Before Covid, Our Climate Efforts Were Just Greenwashing
By: Katy Preen
Tags: Coronavirus, Politics, Greenwashing, Climate Change, Capitalism

Before Covid, Our Climate Efforts Were Just Greenwashing

Adapted from ‘Chimney and cooling towers’ via Geograph

Thanks to bue rübner for alerting me to the source material for this post.

All the climate change measures that governments had put in place over the years have done basically nothing to reduce carbon emissions. But lockdowns imposed to curb the pandemic did a lot. A paper in Nature Climate Change, Temporary reduction in daily global CO2 emissions during the COVID-19 forced confinement, found significant reductions in worldwide CO₂ emissions for the 3-month period from the beginning of February to the beginning of May.

The dataset has now been extended to demonstrate the effect up to mid-June, and the effect of the lockdown is stark:

You see that on the top right of the first graph above? How the CO₂ output just falls off a cliff edge? That’s what shutting down the economy (and even then, only partially) can do. Economists are only just coming round to the idea that capitalism might be killing the planet, although environmentalists had been shouting it from the rooftops for years.

However, the climate messages that are presented to governments and global forums were watered down, to make them more palatable to powerful nations following a hyper-capitalist agenda. And so the climate goals they set would allow them to carry on polluting while giving the appearance of having reduced their carbon output.

From the above graph, you’d think that climate summits cause carbon emissions.

In spite of all the hot air produced at climate conferences, we are still pumping out carbon at an alarming rate. It’s almost as if all the carbon trading schemes in the world can’t actually reduce the amount of CO₂ we produce. Fancy that!

Ever since politicians took note of the impending climate emergency, they sought solutions that would require the least effort and disruption for businesses and the electorate. Emissions targets with fudged data, biomass and rubbish incineration classed as ‘renewables’, energy performance tests in lab conditions that are far from real-world efficacies: we have heard them all.

And now, governments are being called on their bullshit. You can’t negotiate away climate change, you have to actually do something about it. And it turns out that something is actually to do less. Consume less, produce less, pollute less. All the things that are anathema to the capitalist mindset.

We knew this all along, but having empirical proof (not doctored reports that appease rather than illuminate) means we can’t hide from it anymore. Covid-19 was a warning that humans are over-exploiting the planet’s resources, and it also shined a light on our way out of the problem.

We cannot continue our quest for endless growth and consumption — yet that is what Western governments are trying to do. The priority is on firing up the economy again, when we should take the time to think about what the economy is really for, and what we need it to do for us and the planet — not the other way round, as is currently the case.

The UK and the US failed the first test: of protecting their citizens during the pandemic. Based on their track record, they will also fail the next one: of heeding the warning the Earth is sending us. But the sudden reduction in CO₂ levels that we witnessed when the world shut down shows us that it doesn’t have to be this way. What will it take for us to listen?