As one of the 4.5 billion people on earth currently under some form of coronavirus-related lockdown, I have seen a lot of my local area recently. This has mainly been while walking / scooting with my wife and two small children. During a recent jaunt, we noticed how clear the birdsong was on our road. This was due to three factors: More birds in spring, virtually zero traffic noise and the fact that, we ourselves were not racing from A to B in the car. A little further up the road, a question popped up: Does the current situation look anything like a ‘low-CO2 future?’
There would certainly be similarities, most noticeably regarding travel. Air travel has currently plummeted by more than 90% due to a twin collapse of demand (nobody wants to fly) and supply (closed borders and bankrupt carriers). This dramatic decline is not dissimilar to the low-CO2 futures advocated by some climate campaigners in which only the most genuinely deserving cargoes (and travellers) can take to the skies.
Coronavirus restrictions have also taken massive chunks out of private vehicle, bus and train usage, with major cities recording journey reductions of 70 - 95% year-on-year in April 2020. Tom Tom’s congestion comparisons for 2019/2020 are incredible, with Rome a particular highlight.1 While key workers still need to reach hospitals, police stations, food distribution centres and so on, most office workers can do everything online. It is these people that are not on the roads right now, leading to lower emissions and cleaner air. Campaigners would argue that they should stay at home after the lockdown, on public health grounds.
As a subset of travel, tourism, often so damaging to the natural world, has also collapsed. In its place, nature has reclaimed both rural and urban spaces, from improved water quality in the canals of Venice to the reclamation of beaches by wildlife in Thailand and even rogue sheep using children’s playgrounds!2 These show the environmental improvements that can be achieved, even in a few weeks.
The economies of the coronavirus world and low-CO2 future also bear some similarities. Both require lower levels of consumption than we have become used to. With coronavirus, many factories have been forced to stop, leading to cleaner air in a number of ‘pollution hotspots.’ Climate activists call for a permanent reductions to manufacturing, especially of short-term and disposable items. Coronavirus has already led the markets into strange places. As I write, the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil futures price has slipped into negative territory for the first time. Producers literally couldn’t give it away, such are the costs of storing oil - space is running out fast. For some climate activists, the ‘collapse of oil’ is a major aim. However, in a post-lockdown world, oil prices will recover as demand rises. Oil is not going to be killed off by a relatively short-term slump in demand.
A less obvious area of overlap is state support. Governments of every type around the world have been rushing to plug the gap left in their economies by falling demand due to the outbreak. There have been cash packages for core sectors, governments paying portions of private firms’ salaries and help for the self-employed. One criticism of the more urgent calls for climate action is that it would blow a hole in the global economy. Well... the economy has a very large hole in it right now, so what a time to change things up! The lessons learned from the economic handling of the outbreak could help to ‘cushion the blow’ of a future low-CO2 transition.
On the social side, coronavirus restrictions and a lower-CO2 world are also somewhat similar. There’s a lot more ‘staying local’ in both situations, and you have to make the most of whatever’s on your doorstep. In a lower-CO2 world, this would include eating what’s available locally and making do and mending, rather than buying new. Elsewhere, with many office workers now working from home, commuting will take up less time. This might enable people to return to hobbies and exercise... or perhaps more likely allow them to give over ever larger portions of their home-life to work.
Thankfully, the low-CO2 world would not mean being in lockdown. You’d be able to visit family, friends and neighbours at will, so long as they live nearby, of course. Children would be at school and able to visit their friends for tea. This cannot resume soon enough.
What the restrictions have inadvertently allowed is a collective pause. Do we want to be in a coronavirus lockdown forever? Of course not! Was the world as a whole ‘better’ in January 2020? It depends on which metric you choose. Once this is over, we should take care not to go back to the ‘old ways,’ but rather take the lessons of lockdown forward for use in ‘the real world.’ We are all part of an ongoing case-study of what people can be coaxed into doing, en-masse, when the dangers are clear and present. The trick for climate activists will be to apply this ability to dangers that are less clear and less present, but ultimately even more deadly.
1. https://www.tomtom.com/blog/moving-world/covid-19-traffic
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d9FqqegFl8
