transmitted from bats in south Asia.

“Although, you might not think it at the moment, we’ve probably got a bit lucky with [Covid-19],” he said. “So I think we should be taking this as a clear warning shot. It’s a throw of the dice.”

Wild animals sold at the Wuhan Huanan seafood market in China, linked to first cases of the coronavirus pandemic. Photograph: Courtesy of SAM小K/Weibo

“It’s almost always a human behaviour that causes it and there will be more in the future unless we change,” said Cunningham.

Markets butchering live wild animals from far and wide are the most obvious example, he said. A market in China is believed to have been the source of Covid-19.

“The animals have been transported over large distances and are crammed together into cages.

They are stressed and immunosuppressed and excreting whatever pathogens they have in them,” he said.

“With people in large numbers in the market and in intimate contact with the body fluids of these animals, you have an ideal mixing bowl for [disease] emergence.

"If you wanted a scenario to maximise the chances of [transmission], I couldn’t think of a much better way of doing it.”

China has banned such markets, and Cunningham said this must be permanent.

“However, this needs to be done globally. There are wet markets throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa and a lot of other Asian countries too.”

The ease of travel in the modern world exacerbates the dangers, he said, adding: “These days, you can be in a central African rainforest one day and in central London the next.”

Aaron Bernstein, at the Harvard School of Public Health in the US, said the destruction of natural places drives wildlife to live close to people and that climate change was also forcing animals to move: “That creates an opportunity for pathogens to get into new hosts.”

“We’ve had Sars, Mers, Covid-19, HIV. We need to see what nature is trying to tell us here. We need to recognise that we’re playing with fire,” he said.

“The separation of health and environmental policy is a dangerous delusion. Our health entirely depends on the climate and the other organisms we share the planet with.”

The billion-dollar illegal wildlife trade is another part of the problem, said John Scanlon, the former secretary general of the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

Thousands of frozen pangolins lie in a pit before being burnt in Indonesia, after a pangolin bust conducted by the police. Photograph: Paul Hilton/WCS

“Importing countries should create a new legal obligation, supported by criminal sanctions, for an importer of wildlife to prove that it was legally obtained under the source country’s national laws,” he said.

“If we can blend taking a hard line against transnational organised wildlife criminals, while also opening up new opportunities for local communities, then we will see biodiversity, ecosystems and communities thrive.”

The Covid-19 crisis may provide an opportunity for change, but Cunningham is not convinced it will be taken: “I thought things would have changed after Sars, which was a massive wake up call – the biggest economic impact of any emerging disease to that date,” he said.

“Everybody was up in arms about it. But it went away, because of our control measures. Then there was a huge sigh of relief and it was back to business as usual. We cannot go back to business as usual.”

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How Changes Brought On By Coronavirus Could Help Tackle Climate Change

The Conversation - Glen Peters

David Sasaki/Flickr

Glen Peters is Research Director, Center for International Climate and Environment Research, Oslo

Stock markets around the world had some of their worst performance in decades this past week, well surpassing that of the global financial crisis in 2008. Restrictions in the free movement of people is disrupting economic activity across the world as measures to control the coronavirus roll out.
There is a strong link between economic activity and global carbon dioxide emissions, due to the dominance of fossil fuel sources of energy. This coupling suggests we might be in for an unexpected surprise due to the coronavirus pandemic: a slowdown of carbon dioxide emissions due to reduced energy consumption.
Based on new projections for economic growth in 2020, we suggest the impact of the coronavirus might significantly curb global emissions.
The effect is likely to be less pronounced than during the global financial crisis (GFC). And emissions declines in response to past economic crises suggest a rapid recovery of emissions when the pandemic is over.
But prudent spending of economic stimulus measures, and a permanent adoption of new work behaviours, could influence how emissions evolve in future.

