In late spring of this year, several articles suggested that the global pandemic, and the drastically reduced travel that accompanied it, might actually help “heal” the earth. The assumption was that we would potentially see a reduction in CO2 emissions because people were staying home more and not traveling by plane. Indeed, plane travel has dropped by around 95% and at least 61 million Americans have stopped commuting during the pandemic. These trends are similar globally. News outlets have been reporting that people can actually see and feel the impact, particularly with less smog and cleaner air in large cities like Los Angeles and Mumbai where previously cloaked vistas are now visible. Given that just one roundtrip flight from New York to London generates as much CO2 as the CO2 generated by the average Nicaraguan annually, it is not surprising that these predictions of a “healing earth” were being made.
Cleaner daily air quality, however, seems to be the most encouraging metric; other correlations and data trends do not paint quite as rosy a picture. One data trend that was expected to be a little more encouraging is greenhouse gas concentrations. At the risk of stating something you’ve heard ad nauseum, let me break down for you how greenhouse gas concentrations operate. Greenhouse gases are substances like carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide. When released into the atmosphere, these gases trap heat and drive up temperatures close to the Earth’s surface. Atmospheric concentrations are cumulative meaning they result from both past and present emissions and are measured in parts per million (ppm). A recent report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) suggested that while carbon emissions fell by 17% in early 2020, the overall effect on atmospheric concentrations is very small; again, this is because concentrations are cumulative and so we have only slowed the rate of increase, but we are still increasing. In other words, it will take many more years of continued reductions in emissions to slow the rate of concentration growth from year to year in a meaningful way.
There is also a connection between rising temperatures and the ranges of zoonotic pathogens. I know that was a sentence-full of jargon, but the idea is that as temperatures increase, many of the carriers of pathogens such as dengue fever, zika, west nile, or Lyme disease, can increase their habitable area and increase the spread of these pathogens. Mosquitoes like warmer temperatures. For example, before 1970 the World Health Organization recorded 9 countries with dengue epidemics. In 2019, that number rose to 128 countries as mosquitoes have been able to move northward and into higher elevations due to rising temperatures.
Finally, there is a single business case that I think represents a larger economic issue during the pandemic. Exxon Mobil Corp. owns a complex of pipes, tanks, and pumps over the geological Madison formation in Wyoming where they have been extracting natural gas and helium for more than 30 years. In this process, they have also been dumping CO2, which is also contained within the Madison formation, to the tune of about 300,000 car’s worth of emissions annually. The company was set to start construction in the summer of 2020 on a carbon capture and sequestration project that would have locked away enough CO2 to essentially zero-out the facility’s climate impact. In April, however, amidst falling share prices, the company announced that the project will be on hold indefinitely. The story here is as follows: Company finds a profitable process, company creates externalities (carbon pollution) through the process, company finds a way to mitigate the externality using technology and government programs (tax credits), economy plummets, project is tabled, and the company’s efforts toward climate mitigation are foiled. And Exxon is not simply going back to regular operations. In fact, not only are they not advancing their climate plan, but they are ramping up their core business through a pricey expansion of crude oil operations. The result will be sharp increases in their carbon emissions rather than significant reductions as a reaction to the pandemic-induced economic downturn.
As COVID-19 vaccines are deployed over the next 12-18 months, we will be glad to get “back to normal.” We would be wise, however, to consider whether the pre-COVID normal is exactly what we want to return to from a climate change mitigation perspective. If we return to normal levels of commuting, air travel, and fossil fuel use, we will have missed an opportunity to move climate trends in a positive direction and our friends in big cities will undoubtedly lose their newly-acquired views. Wouldn’t it be nice if some good came out of this pandemic? I hope we will attempt to embrace a new normal instead. Likewise, this is an opportunity for government to consider how the market has impacted business decisions and how COVID relief packages can be developed to promote and incentivize climate-positive actions.
Dr. Heather Farley is Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice, Public Policy & Management and a professor of Public Management in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia. She is an associate of the College’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. For more information on the Reg Murphy Center, please visit www.ccga.edu/murphycenter .
Reg Murphy Center