What the Coronavirus Can Teach Us About the Climate about:reader?url=https://theintercept.com/2020/04/04/coronavirus...

theintercept.com

What the Coronavirus Can Teach Us

About the Climate
Charles Komanoffkomanoff@gmail.com
10-12 minutos

Greta Thunberg couldn’t do it. Bill McKibben and 350.org

couldn’t do it, and neither could the Paris climate accord. But
Covid-19 is cutting human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide
and other greenhouse gases as travel and other economic
activity in much of the world slow or halt altogether.

While the contraction in CO2 emissions set off by the virus

may not be as pronounced as the related though distinct fall in
“conventional” pollutants like soot and smog, it is far more
consequential. Soot and smog poison and kill only in the
present, while greenhouse gases stick around to maim the
climate for the next century. Burning a fossil fuel today is
tantamount to signing a death warrant for future generations.
Conversely, forgoing an action that would have caused a fossil
fuel to be burned creates a permanent benefit.

Until now, the only downturn of note in total worldwide CO2

emissions during the era of climate awareness — defined as
the period beginning in 1995 with the first U.N. Climate
Change Conference — was in 2009, the onset of the Great
Recession. That downturn was brief and mild.

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In contrast, the current contraction could be severe enough to

cut in half this year’s addition to the atmosphere’s carbon
dioxide concentration — the metric that dictates climate
change — according to calculations by co-author Charles
Komanoff for the Carbon Tax Center.

Is it cruel to point approvingly to the steep reduction in carbon

emissions now unfolding, given the skyrocketing deaths, lost
livelihoods, and widespread privation? And won’t the
reductions be negated as the virus is tamed and emissions
come roaring back? No and no.

Like so much else, whether or not the current reduction in

CO2 is sustained will depend on who gets to reconstruct
society after the virus. But the reduction will not be negated.
Just as carbon emissions persist long enough in Earth’s upper
atmosphere to act as permanent climate change agents in
terms of one individual’s lifetime, avoided emissions are a
permanent balm.

The airplane trips you won’t take this year won’t be made up in
2021, for the simple reason that most people who use
airplanes do so regularly. A missed trip isn’t a once-in-
a-lifetime experience that will be put back next year; it’s a
missed trip, period. Ditto for work commutes and leisure
activities.

So yes, the precipitous drop in burning petrol for vehicles and

aircraft has a lasting imprint. The contraction of the U.S.
economy this year could purge 30 to 40 percent of carbon
emissions we would otherwise spew. Similar but milder
jettisoning of carbon-burning in the rest of the world could

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collectively trim up to one part per million from the

atmosphere’s present 415 ppm concentration of CO2 — a
modest climate-protective achievement, to be sure, but one
without precedent in the modern era.

The suffering is a different story. Were a happiness/misery

calculator able to quantify the pluses and minuses to well-
being from events befalling human society, the coronavirus’s
flattening of the rising CO2-in-the-atmosphere curve would
obviously be swamped by the lost life and the disordering of
business as usual.

And yet business as usual must come to an end if we are to

hand down a livable planet to our children.

The rub is how to slash carbon emissions with minimum

suffering and maximum social and economic justice, and
without nature forcing the reductions on us via pandemics or
other chaotic black swan events that are surely in store.

The fact that human behavior and activity are undergoing

climate-beneficial changes in the crucible of Covid-19
suggests that “business as usual” can be altered, and quickly.
Though we can’t yet point to new models of planned and
equitable carbon reduction, there are four identifiable
pandemic-driven upheavals of social consciousness that
should give us hope of instituting the transformations
necessary for civilization not to commit collective climate
suicide.

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Read Our
Complete CoverageThe Coronavirus Crisis

One is that science’s prestige and value are being restored.

Americans watching Trump’s circus-like coronavirus daily
briefings see National Institutes of Health immunologist Dr.
Anthony Fauci stepping in to correct the president’s
dangerously ignorant commentary. Similarly, we know it is the
community of front-line doctors, nurses, and health care
workers who will care for the sick; the epidemiologists and
science journalists who will inform the public’s response; and
trained chemists, biologists, and statisticians who will
synthesize and prove the vaccines that will bring the pandemic
to an end. As environmental legal scholar Michael Gerrard
wrote this week, the climate change lessons of Covid-19 are to
heed the warnings of scientists, do everything possible to
minimize the hazards they predict, and prepare to cope with
the impacts that remain.

