Around the world, weary people in many countries have begun to chart the promising slide of daily coronavirus cases and deaths—less so in the United States, of course, where our leader has decided that we should be “warriors” bravely exposing ourselves to the microbe. But even here in New York City, the worst hotspot so far, we appear to have reached the top of the roller coaster.
But the other crisis curves on our planet—the endless rises of temperature and carbon-dioxide concentration—show no such mercy. Just the opposite. Researchers reported last week that April of 2020 has tied for the hottest April on record, and that there is a seventy-five-per-cent chance that this year will become the hottest one ever measured for the globe as a whole. That would be remarkable, because it usually takes an El Niño warming the Pacific to vault the globe to a new record, which isn’t happening this year. In fact, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said that February and March of 2020 were the two hottest non-El Niño months ever recorded in its temperature database. For perspective, April was the four hundred and twenty-fourth consecutive month with temperatures above the twentieth-century average, meaning that, if you’re under thirty-five, you’ve never lived through a cooler-than-usual month.
That’s because of the carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere as we continue to burn carbon fuels, which also set a new record this month, topping four hundred and eighteen parts per million for the first time in at least three million years. Some people may wonder: If we’re driving less, shouldn’t atmospheric CO2 concentrations be dropping? Indeed, the lockdown has dropped carbon-dioxide emissions by what the International Energy Agency estimates will be around eight per cent this year, but that doesn’t do more than slow the growth a tad. That’s because, once we emit carbon dioxide, the molecule stays in the atmosphere trapping heat for a century or more. “Eight percent is not an awful lot in the grand scheme of things,” Sean Sublette, a meteorologist at the nonprofit Climate Central, told a reporter for The Verge. “It’s like a bathtub and you’ve had the spigot on full blast for a while, and you turn it back 10%, but you’re still filling the bathtub.” Sublette added, “You haven’t really stopped filling the bathtub, you’ve just slowed it a tiny bit.”
Indeed, the first question is: Can we even maintain that eight-per-cent drop as we come out of quarantine? (The second question is: Can we drop CO2 emissions another eight per cent each year for much of the next decade? Because that’s what it would take to meet the temperature targets we set in Paris in 2015.) Officials in many cities are worried that, as life resumes, people will start driving more, not less, because who wants to be on a subway right now? In the United Kingdom, transport officials announced that bus and train capacity would drop by ninety per cent if people kept up the two-metre social distancing that health officials have recommended. Parts of the U.K. have shown a seventy-per-cent rise in bicycle traffic, so authorities are going to try to encourage that trend. In London, aware that the city risks “grinding to a halt” if any large fraction of Tube rides are replaced by car traffic, Mayor Sadiq Khan said that “by quickly and cheaply widening pavements, creating temporary cycle lanes, and closing roads to through traffic, we will enable millions more people to change the way they get around our city.” Italy is awarding five-hundred-euro grants to city dwellers who buy bicycles or e-scooters. Some American cities are thinking the same way: Seattle has announced that it will permanently ban cars from about twenty miles of what it’s calling Stay Healthy Streets.
Those changes of individual habit are important, if we can maintain them. (And they’ll make for far nicer cities.) But the stubbornly high carbon numbers from the lockdown make it clear that we’re also going to need institutional and infrastructural change. The economic-recovery plans that nations are now making may offer the best chance we’ll ever get at those deep changes. Because the heat isn’t pausing—that’s what the jaggedly rising curves of the planetary fever make clear.
Passing the Mic
It’s not just global warming that keeps going during a pandemic—the fossil-fuel industry continues trying to build new infrastructure, often taking advantage of the restrictions on gatherings that make it difficult for protesters to organize. One of the hottest fights in the country is raging on the south shore of Massachusetts, where Enbridge Inc. is building a compressor station to export gas to Europe and Canada. It’s run into mass citizen resistance, focussed in the town of Weymouth. Alice Arena and the Reverend Betsy Sowers are two key organizers of that fight, and they jointly e-mailed me their thoughts. There’s more information at nocompressor.com, and on Facebook, at their group Fore River Residents Against the Compressor Station.
Work on the Weymouth compressor is continuing amid the pandemic. What’s the point of this project? Where’s the gas coming from and going?
Enbridge hopes to move fracked gas from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania to [eastern] Canada, for export as L.N.G. [liquid natural gas]. It’s a battle with Russia for the European market, even as Europe turns toward renewables and some of Enbridge’s contracts in Europe are disappearing. (A small amount of the gas is destined for local distribution in Canada.) Its only point is to set one precedent and prevent another. It would set a precedent as the only transmission compressor station sited in a designated port area, in a FEMA flood zone, in a densely populated urban area adjacent to two environmental-justice communities, on only 4.3 acres of land. It would avoid setting the precedent of losing to a ragtag citizens group and a few municipalities who have cost them millions in overruns and lost shipping capacity in a five-year legal battle. They would be pariahs at fossil-fuel cocktail parties.
