2020 declines in carbon emissions were staggering. Can we keep it that way?
They started as unexpected silver linings — clearer skies and cleaner air in cities from Los Angeles to New Delhi and a much-celebrated return of fish and crystal-clear waters to the oft-murky canals of Venice, Italy. By the end of last year, these local anecdotes were real and measurable markers of the pandemic's unintended climate benefits.
Yet, while heartening, the environmental reprieve isn't expected to last. There are already signs that as countries try to return to a new normal, economic activity — and all the emissions and pollution that go along with it — will creep up again.
And if the pandemic revealed what could be considered low-hanging fruit in the climate fight, it also highlighted the sheer scope of the problem.
"If you think about the scale of action that we need — if we want to limit warming as is proposed in the Paris Agreement — we would need to reduce carbon emissions by 1 or 2 billion tons every year," said Corinne Le Quéré, a professor of climate change science at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. "That's less than what we did during the pandemic, but it's still a big number."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/2020-declines-in-carbon-emissions-were-staggering-can-we-keep-it-that-way/ar-BB1fVyqU?li=BBnbklE&ocid=DELLDHP
= new reply since forum marked as read
Actually, I have been keeping a spread sheet of all the weekly readings at Mauna Loa and all the monthly and yearly readings for over ten years.
At 2.31 ppm over 2019, 2020 was a worse year than 2017 (1.93 ppm), 2013 (1.99 ppm), 2014 (2.22 ppm) and every year from 2000 to 2010 except 2002 (2.51 ppm) and 2005 (2.57).
In the entire 20th century, going back to 1959, only one year, 1998 (2.98) when fires set for palm oil plantations destroyed much of the SE Asian rain forest - let's all cheer for biodiesel for Germany - was as bad as 2020.
None of this inspires me to cheer for the wonderful environmental advantage of having a world wide plague, even if, for a few months, air pollution deaths may have fallen slightly lower than 19,000 people a day, which easily exceeds Covid's worst day ever.
Speaking only for myself, and I recognize that I'm eccentric, I think we should stop kidding ourselves with all these pictures of wind turbines supported on steel made but heating iron ore over coke made by heating coal with burning coal.
The claim is just silly. Two billion tons of CO2, as incredible as it might seem, even if it were real, would mean next to nothing. It doesn't even address the climate cost of land use changes (about 10 billion tons a year) never mind dangerous fossil fuel waste (35+ billion tons a year.)
We don't need to "keep this going." Neither dead minds nor dead people will address climate change, but live minds might. The continued cacophony of lies we tell ourselves are not helping. We are failing the future.
