The Pandemic Brought a Record Plunge in Carbon Emissions! Then There’s the Bad News.

During this pandemic year (which, really, is nearing a year and a half), the world became cleaner: Dolphins swam the canals of Venice! Blue skies lit up normally smoggy Shanghai! Pumas wandered the streets of Santiago!

Global air pollution even fell enough that the northern Himalayas were visible for the first time in 30 years!

But — most important — the world saw a record decrease in carbon emissions: a 7 percent drop in 2020 over the year before, the Australia-based Global Carbon Project reported. CO2 is the most dangerous and prevalent greenhouse gas in terms of trapping heat in our atmosphere.

It seems we “experienced the greatest drop in greenhouse gas emissions since the burning of fossil fuels began,” said Arunima Malik, one of the authors of a July 2020 study that linked the atmospheric improvement to lower consumption.

In this dark time, these environmental revelations gave us hope for the future.

Only, dolphins never swam in the still filthy Venetian canals (and the water’s new clarity was merely because fewer boats were stirring up sediment); smog is now even worse than pre-pandemic levels in China; and yes, there were some wild animal sightings in cities, but urban animal incursions didn’t suddenly make for Disney-like animal-human coexistence.

The much more quietly insidious news is that the record fall in carbon emissions was only temporary, scientists have found. And as the world crawls in fits and starts back from the worst of the coronavirus, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has hit an all-time high.

Announced by scientists on June 7, the level of CO2 has risen beyond any measurement taken by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration since they began keeping records 63 years ago.

So what’s going on? Is the pandemic record drop real progress, or now that the coronavirus is waning, are we all doomed?

Just as in the last recession (2007-2009), during the pandemic people drove fewer vehicles, industrial productivity decreased, and the global workforce fell 4.2 percent — which led to a $3.8 trillion drop in consumption, lowering the use of fossil fuels. And, as someone who lives close to JFK and LGA, I can tell you that I didn’t hear more than a handful of airplanes overhead throughout 2020. Experts told The New York Times in May that planes cause about 3 to 4 percent of the United States’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

The U.S. is, by far, the largest contributor to climate change in the world, many researchers say. As Vox author Umair Irfan put it in December 2019: the U.S. “does a behind-the-back, through-the-legs, backboard-breaking dunk over China and the Soviet Union” when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. (Although if you ask China, the U.S. is the worst polluter, no contest.)

“We are adding roughly 40 billion metric tons of CO2 pollution to the atmosphere per year,” writes Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Laboratory. “That is a mountain of carbon that we dig up out of the Earth, burn, and release into the atmosphere as CO2 — year after year.”

In order to “avoid catastrophic climate change,” Tans says, the most important thing to do is reduce CO2 emissions “to zero at the earliest possible date.” But CO2 has been steadily rising for decades, with an increase of more than 20 percent over the past 40 years.

Right now, the atmospheric level of CO2 is akin to what it was between 4.1 to 4.5 million years ago, according to NOAA. That was right about when our human ancestors called Australopithecines appeared. Those guys had brains no larger than a chimpanzee’s, and describing their living conditions as inhospitable is an understatement.

Back then, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times. Much of the Arctic tundra was blanketed in forests, and sea level was 78 feet higher — which is about the height of a seven-story building. (This terrifying tool shows you how much land the U.S. will lose with every inch and foot of rising water.)

With President Biden in office, the U.S. government has committed itself to slowing (and hopefully stopping) climate change by trying to reach net-zero carbon emissions, also known as carbon neutrality, by 2050. So far, 59 countries — nearly 70 percent of the world’s economy, and 54 percent of the world’s carbon emitters — have declared that they too will try to reach net zero in approximately the same timeframe. Still, there is no true global consensus on what to do.

The question then is whether these piecemeal efforts will be enough, and fast enough, to ensure that future generations are not living on an inhospitable planet. Can we count on now choosing to do what we did during the pandemic, when, whether we realized it or not, we reduced our often ignored personal and industrial carbon imprint?

Ultimately, lessening our impact on the environment will depend on each of us doing our part, in addition to each government and corporation. But if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that nobody wants to be told that they have to think beyond their immediate comfort every minute: aka wear a mask and social distance or risk infecting, and potentially killing, others.

Now that we’re back to record-high carbon emissions, it would seem that the coronavirus personal liberty wars, unfortunately, were an indicator of our continued, deadly disregard of how we impact one another, and life as we know it.