Explain how this fits into the larger climate fight.
Every new piece of fossil-fuel infrastructure locks us into decades more of fracking, of methane and carbon-dioxide increases, leading to catastrophic climate change. If Enbridge succeeds in completing this compressor station, it has plans to add more turbines and more high-pressure pipelines, more than doubling its capacity for the global export market. This project also jeopardizes the health and safety of environmental-justice communities from Pennsylvania impacted by fracking; to Massachusetts, where the compressor will belch more poisons into already suffering urban neighborhoods; to Mi’kmaq tribal lands, in Canada, where salt caverns are proposed to be reamed out for L.N.G. storage, destroying tribal fishing grounds on the Shubenacadie River. Finally, if burned, the gas will add still more to the atmosphere’s toxic methane and carbon overload. Every time fossil-fuel infrastructure is built, it’s another step backward in the battle for a livable world. We have to stop all of this construction.
What has it been like to try to keep momentum alive in the pandemic?
We have to say that the pandemic has been an obstruction to our ability to organize, and it has taken an emotional toll on our members to have to watch the construction go on, even during a public-health emergency. When construction began, in November, we started ramping up a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience, with thirty-two arrests from December to February. COVID-19 shut down our ability to be on the site protesting and slowing the pace of work. Instead, we have run virtual campaigns, and hosted three successful car-parade protests in the past four weeks. Our monthly community meetings, [which were held] in person for the past five years, have moved to Zoom. We are having fun playing Where’s Waldo with a plywood effigy of Governor Baker (with his hands tied, because he has repeatedly said he can’t do anything because his hands are tied by federal policy). He’s been travelling around to strategic locations having his picture taken with [our] members and allies. All of this is being done with social distancing and masks!
Climate School
A new study found that the incidence of super high levels of heat and humidity—past the level tolerable for our species—has been underestimated. These waves of hideous steambath heat have doubled in some coastal subtropical areas since 1979.
Warren Buffett got expensively schooled, so you don’t have to. Last weekend, he reported to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholders that a ten-billion-dollar bet he’d made on oil last spring—in this case, in shares in Occidental Petroleum Corp.—had gone quite wrong. Now, he said, he’ll invest some assets in wind and sun.
Scoreboard
When city officials in San Luis Obispo, California, scheduled a hearing on plans to follow other cities and discourage gas hookups in new construction, union officials allied with the local gas utility sent city officials an e-mail threatening a mass protest where there will be “no social distancing in place” to block the move. Eric Hofmann, the president of Utility Workers of America Local 132, wrote, “Please don’t force my hand in bussing in hundreds and hundreds of pissed off people potentially adding to this pandemic.” Hofmann also chairs Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions, a pro-gas advocacy group that has received funding from SoCalGas. It’s worth remembering that if people use, say, electric induction cooktops and electric air-source heat pumps in their homes, workers will be needed to install them, too.
Despite pleas from manufacturers that a pandemic is the wrong moment for a new mandate, California regulators plan to push ahead with a June vote mandating a steadily rising number of electric trucks. This is important because, as John Lippert writes for Forbes, as much as twenty per cent of the state’s greenhouse-gas emissions can come from heavy-duty trucks.
With the world distracted by a pandemic, the Amazon is in trouble. Deforestation in the first few months of this year showed its highest rate during the same time period since record-keeping began, in 2015—up fifty-five per cent from the same period last year.
The Washington Post won a truly deserved Pulitzer Prize for its remarkable climate-change series “2°C: Beyond the Limit.” For two decades, beginning in 1990, the élite newspapers were part of the climate problem, treating it as a “both sides” debate. But in recent years the Post, the Times, and others have given the crisis intense and memorable coverage.
Renewable energy continues to set remarkable records. Even as the fossil-fuel industry falters, the Financial Times reports that clean energy continues to draw investment. “Covid-19 is a terrible thing, but it doesn’t impact how much the sun shines or the wind blows,” an analyst explained. Indeed, a burst of installation of new solar and wind power last year meant that, for roughly forty straight days this spring, the United States produced more electricity from wind, water, and sun than it did from coal.
Warming Up
I needed to feel a little fierce this week, and so I tracked down a favorite video. Made in 2013, it shows Pacific Climate Warriors on islands across the South Seas throwing down in ceremonial dance to demand climate action. Their slogan is “We Are Not Drowning, We Are Fighting,” and it seems right for the moment.
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May 14, 2020 at 06:05PM
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One Crisis Doesn’t Stop Because Another Starts - The New Yorker
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