The Covid Pandemic Is Not Over, But The (Brief) Reduction In Carbon Emissions Sure Is

Carbon emissions are almost back up to where they were
before the pandemic. There was a sharp drop in emissions 
during pandemic lockdowns in 2020, but they weren't 
as extensive as some scientists had anticipated.

 The global Covid-19 pandemic rages on, and we all know it has produced absolutely no good news.

If you were looking for any silver lining with the pandemic, it was that lockdowns meant less carbon emissions, meaning contributions to climate change also declined.  

Carbon emissions dipped by 5.4 percent in 2020.  Not much, but it was a start. And, to state the obvious, the dip in carbon emissions surely wasn't worth the 5.3 million and counting global deaths from Covid 

The dip in emissions was short-lived.  Certainly much shorter than the actual pandemic  This year, we're almost back to pre-pandemic levels. 

According to the journal Nature: 

"After rising steadily for decades, global carbon dioxide emissions fell by 6.4% or 2.3 billion tons in 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic squelched economic and social activities worldwide, according to new data on daily fossil fuel emissions. The decline is significant - roughly double Japan's yearly emissions - but smaller than many climate researchers expected given the scale of the pandemic, and is not expected to last once the virus is brought under control."

Estimates from Stanford-led researchers indicate this year's carbon emissions will have risen by 4.9 percent, wiping out most of the emission cuts from 2020.

Nature notes that the United Nations estimates the world needs to cut carbon emissions by 7.6 percent per year over the next 10 years to prevent the world from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Since we couldn't cut emissions by that much in a year when the world pretty much shut down for part of it means we really have our work cut out for us. 

It's plain that government policy, however well intentioned in some nations, is not enough to stem the tide of rising emissions.

Even if the rate of emissions slows in the coming years, that might not be enough. Think of it this way. If you leave the water running out of the faucet in the bathtub with the drain closed it will overflow.  If you turn the water down but not off, the bathtub will still eventually overflow.

That's kind of the predicament we're in now.