Greenhouse gas emissions plummeted in the United States as the coronavirus prompted widespread shutdowns, canceled flights, and ground economic activity to a halt, falling to the lowest levels since 1983, according to a Bloomberg study.
Greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. will fall by 9.2% in 2020, a study from BloombergNEF projected. U.S. emissions have been trending downward for more than a decade, according to Bloomberg, in large part because of the energy industry’s slow transition from coal power plants to renewables and natural gas plants, but 2020’s dip is the steepest drop on record.
Without the effects of the pandemic, the U.S. was only projected to reduce its emissions by 1%.
Should the U.S. remain on BloombergNEF’s projected course, it could fall within the emissions levels it committed as part of the Paris climate agreement, which Trump pulled the country out of. Before 2020, the country had fallen well behind reaching the accord’s targets.
Global greenhouse gas emissions fell nearly 17% during the height of the spring lockdowns, owing in large part to dramatic reductions in transportation, according to the New York Times. But those reductions didn’t last — by June, China had already returned to pre-coronavirus emissions levels, and the rest of the world wasn’t far behind.
Transportation emissions are expected to increase in 2021. Not only are people already back on the roads, but more people who previously didn’t have vehicles are buying them, according to the Atlantic, as fears of public transportation curb interest in using subways or buses.
Despite the record-breaking drop in emissions, net emissions are expected to come in at a sizable but much less precipitous 6.4% decrease. That roughly 3-point discrepancy is a result of extreme forest fires ravaging much of the West Coast over the summer — more than 4 million acres of California alone were burned in 2020. Those fires packed a carbon emission punch, dumping 184 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to BloombergNEF.
The firm cautioned that 2020’s reductions are not the cause for celebration that some might hope them to be.
“The amount of pain we’ve had to go through for a relatively modest drop shows that there needs to be more smart policy and smart thinking about emissions,” said Ethan Zindler, BloombergNEF’s head of Americas. “The emphasis has to be not on how to reduce demand, but how to make supply more green.”