Global fossil CO2 emissions (vertical axis) have grown together with economic activity (horizontal axis) over extended periods of time. Glen Peters/CICERO

The world in crisis
In just a few short months, millions of people have been put into quarantine and regions locked down to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. Around the world events are being cancelled and travel plans dropped. A growing number of universities, schools and workplaces have closed and some workers are choosing to work from home if they can.
Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has cancelled a critically important meeting and will instead hold it virtually.
The International Energy Agency had already predicted oil use would drop in 2020, and this was before an oil price war emerged between Saudi Arabia and Russia.
The unprecedented coronavirus lockdown in China led to an estimated 25% reduction in energy use and emissions over a two-week period compared to previous years (mostly due to a drop in electricity use, industrial production and transport). This is enough to shave one percentage point growth off China’s emissions in 2020. Reductions are also being observed in Italy, and are likely to spread across Europe as lockdowns become more widespread.
The emission-intensive airline industry, covering 2.6% of global carbon dioxide emissions (both national and international), is in freefall. It may take months, if not years, for people to return to air travel given that coronavirus may linger for several seasons.
Given these economic upheavals, it is becoming increasingly likely that global carbon dioxide emissions will drop in 2020.

Global air travel is down significantly as a result of the pandemic. Andy Rain/EPA

Coronavirus is not the GFC
Leading authorities have revised down economic forecasts as a result of the pandemic, but so far forecasts still indicate the global economy will grow in 2020. For example, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) downgraded estimates of global growth in 2020 from 3% (made in November 2019) to 2.4% (made in March 2020). The International Monetary Fund has indicated similar declines, with an update due next month.Assuming the carbon efficiency of the global economy improves in line with the 10-year average of 2.5% per year, the OECD’s post-coronavirus growth projection implies carbon dioxide emissions may decline 0.3% in 2020 (including a leap year adjustment).But the GFC experience indicates that the carbon efficiency of the global economy may improve much more slowly during a crisis. If this happens in 2020 because of the coronavirus, carbon dioxide emissions still could grow.

A decomposition of CO2 emissions growth into economic growth (orange) and carbon efficiency improvements (green) to estimate future emissions based on OECD economic growth projections. Glen Peters/CICERO

Under the worst-case OECD forecast the global economy in 2020 could grow as little as 1.5%. All else equal, we calculate this would lead to a 1.2% decline in carbon dioxide emissions in 2020.
This drop is comparable to the GFC, which in 2009 led to a 0.1% drop in global GDP and a 1.2% drop in emissions. So far, neither the OECD or International Monetary Fund have suggested coronavirus will take global GDP into the red.

The emissions rebound
The GFC prompted big, swift stimulus packages from governments around the world, leading to a 5.1% rebound in global emissions in 2010, well above the long-term average.
Previous financial shocks, such as the collapse of the former Soviet Union or the 1970s and 1980s oil crises, also had periods with lower or negative growth, but growth soon returned. At best, a financial crisis delays emissions growth a few years. Structural changes may happen, such as the shift to nuclear energy after the oil crises, but evidence suggests emissions continue to grow.

Global fossil CO2 emissions (in Gigatons or billions of tonnes of CO2) and carbon intensity of world Gross Domestic Product (grams of CO2 per $US, 2000), with the most important financial crises. Global Carbon Project

The economic legacy of the coronavirus might also be very different to the GFC. It looks more like a slow burner, with a drop in productivity over an extended period rather than widespread job losses in the short term.

Looking to the future
The coronavirus pandemic will not turn around the long-term upward trend in global emissions. But governments around the world are announcing economic stimulus measures, and they way they’re spent may affect how emissions evolve in future.There is an opportunity to invest the stimulus money in structural changes leading to reduced emissions after economic growth returns, such as further development of clean technologies.

Fewer people are expected to use public transport during the coronavirus outbreak. Steven Saphore/AAP

Also, the coronavirus has forced new working-from-home habits that limit commuting, and a broader adoption of online meetings to reduce the need for long-haul business flights. This raises the prospect of long-term emissions reductions should these new work behaviours persist beyond the current global emergency.
The coronavirus is, of course, an international crisis, and a personal tragedy for those who have lost, and will lose, loved ones. But with good planning, 2020 could be the year that global emissions peak (though the same was said after the GFC).
That said, past economic shocks might not be a great analogue for the coronavirus pandemic, which is unprecedented in modern human history and has a long way to go.