Second, the crisis is helping us see just how much our well-
being depends on muscular, proactive governance.
Government of the people and for the people is literally the
thing that’s now needed more than ever.  The people must be
sovereign over corporations and not vice versa — a point
driven home by the tepid response of big business to Trump’s

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exhortations to step up manufacture of equipment to protect

health care workers.

Third, we may be shaking loose the defeatism that nothing can

be done quickly. Take the example of those of us sheltering in
place: We are learning, overnight, that simplicity isn’t
necessarily austerity, frugality need not be privation, and that
we can forgo quite a lot of our leisure and consumer
entitlements if it serves some higher purpose — at present, to
stop the sickening and death of our fellow human beings; in
the longer run, to bend the rising curve of carbon emissions
and put a hard stop on climate chaos.

Moreover, if our society can act, finally, to manufacture a

million ventilators and a billion protective masks, surely we can
within a few years act on a far grander scale to erect, say, a
million wind turbines, insulate and solarize a hundred million
buildings, carve ribbons of bicycle paths throughout our cities
and suburbs, and so on. With the pandemic enforcing a brutal
but necessary reset, the NIMBYism that has impeded this kind
of progress practically everywhere might be swept into the
dustbin for good.

Most hearteningly, the crisis is instilling a renewed

appreciation of social solidarity. The more we are forced to
quarantine and isolate, paradoxically, the more we become
cognizant of the need for mutuality and social relations and
social conscience.

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Volunteers for nonprofit organization Martha’s Table load bags of

fresh produce to distribute to people in underserved communities on
April 1, 2020, amidst the coronavirus pandemic in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

My well-being depends on your not being sick. My ability to be

fed depends on your ability to grow and transport and
distribute food. My life is now literally in your hands, as you
make decisions whether to restrain your activity in the public
sphere, keep your distance, self-quarantine.

If we so fully need each other, how can I abide your not having
affordable health care? In this moment when the precarity of
half or more of American households is laid bare, how can I
abide a government that places the well-being of billionaires
— whose wealth each week generates more money than
many of us earn in a lifetime — above that of the 90 percent of
Americans who make less than $100,000 a year?

What does solidarity have to do with climate? Everything.

People whose health is tenuous and whose pocketbook is
empty can’t easily stand up for climate action, but they may do
so if government has put them on a solid footing and, in the
Green New Deal, provided a framework for paying them good

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wages to actually implement it.

Synergies abound. With the U.S. government providing direct

payments to American households, it’s only a step or two to
paying coal miners and cattle ranchers to become solar
installers and wind farm maintainers. Enacting some form of
guaranteed income, even just temporarily, could pave the way
for the “carbon fee and dividend” approach to taxing carbon
fuels without further burdening the less well-off. In a different
vein, trading frenetic foreign travel for staycations could
downsize socially destructive companies like Airbnb, making
rental apartments more affordable and in turn diminishing
long-distance commuting and slashing carbon footprints.

As for the super-rich, never have their fortunes been so fully

revealed as hollow and corrosive. Worldwide, the wealthiest 5
percent of households collectively burn more carbon than the
entire bottom half, according to a comprehensive new report
from the University of Leeds. Could the past decade’s
research and agitation on economic inequality now culminate,
in the pandemic’s wake, in an insistence on transmuting
extreme private wealth into a new collectively shared wealth of
renewable energy and sustainable communities?

This, more than fossil fuel divestment or class-action litigation,

is the kind of program that will actually cast off the yoke of the
fossil fuel empire upon which the portfolios of the super-rich
depend. In the process, the toxic aspiration to join the super-
rich could be swept aside. Bye-bye, lusting after commuter
helicopters. Bye-bye, hungering for one’s own island. Bye-bye,
legislatures purchased by dark money.

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As for those in the rarified upper classes who, in Margaret

Thatcher’s iconic phrasing, embrace the libertarian right-wing
precept that “there is no such thing as society,” let’s hope they
will be answered by the millions of commoners who see
clearly, as the pandemic rages, that we are all in this leaky
boat together.

Charles Komanoff, a New York City-based economist and

activist, directs the Carbon Tax Center.  Christopher Ketcham,
an upstate New Yorker, is author of “This Land: How Cowboys,
Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West.”  

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