Stewart M. Patrick
As the world grapples with COVID-19, it cannot afford to ignore an even more serious global emergency that will persist long after the pandemic has passed: climate change. Last month, the United Nations issued a dire multiagency report warning that the world is “way off track” on its commitments to cut emissions under the Paris Agreement. Without dramatic and sustained emissions reductions, higher atmospheric and marine temperatures will bring more deadly heat waves, catastrophic storms, rising seas, food insecurity, health crises and mass displacement.
Although emissions have dropped sharply since January with the coronavirus pandemic virtually shutting down entire economies and most air travel, they are sure to surge again as the world economy roars back to life whenever the pandemic ends. Antonio Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, put it bluntly: “We will not fight climate change with a virus.” Indeed, the pandemic will make progress against global warming even more elusive.
Nobody welcomes a pandemic that threatens to kill millions, infect hundreds of millions more and throw the world into economic depression. Still, the dramatic global response to COVID-19 has captured many environmentalists’ imaginations, by showing what a less polluted planet might look like and suggesting how the world might mobilize to fight climate change.
Since January, China’s emissions have declined by a stunning 25 percent. Globally, they are poised to fall, perhaps dramatically, in 2020. Remarkable satellite imagery has also captured huge declines in emissions of nitrogen oxides and other forms of smog in Beijing, Los Angeles and New York, revealing brilliant blue skies unseen in decades. In Italy, the water in Venice’s canals is flowing clean again.
The global economic shutdown provides an alternative reality, or at least a “mirage,” of what could be if humanity managed to reduce its carbon footprint. It has also exposed just how dangerous air pollution is to human health. Marshall Burke, a professor of earth science at Stanford University, calculated in March that China’s shutdown had “likely saved the lives of 4,000 kids under 5 and 73,000 adults over 70”—20 times the deaths China had attributed to the coronavirus—thanks to a decline in pollution-related respiratory illnesses.
Unfortunately, the response to COVID-19 is more likely to frustrate than inspire strong global action on climate change. Governments will prioritize short-term economic goals over long-term sustainability, while loosening environmental regulations and their enforcement. Major corporations will delay clean energy investments. And many citizens will focus on pocketbook matters rather than advocate for a healthy biosphere. If history is any guide, emissions will rise steeply as the economy rebounds, just as they did after the energy shocks of the 1970s and the 2008 financial crash.
Before COVID-19, 2020 was poised to be the year of the environment. In April, the world would mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. In October, nations would gather in Kunming, China, for a major biodiversity conference. Finally, in November, the parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change would convene for their pivotal 26th conference, known as COP26, in Glasgow. The pandemic has dashed those hopes, displacing climate change from the top of the international agenda, disrupting environmental diplomacy and endangering scientific collaboration and climate funding. Last week, the UNFCCC announced that it would postpone COP26 until 2021, delaying a make-or-break meeting where governments are supposed to ratchet up the commitments they made in Paris in 2016.
The response to COVID-19 is more likely to frustrate than inspire strong global action on climate change.
The delay could not have come at a worse time. Most countries are lagging in their Paris Agreement pledges. But even if they were fully implemented, those commitments would achieve only a third of the emissions reductions needed to keep the rise in average global temperatures from preindustrial days below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the agreed Paris target. The global economic downturn makes it even less likely that world leaders will summon the political will or invest the funds needed to arrest global warming.
Fearing a prolonged recession, or even depression, governments are launching massive economic bailouts and rescue packages likely to shape the trajectory of emissions for years to come. Ideally, says Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, they would seize this “historic opportunity” to hasten the decarbonization of the world economy by investing heavily in clean energy technologies and infrastructure. The European Union, which last month doubled down on its $1 trillion Green Deal and recommitted itself to carbon neutrality by 2050, shows it can be done.
Few others are following suit, however. In most countries, the pandemic will delay any clean energy transition, as politicians cling to traditional growth models. In the United States, the Trump administration and Senate Republicans successfully rebuffed Democratic efforts to include clean energy investments and relief for renewable energy industries in the nation’s $2 trillion stimulus bill. More perniciously, the administration continues to roll back Obama-era limits on U.S. emissions, including from automobiles.
Similar dynamics are unfolding elsewhere. China has announced that it will relax some environmental regulations to allow companies to focus on economic growth. In Southeast Asia, where distracted governments have loosened supervision of logging companies and redeployed enforcement personnel to cities to cope with the pandemic, deforestation is poised to accelerate.
The private sector is unlikely to come to the rescue. Tighter capital markets will make it harder for corporations to secure funding for green energy investments. Cash-strapped energy companies will struggle to invest in solar, wind and other renewables that make up a growing share of their portfolios. And with plunging oil and natural gas prices, fossil fuel consumption is set to rise, hurting renewable energy companies and electric vehicle manufacturers like Tesla.
Finally, public pressure to combat climate change will dissipate, as rising unemployment and basic pocketbook issues leave citizens, particularly young people, with less time and energy for environmental activism. Climate advocates had planned enormous protests for April 22 to mark the 50th Earth Day. Thanks to the coronavirus, these will occur online.
The international response to the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that massive behavioral changes—from social distancing to reduced airline travel—are indeed possible on a global scale. It is not clear that the lessons of the coronavirus can be applied to climate change, however, because the two policy problems differ in fundamental ways, most obviously in their time horizons. COVID-19 is an immediate, once-in-lifetime event that threatens human lives in the here and now. Climate change, in contrast, is a gradually unfolding planetary challenge whose many implications will only become truly manifest in coming decades.
It is commonplace in politics for the urgent to overwhelm the important. This is particularly true when the former inspires panic and the latter permits procrastination. Defeating the coronavirus requires societies and individuals to suffer acute, short-term pain, in the expectation that the pandemic will pass and economies will quickly recover. Decarbonization implies something more daunting: a transformation of the entire global economy, with attendant dislocation, to avoid a catastrophe that we sense is coming, but are only beginning to feel.
Stewart Patrick is the James H. Binger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World” (Brookings Press: 2018). His weekly WPR column appears every Monday.
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