The New Normal interview series: Covid-19 and the environment

‘When we look at Covid-19 and the environment, the incredible thing is how fast everything changed. We just shut everything down. Two and a half billion people were under lockdown at one point and a lot of people won’t be emerging anytime soon. As a result, local air pollution and CO2 emissions came down. As an economist and an environmentalist it is a fascinating time, but as a person living in New York City – the epicentre of the worst hit country so far – it is petrifying.’

‘In an ironic twist, because of the massive decrease in substances like nitrous oxide and sulphur dioxide being emitted we may actually be extending so many people’s lives that, on net, people will live longer as a result of Covid-19 than without it. Marshall Burke, assistant professor in the Department of Earth System Science at Stanford, calculated that up to 77,000 lives are likely to have been saved in Wuhan because of the decrease in local air pollution. That's far less than the 5,000 people who have died in all of China from Covid-19. Now, this is not to go around saying Covid is a good thing. It clearly is not. What it does show is how huge the local air pollution problem is.’

‘Air pollution is very different from talking about CO2 emissions, though. CO2 emissions, the major cause of climate change, are down too – up to 20 percent down. That is a significant drop, but it’s not enough. We want to get to net zero emissions, yet even when we shut down huge economies, we only cut emissions by 20 percent. Unlike air pollution, CO2 is a stock pollutant, not a flow pollutant. It's the stock of CO2 in the atmosphere that matters. A good analogy is a bathtub. It's not just about the water that flows into the tub, it's the water that's already there that is the problem.

‘In CO2 terms the level already in the air is linked to global average temperatures. So just to stop the atmospheric CO2 bathtub getting worse, you have to cut the inflow down to net zero. Lockdowns decreased the inflow slightly, but it's not going to stop climate change. The concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere will go up again this year, just not quite as much as they would have otherwise. Temperatures will continue to rise for decades, sea levels for centuries.’

‘The crisis has shown us that we can’t cut CO2 emissions fast enough by simply shutting down, we need to do more. We need to invest in renewable energy, which can be good for the economy, which has suffered because of Covid-19. We have to spend a lot of money on the kind of clean, lean, mean green technologies that we need to decarbonise our planet. This can create more jobs, lead to more economic growth. It doesn’t have to be a choice between the economy and emissions.’

‘As big and systemic and as all-encompassing Covid-19 is, many of the problems are vastly, vastly magnified when it comes to climate change. The problem is time. Covid-19 came and hit us within weeks and we reacted relatively quickly. Now what days and weeks are for Covid, for climate it's decades and centuries, and we’ve been far slower to react.

‘People are dying now from Covid-19, but most climate change mortality will happen decades, centuries from now. There have been reports that if a country like France had shut down a week earlier, up to 50 percent of deaths could have been avoided. That's the difference days make for Covid. For climate, those results are slower but more significant and the need to act is even greater. In 2019 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned we had twelve years to take drastic action to save the planet. Now we have more like ten years. The crisis has shown us that the worst can happen – we cannot wait to do what needs to be done.’