The coronavirus outbreak seems to be affecting all aspects of our daily lives. Everyone is well aware of the economy crashing and colleges being sent online, but what is less clear is the pandemic’s impact on the environment. With air travel plummeting and cities, states and countries changing their practices and/or essentially shutting down, I wondered what this all means for levels of CO2 emissions and other forms of waste.
Over a week ago, when the state of the virus was less clear, Starbucks placed a ban on its reusable cups in an effort to stop the spread. This does not seem too significant, but historically, Starbucks customers have saved over a million pounds of paper from landfills every year by purchasing drinks in reusable cups. This new policy will surely be a huge environmental setback in this regard.
Carbon emissions, on the other hand, have been decreasing. China, which emits the most carbon of any nation in the world, has been seeing levels 25 percent lower than usual in the past month. However, records show that drops this drastic are usually very temporary.
Another interesting factor to consider is the energy saved from decreased transportation. The most obvious is air travel. On my flight from Boston to San Diego last week, there was a noticeable wave of panic in the air, unlike anything I’d ever seen before. People were wiping down their seats so frantically that the flight attendants actually had to make an announcement to stop people from rubbing off the paint. This kind of hysteria makes it no surprise that air travel has been dropping sharply all over the world. United Airlines has announced that it will decrease international air travel by 20 percent, and Lufthansa Group said its capacity would be cut by 25 percent.
Air travel generally contributes around 2 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, so drops this drastic will no doubt help the environment. However, this should not offer people a false sense of optimism over climate change concerns. While the airline industry was hit hard after 9/11 in 2001, the fact that air travel was once again rapidly increasing right before the coronavirus outbreak shows a more realistic picture of how people will likely respond in the long term. Keeping in line with historical trends, it is more likely that people go back to their old habits once the pandemic has passed.
Additionally, with many people confining themselves to their homes, there will also be less CO2 emissions coming from cars. But, as a sustainable urban development expert quoted in Scientific American points out, there could actually be increased energy usage if people spend their time at home watching TV and using appliances.
The moral of the story is that we need to be mindful of the reasons behind the increased or decreased use of certain resources. Simply looking at statistics does not offer a complete look at how global energy usage will be affected by the coronavirus outbreak in the long term. In the meantime, however, it is of course reasonable to place more of a focus on thinking about public health issues and caring for our health and that of those around us.
For those of us fortunate enough not to be dealing with a pressing health crisis right now and just learning to navigate life at home again, we should just continue to be mindful of our resource usage and not take for granted some of the temporary improvements to the environment that this pandemic has seemingly caused. We need to keep in mind that there are larger systems at play, and as long as we live in a society whose first concern is bailing out airline corporations, our individual environmental actions are still needed.
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