In some ways, the dire lockdowns undertaken to stop Covid-19 have fast-forwarded us into an unlikely future—one with almost impossibly bold climate action taken all at once, no matter the cost. Just months ago it would have been thought impossible to close polluting factories virtually overnight and slash emissions from travel by keeping billions at home. Now we know that clear skies and silent streets can come about with shocking speed.
The pandemic is a cataclysmic event so big and disruptive that it can be measured in the planetary metrics of climate change. As many as 2.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, about 8% of the estimated total for the year, will never be emitted into the atmosphere, according to estimates by the International Energy Agency. Pick any world-shaking event from 20th-century history—none has produced a bigger decrease in emissions.
It took weeks, not years, for skies in polluted cities to clear as emissions dropped. People in smog-choked towns in India shared photos of the suddenly visible Himalayas, which had been obscured by pollution. Power plants responded to the lockdowns almost immediately, to the point that it’s been possible to trace the spread of the virus from the Chinese province of Hubei to Central Asia, Europe and the U.S. just by looking at grid activity. A pickup in power in Hubei in recent weeks is an indication that activity there has resumed after the lockdown ended. To see Europe’s emergence from lockdowns, simply note the recently shrinking gap between energy demand this year and last.
Global demand for energy is set to fall by 6%, seven times the decline seen after the global financial crisis of 2008, according to the IEA’s forecast. In absolute terms the drop is unprecedented—the equivalent to losing the entire energy demand of India for one year.
Satellites and sensors previously used to monitor climate change have become essential to track and understand the sudden changes in our most immediate environment. In cities, the effect of billions of humans at standstill has become evident in the Earth’s crust. Movements from everyday human activity create countless tiny vibrations in the ground. Seismometers close to or inside urban areas have registered reductions in movement.
The lockdowns have brought the tourism and travel sectors to a halt. With companies conducting a giant “meetings-that-could-have-been-emails” experiment, analysts and experts wonder whether the travel sector will ever fully recover. Before the pandemic, aviation accounted for more than 2% of global emissions.