What coronavirus does—and doesn’t—teach us about climate action
TL;DR: Amidst reduced emissions and cleaner air during the pandemic, the real promise of a low-carbon energy future is returning to a fully functioning economy and society while keeping hold of a healthier environment.
Among a constant onslaught of global coronavirus coverage, there’s been a steady sub-thread about the pandemic’s environmental and climate impacts. Granted, this might be more front-and-center for me personally based on who I follow on Twitter, who I’m connected to on LinkedIn, the content that algorithms serve up for me based on my web browsing habits, and the industry in which I work. But it’s a prominent sub-thread nonetheless.
For one body of examples, there’s the coverage of the temporarily but drastically improved air quality in places like Beijing and North China, Milan and northern Italy, and U.S. cities such as Los Angeles and Seattle. For another example, there are the stories of wildlife returning to urban environments, like the mountain lions roaming the neighborhoods of Boulder (Colorado, USA) and coyotes walking the streets of San Francisco. (There were even now-debunked reports of dolphins returning to the canals of Venice.)
But what insights and lessons are we to glean from such examples, if anything at all?
The problem with climate “takeaways” from coronavirus
For those of us working on the front lines of climate action and accelerating a low-carbon energy future, it’s tempting to latch on to the aforementioned examples as positive stories of nature’s healing. But doing would amount to a callous insult to all those now suffering.
(Witness example headlines such as “The Surprising Climate Change Benefits of Coronavirus.” Amidst more than 887,000 confirmed cases globally and 44,000 deaths and counting as I write this, headlines such as these will not age well, nor will the sentiment behind them.)
As others have already pointed out, what we’re seeing globally with improved air pollution is temporary and the result of much hardship and tragedy. To borrow a term already familiar to those who work in renewable energy, we’re seeing these reductions in emissions because we’re living through a time of great societal curtailment. Air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions haven’t lowered because we’ve cleaned up the energy system, but rather because we’ve turned off the emissions spigot in the short term by shutting down large swaths of society and the economy behind it. That’s not a ‘win’ to celebrate, even if you’re a fiction writer looking for inspiration for your next post-apocalyptic novel.
As a former Rocky Mountain Institute colleague wrote recently on social media (I paraphrase): “What good is a geophysical system without a thriving society…”
Exactly.
And yet, the climate crisis doesn’t go away just because pandemic is here. The climate crisis remains ever present, and we cannot afford to stall efforts on that front, even as we’re fighting the pandemic.
So how do those of us championing a clean energy future forge ahead without being either woefully tone deaf to the global pandemic at hand or inappropriately opportunistic trying to highlight the so-called “opportunity” amidst a tragedy?
To borrow a term already familiar to those who work in renewable energy, we’re seeing these reductions in emissions because we’re living through a time of great societal curtailment.
Looking beyond the red herring
Some have used this time as a moment to extol the climate virtues of remote work and telecommuting. This has given rise to content ranging from the hollow promise (“Social Distancing? You Might Be Fighting Climate Change, Too”) to the pragmatic (“Coronavirus ‘Really Not the Way You Want To Decrease Emissions’”) to the thoughtful (“Lockdowns and distancing won’t save the world from warming. But amid this crisis, we have a chance to build a better future.”).
To be sure, designing our cities around people, rather than cars; taking advantage of digital technologies to increase the amount of decentralized, remote work (thus lowering our commuting footprint); and other strategies can contribute to a broader portfolio of climate action.
But touting actions like telecommuting as a coronavirus-induced, climate-friendly new mode of operating are a red herring. The point isn’t to carry over pandemic life into our future ‘normal’ lives. Rather, the goal should be to return to a robust society and economy powered by low-carbon, low-emissions energy and transportation that regains the healthy urban air we have glimpsed during the depths of the current pandemic.
As Paul Monks, a professor of air pollution at the University of Leicester, told the Guardian with respect to better air quality and a healthier environment: “Are we looking at what we might see in the future if we can move to a low-carbon economy?”
This is not an outlandish or terribly foreign idea. We’ve seen it previously many times over, albeit couched in different language: the decoupling of economic productivity from energy consumption and the decoupling of energy production from carbon emissions.
It happened with automotive fuel economy standards during the 1970s oil crisis. It happened again with the advent of economically competitive renewable energies such as wind and solar. And it happened yet again with vehicle electrification and EVs that get 100+ MPGe vs. internal combustion engine autos still only get fuel economies in the 20+ MPG range. All while the GDP of countries such as China, the United States, and Germany have grown, even as their energy consumption and carbon emission per GDP have fallen steadily.
The goal should be to return to a robust society and economy powered by low-carbon, low-emissions energy and transportation that regains the healthy urban air we have glimpsed during the depths of the current pandemic. This is not an outlandish or terribly foreign idea. We’ve seen it previously many times over, albeit couched in different language: the decoupling of economic productivity from energy consumption and the decoupling of energy production from carbon emissions.
What have we learned?
So what do we do next? Once the pandemic begins to subside, how do we move forward as a global community? Have we learned lessons amidst the pandemic that we can usefully carry forward into life after the pandemic?
First, I think it’s worth pausing to acknowledge how central the interlinked energy and telecom sectors have been to helping the world navigate this crisis. Around the world, communities have rightfully been celebrating the people on the front lines of the pandemic: our healthcare workers, our public safety officials, the food service professionals keeping our food supply chain largely in tact. We should also be celebrating the teams of workers at utilities and telecoms companies who have kept the power on and our devices connected.
That continuity of electricity and connectivity has fundamentally altered what’s possible for working from home, consuming entertainment and critical news content, and staying in touch with the family, friends, and colleagues we can no longer see in person. Can you imagine the isolation we’d all feel and the further loss of economic productivity we’d experience if coronavirus struck a generation ago, before the Internet had become widespread, when we made calls on rotary landline telephones and got our news from printed newspapers on Sunday mornings?
Second, we have seen the power of collective action in support of a shared goal. Although the details have varied from city to city and country to country, various social distancing measures—ranging from strict lockdowns to voluntary stay-at-home orders—have leveraged a combination of centralized, top-down and decentralized, grassroots, bottoms-up approaches to mitigating the spread of coronavirus.
And while there are some important differences between a global pandemic and the climate crisis, there are also commonalities. To quote Bill Gates speaking recently to TED: “That idea of innovation and science and the world working together — that is totally common between these two problems, and so I don’t think this has to be a huge set back for climate.”
The important long-term work remains that which we’ve been relentlessly pursuing with our members around the world: building the necessary digital infrastructure to support a low-carbon, customer-centric electricity system that can make the fleeting environmental improvements we’ve seen during the pandemic durable for generations to come, while sustaining global prosperity.
Third and finally, we have seen the promise of nature’s healing through decarbonization and the strength of societal resilience through decentralization and digitalization. This is the promise of a digitalized, distributed, low-carbon energy system in a post-pandemic world.
Looking ahead to some uncertain future date when the world will emerge from this pandemic, the hope should not be that we’ll adopt en masse some of the practices we’ve had to put into place during this exceptional time. Instead, the actions we take should accelerate a return to fuller economic productivity and societal engagement while keeping our climate footprint lighter. That’s what the clean energy movement has been after all along.
And that remains the focus of our team here at Energy Web. Yes, we are a decentralized team already accustomed to remote work and virtual meetings. Yes, such actions reduce our team’s collective climate footprint. But the important long-term work remains that which we’ve been relentlessly pursuing with our members around the world: building the necessary digital infrastructure to support a low-carbon, customer-centric electricity system that can make the fleeting environmental improvements we’ve seen during the pandemic durable for generations to come, while sustaining global prosperity.
