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Covid-19 Reminded Us of the Most Powerful Weapons in the Fight Against Climate Change
The dismal planning failures can’t be repeated if we want to survive on this planet
In March, global emissions dropped as a result of Covid-19 shutdown orders. Carbon emissions dropped by as much as 17% in some countries, scientists reported, because so many of us weren’t on the road. People celebrated clear skies in normally smog-filled cities like Los Angeles and Beijing. Some claimed the planet was healing itself.
At the time, I wondered: Was this a temporary blip or something that could actually change our approach to climate change in the future? In an ideal world, Covid-19 would show us how much we could live without consuming fossil fuels and maybe even convince us to pass legislation to stop using them sooner than 2030 or 2050.
In May, I asked people working on the front lines of the climate crisis what we could learn about handling climate change from Covid-19 shutdowns. They said that the decline in emissions we were seeing was just a brief dip. As ever, we needed long-term shifts in environmental policy to address the climate crisis. The federal response to Covid-19, much like its handling of the climate crisis, was insufficient in that elected leaders denied the severity of the crisis…
