There is virtually no economic sector on Earth that has not been impacted by the spread of the novel coronavirus, but few have been as thoroughly battered as the global energy industry. As industries and nations shut down around the world, the demand for oil plummeted, taking oil prices down with it, and the energy consumption patterns of the average person changed radically. In China, the nation’s severe shutdowns to contain the spread of COVID-19 curbed so many industrial sectors and took so many vehicles off the road that the novel coronavirus has indirectly saved lives on the whole by mitigating the country’s typically deadly levels of air pollution. Even the most conservative estimates show that an additional 4,000 children under the age of 5 and 73,000 elderly Chinese citizens over the age of 70 would have died in a business-as-usual scenario. In the United States, energy consumption has […]