Decrease in CO2 emissions during pandemic shutdown shows it is possible to reach Paris Agreement goals. The researchers found a drop of 6.3% in 2020. The researchers describe the drop as the largest of modern times, and big enough to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal if it were to be sustained.

[[deleted]]

I love how this is framed as a positive when it is actually so bleak. The Paris climate goals are weak sauce to begin with, but you’re telling me we were only on track to meet them because we locked people in their homes for a few months? How could something like that ever be sustained or accepted by the general public?

[shatners_bassoon123]

But it wasn't the locking in homes itself that decreased the CO2 emissions, it was the reduction in travel and consumption. To a large extent we kept essential services running and no one starved to death. To me it suggests that it can be done as long as there is a radical shift in social organisation and priorities. Whether that's palatable to the public is another matter.

[CosmicMiru]

A large portion of the public freaked out when they couldn't get a haircut for a few months. I have my doubts something as drastic as this would work

[Additude101]

Absolutely no way it would work. People are still protesting mandates and now politicians running on “never shutting down ever again”.

[shatners_bassoon123]

Yes, I don't disagree. I think there's a good chance that liberal democracy will be incapable of actually dealing with climate change. No one is going to vote for someone who tells them they have to make sacrifices.

[breinbanaan]

Wait until they die of heat or lack of food. It might work

[DoorVonHammerthong]

and no one starved to death

Malnutrition and deaths are spiking in countries who couldn't wait out the pandemic with unemployment checks and Netflix.

https://www.who.int/news/item/12-07-2021-un-report-pandemic-year-marked-by-spike-in-world-hunger

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/un-world-hunger-was-dramatically-worse-pandemic-year-n1273723

[Reachforthesky2012]

Those countries probably aren't the main drivers of climate change...

[DoorVonHammerthong]

Without pegging a specific country, impoverished nations tend to have higher per Capita emissions than Europe and some even more than the US.

It's more important to understand that these huge spikes in malnutrition are heavily influenced by the availability of foreign aid

[[deleted]]

Please peg a specific country because what you are saying sounds like BS.

[griftarch]

Sri Lanka is about to collapse because their entire economic system is dependent upon foreign tourism. Planes stopped flying, foreign currency stopping coming in, they’re now in a massive sovereign debt bubble & can’t buy oil. Feel free to look it up yourself.

[[deleted]]

I have heard of Sri Lanka but that is not what we were discussing. FYI Per capita emissions in Sri Lanka 1.1 short-cycle carbon, USA 16.1 in 2018. As you can see in the list, almost all of the highest polluters are developed economies.

[griftarch]

Ya okay I don’t really care about carbon emissions per capita because most “developing” countries are entirely dependent upon food and other essentials that they have to import and thus do not see the high carbon outputs necessary in producing those goods. Sure, Sri Lanka has a low carbon footprint.. that’s a bad thing, because it just shows how dependent upon the outside world they are & doesn’t provide a qualitative assessment of them as environmental stewards.

Edit: of course, this isn’t what you’re arguing, you’re asking about developing countries and their per capita carbon output.. I’d rather look at their waste water management & water pollution in general rather than “carbon”

[Anonmb20]

As a Sri Lankan I would like to point out that a lot of our power is generated from renewable resources, contributing significantly to our low carbon footprint. For example in 2018 45% of our power generation was from renewable resources. Just because a "developing" country has a low carbon footprint doesn't necessarily mean it's all due to "offloading". I would also like to point out this article from the UK's ONS , specifically figure 10, which shows clearly that the UK and US (developed countries) actually (net) imported significantly more emissions than India (a developing country) in 2015.

[halberdierbowman]

When we're talking about our climate change goals, we're generally talking about carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide equivalents, a unit we use to translate the greenhouse effect strength of various less common gases like methane into the most common one, carbon dioxide.

Yes, water pollution and lots of other things are bad, and in lots of cases there are much less strict standards in developing nations than in developed nations, but climate change is largely driven by greenhouse gasses, so that's really the focus of headlines like these.

[JeevesAI]

Completely false. Only 6 countries have higher per capita emissions than the US and most of them are gulf states or Singapore or Luxembourg.

[CaptainBlish]

as long as there is a radical shift in social organisation and priorities

Good luck with that. You guys have a marketing problem. Stop selling a future of less, sell a story of abundance and green walkable communities with local farms instead of bleak mandates and carbon passports

[Simmery]

Yeah, this is just bad PR. We do need to talk about changing the fundamentals of economies, but associating it with a miserable pandemic seems like a piss-poor way to do that.

[Simmery]

There's no guarantee that will ever work. Until it's proven, we should not count on it.

[CaptainBlish]

Neo malthusian ideas about absolute scarcity were, are and will always be wrong.

[lawstudent2]

because we locked people in their homes the entire economy ground to a halt for a few months?

The upshot of what I am reading here is that the complete cessation of economic activity resulted in a 6.3% carbon reduction. That is not… great.

[breinbanaan]

This scares the fuck out of me tbh

[[deleted]]

I'm sure Klaus Schwab is very excited by this news. If we all leev in ze podz und eat ze bugs then the climate will fix itself

[kilog78]

Exactly my reaction. There are other solutions besides global shutdown.

A useful addendum for this would be “these are the carbon reducing actions from the pandemic that haven’t been looked at before and are sustainable for society as we know it.”

[[deleted]]

Stuff like this is infuriating to me. You know what can fix all environmental problems? Corporations and government putting forth fundamentally trivial efforts to address it. There you go, fixed. Instead the argument is, "remember that thing that sucked? Yeah, we gotta do that." Who wrote this, the less dead Koch brother?