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5 Lessons From Coronavirus That Will Help Us Tackle Climate Change

TIME - Christiana Figueres

An empty road is seen during a nationwide curfew in response to the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in Mumbai, India on March 22, 2020. Himanshu Bhatt—NurPhoto/Getty Images

Christiana Figueres

Christiana Figueres was executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from 2010 to 2016.
She is the co-founder of Global Optimism, co-host of the podcast “Outrage & Optimism” and is the co-author of the recently published book, “The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis.”

Could the devastating impact of the new coronavirus pandemic destroy the momentum that the climate movement has built up over the last year? Some say so, fearing that the economic fallout will push climate down the list of priorities for governments, and that travel restrictions will force a delay to the U.N. climate conference.

That can’t happen. What brought us to this point of unprecedented interest in taking climate action is climate change itself. We have witnessed huge, record-breaking fires and floods, from California to Siberia, all in the space of one year. Sadly those negative impacts will continue, both in frequency and intensity. If we thought we could forget about it, I’m sad to say, nature will remind us.

In fact, I believe the last few weeks, as terrible as they have been for so many people, have taught us crucial lessons that we needed to learn in order to enter a new era of radical, collaborative action to cut emissions and slow climate change. Like everyone else, I can’t believe we’ve learned these five lessons in a matter of days.

Global challenges have no national borders. Some people used to think that they would be immune to global crises like climate change unfolding “on the other side of the world.” I think that bubble has burst. No one is geographically immune to the coronavirus and the same is true for climate change.

As a society, we’re only as safe as our most vulnerable people. During the COVID-19 outbreak, the elderly and those with health conditions are more vulnerable to the coronavirus and the poor are more vulnerable to its economic impact. That makes us all more vulnerable too. That lesson has taken us into a space of solidarity that we’ve never seen before. We are taking care of each other both out of altruism and because we want to make sure that we’re safe. That’s exactly the thinking we need to deal with climate change.

Global challenges require systemic changes — changes that can only be activated by government or companies. But they also require individual behavioral changes. We need both. We have seen over the past few weeks that governments can take radical action and we can change our behaviour quite quickly.

Prevention is better than cure. It’s cheaper and safer to prevent people from catching and spreading the virus than to attempt to treat huge numbers of cases at once. That’s always been the case in the health sector. And in climate change it is much better to prevent runaway temperature rises than to figure out how to deal with the enormous consequences.

All our response measures need to be based on science. There are a lot of myths around coronavirus, just as there are a lot of myths around climate change. But the countries and individuals basing their responses on what the health professionals are saying are doing better. Likewise on climate change we must take action in line with what the science tells us, rather than following myths or misinformation.

Of course, there are also key differences with COVID-19 that make responding to climate change a more positive experience. The coronavirus needs to be addressed through personal isolation, while the climate needs to be tackled through coming together and collaborating. Social distancing measures have caused economic paralysis, while our response to climate change should actually strengthen and improve the economy.

Governments and financial leaders are already considering recovery packages for an economy so badly hit by the virus. Surprisingly, these decisions will be the most important decision on climate change. If investments to kick start the paralyzed economy are directed into high carbon assets and industries, we will lock out our current potential to bend the curve of emissions this decade. On the other hand, with interest rates at an all time low, political and financial leaders now have an unprecedented historical opportunity to accelerate the energy transition putting us onto a safe path toward a 50% reduction of emissions by 2030.

I hope that the shock of this pandemic will jolt people out of their desire to ignore global issues like climate change. I hope our growing sense of urgency, of solidarity, of stubborn optimism and empowerment to take action, can be one thing that rises out of this terrible situation. Because while we will, eventually, return to normal after this pandemic, the climate that we know as normal is never coming back.

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