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goldstein: covid-19 exposed the folly of our approach to climate change
if the covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is ...
dec 18 2021
3 minute read
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if the covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is the utter impracticability of meeting the united nations targets on reducing global greenhouse gas emissions to address climate change.
the un says that as a first step in avoiding catastrophic global warming of more than 1.5c by the end of this century, global emissions have to drop every year from 2020 to 2030 by 7.6%.
not even the massive global recession caused by the pandemic in 2020 came close to doing that.
it lowered global emissions by 5.4% last year.
think about that. recall the massive downturn in global economic activity at the start of the pandemic in 2020, when we knew little about the new coronavirus and vaccines were not available.
factories were shut down. land borders were closed to non-essential travel. businesses sent millions of workers home. unemployment soared. schools were shuttered. air travel, the tourism industry and the restaurant, hotel and retail sector were devastated.
public transit was nearly deserted. medically necessary surgeries and treatments were postponed. professional sports leagues ceased operations.
and yet, despite all of that, global emissions dropped by a mere 5.4%, far short of the un’s goal of a 7.6% decrease for 2020 and for every year from 2020 to 2030.
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for 2021, a year of gradual economic recovery from the pandemic, at least before the omicron variant hit late in the year, global emissions rose by 4.9% to 36.4 billion tonnes.
that’s the second highest level ever. the highest occurred in 2019, when emissions totalled 36.7 billion tonnes.
these figures, compiled by the global carbon project, underscore how economic activity and jobs are linked to fossil fuel energy.
the only other time in the modern era that global greenhouse gas emissions dropped dramatically on a year-over-year basis occurred during the 2008-09 global recession, which began with the subprime mortgage derivative scandal in the u.s. that led to a global credit freeze.
while the impact of the highly transmissible omicron variant of covid-19 on the global economy in 2022 won’t be known until the end of next year, the simple reality is this.
in order to meet the un’s target of lowering emissions by 7.6% annually from 2020 to 2030, we would need the equivalent of a covid-19 global recession every year from now until 2030 and even then it would not be enough.
worse, the realistic things we could be doing right now to dramatically cut emissions without destroying the economy — for example by replacing coal-fired electricity with nuclear power and natural gas — are opposed by the very people demanding immediate and dramatic cuts in emissions.
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far too many of our politicians are listening to them.
nuclear power doesn’t emit greenhouse gases. natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel, burning at half the carbon intensity of coal.
but the global environmental movement (with a few honourable exceptions) oppose both nuclear power and natural gas.
they illustrate robert bryce’s point in his 2010 book on how energy is actually produced in industrialized countries — power hungry: the myths of ‘green’ energy and the real fuels of the future — that, “if you are anti-carbon dioxide and anti-nuclear, you are pro-blackout.”
we need to abandon the fantasy that unreliable, intermittent wind and solar energy can power modern industrialized countries.
we need to use existing technologies to provide us with the clean energy we need, without global depressions.
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