COVID and the Climate
COVID and the Climate
An exercise in developing our intuition for climate scale
Remember the pandemic?
Seems a long time ago now, doesn’t it?
Remember the empty airports, the abandoned downtowns, the sudden end of traffic?
Remember the civilization-pausing weirdness of it all? The vastly different new norms of behavior imposed on everyone, worldwide, all at once?
It was intense!
What do you think all that did to greenhouse gas emissions, worldwide?
Have a guess.
Think of a number.
Did they go down by 30%?
50%?
In fact, in 2020 Global GHG Emissions fell to 50.7 billion tons of CO2-equivalent, from 52.6 billion tons in 2019.
That’s a decline of…3.8%.
Three point eight percent!
Worse, GHG emissions rebounded to pre-pandemic levels within a single year. By 2022, they were growing again.
In the EU’s 1970-2022 data, COVID-19 barely turns up as a one-year blip. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d miss it:
Think about what this means the next time someone proposes some behavioral shift —any behavioral shift— on the grounds that it will help the climate.
It won’t.
Humanity is so intensely carbonogenic, the scale of our emissions is so vast, that even civilization-shaking events that force major behavioral changes globally barely make a dent in emissions.
As Guido Núñez-Mujica puts it, “you can give up pretty much everything we value, everything that makes life worth living —not just travelling in general, but gathering to work, dream, play, or create together — and it still doesn’t make a meaningful difference.”
Climate scale is far too big for that.