Just like that, a pandemic-fueled glimpse of a better world is growing hazy—or smoggy, to be more precise. As civilization locked down in early 2020—industries ground to a halt, more people worked from home, and almost no one traveled—global carbon dioxide emissions crashed by 6.4 percent, and in the United States by 13 percent. In turn, air quality greatly improved. Life transformed, sure enough, but that transformation was fleeting. Scientists warned that the drop would be temporary because economies would roar back stronger than ever to make up for lost revenue. Indeed, by the end of 2021, emissions have now returned to pre-pandemic levels.
“What we witnessed was more or less one year of emissions decline that would help put us on a reasonable trajectory,” says environmental economist Mark Paul of the New College of Florida. “But there was also tremendous pain for tens of millions who lost their jobs.”
There are lots of ways to fight climate change, but relying on a pandemic to force (temporary) reform ain’t it. Really, 2021 should have been a year of civilizational reassessment—instead, we’re pretty much back where we started. “People are still driving internal-combustion engines. People are still turning on their lights powered by coal and other fossil fuels. I really think nothing fundamentally changed,” Paul says. “It was a temporary blip that I think highlights how big the lift is.” The pandemic year did, however, offer some solid clues for how to tackle longer-term changes—if we’re willing to make that shift.
One place to start is, literally, with work. The US Congress and the White House have been floating the idea of a Civilian Climate Corps, a reimagining of the Civilian Conservation Corps that employed 3 million workers during the Great Depression. It would mobilize Americans to plant trees in cities, thus mitigating the urban heat island effect, and deploy them to prepare the landscape against catastrophic wildfires, floods, and other ravages of climate change. The government would provide people with income and stimulate the still-reeling economy, all in a larger quest to prepare the nation for a hotter future.
But nearly two years after the start of the pandemic, the Civilian Climate Corps has yet to materialize. Yes, Biden’s social bill, which is currently languishing in Congress, allocates $555 billion to climate programs. Of that, $30 billion would go to hire 300,000 people for the corps. But it’s not nearly enough, Paul says. He thinks the program should employ more like 9 million people over its lifetime, which he estimates will take hundreds of billions of dollars. Sure, concerned citizens could volunteer their time with any number of nonprofits that work on climate action. But the scale of the problem demands a solution only the government can provide. “The government provides people with opportunities to join the military and to go serve their country,” says Paul. “But for those who are less interested in international conflict and are more interested in preserving a safe and habitable planet for themselves and future generations, their government essentially says, Hey, you're out of luck.”
This year, the US took at least a step toward the future of renewables. In November, Congress finally passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, of which some $154 billion is to fund climate programs. It allocates money for updating our ancient, busted grid; puts $7.5 billion toward a vast network of chargers to power electric vehicles; will expand access to clean drinking water; and funds investments in research hubs for clean energy technologies like advanced nuclear reactors.
Think of this kind of government spending like an investment in the economy and in public health. “There’s literature saying that renewables can potentially actually create more jobs than fossil fuels,” says Sha Yu, a senior scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who studies climate change. We’re talking five times the number of jobs in the green energy sector by 2050, according to one international team of scientists. “And, clearly it has the benefits of improving air quality in different regions,” Yu continues. “So it's a low-hanging fruit that is cost-effective, but it also creates additional co-benefits for the overall society.”
Yet that's just the first step in a very long journey that's barely begun. If the United States is going to hit Biden’s goal of going net-zero by the year 2050—meaning both reducing the emission of greenhouse gases and pulling them out of the atmosphere—the nation will need to reduce emissions 8 percent per year, every year. But when you turn on your lights in the US in the year 2021, there’s still an 80 percent chance the energy is coming from fossil fuels. And since the average car in America lasts 16 years, a whole lot of carbon-spewing vehicles are going to be zooming around for years to come. “In fact,” Paul argues of the infrastructure bill, which allocates over $100 billion to fix roads, bridges, and highways, “massive investments in roads will continue to support our vehicle-dependent culture, and will really limit the transition into a more sustainable transportation economy.”
One of the roadblocks is that the US can’t fully shift to renewables until the national grid gets fixed. (Technically, it’s three grids: one for the East, one for the West, and one for Texas.) The main challenge is intermittency: The sun doesn’t always shine on solar panels in the Southwest, and wind doesn’t always blow turbines in the Midwest. Ideally, a unified grid would allow the sharing of energy across the whole country to port it to wherever it’s needed. But that isn’t possible yet. A secondary problem is that the system isn’t ready for the spike in demand from an increasing number of EVs plugging into it. “Our electricity grid is just in urgent need of modernization,” says Paul. The government needs to invest tens of billions of dollars a year in the grid for many years to come, Paul says, but the infrastructure bill allocates $65 billion once. “So we're talking about really pennies on the dollar.”
Modernizing the grid to accommodate renewables requires big structural changes, and that's going to take time. But not everything will. “There are things that can cut emissions very quickly, like [addressing] methane leaks from the oil and gas industry,” says Jonathan Foley, executive director of the nonprofit Project Drawdown, which advocates for climate action. “Just go out and plug the leaks. There's no infrastructure required, just money and wrenches.” Methane is 80 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, but it also disappears from the atmosphere much more quickly; if you stop producing it, you see a rapid response in the climate.
Stopping deforestation is another quick fix, Foley says. The rotting trees in dying forests release greenhouse gases, whereas healthy forests sequester carbon in trees and in soils. But this isn’t as easy as just throwing seeds across a landscape and calling it a day. An ecosystem needs to grow back to its previous biodiverse glory, which will make it far more resilient to climate change than a mono-cropped plantation of a single tree species.
Another less obvious climate solution might be making people more aware of their electricity use. For all the pain the pandemic visited upon humanity, it did hint at a more energy-efficient way of living, especially for those who had the privilege of working from home. In the US, energy demand typically peaks when people get home from work and start cooking and running their appliances. That’s around the time the sun sets, when solar power generation drops off. Since there aren’t large-scale ways to store that renewable energy to use on-demand, power plants have to spin up to meet it by burning fossil fuels.
But in the future, occupational flexibility could translate into energy flexibility: Instead of charging their EVs and running the washing machine when they get home, more people could do those tasks during the day, when demand is lower and the sun is burning bright. “As we have more solar, we're going to have more and more electricity being produced around noon,” says Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, director of the Renewable Energy and Advanced Mathematics Lab at UC San Diego. “So if we can move as much of our electricity demand as we can to match the profile of renewable generation, that's the best way that we could incorporate more solar power at the cheapest cost.”
Still, Foley points out that individual change just isn’t enough to cut it. And nobody wants to go back to a world of shuttered businesses and limited movement. “Having everybody stay at home, and other people getting laid off, and a lot of economic activity not happening probably isn't the way we want to decarbonize the world,” says Foley.
Some of the biggest lifts—like updating the grid, regulating emissions, and other systematic changes—will have to be shouldered by governments alone. But Foley suggests that others will work better if the government partners with consumers and fronts the funding for better choices. “The government doesn't know how to spend money very efficiently,” says Foley. “We throw large amounts of money around and often are disappointed afterward. And so I'm actually more attracted to lots of smaller initiatives instead of the big grandiose ones to get all the attention.”
Take, for example, the government’s power to incentivize homeowners to adopt greener technologies, which has previously been done by using rebates and tax breaks to accelerate the purchase of solar panels. “The government didn't make solar get cheap—it was Chinese manufacturing that made solar cheap,” says Foley. “But the government helped by adding more capital to that accelerating curve.” Now, he thinks, the same kinds of tax breaks and other incentives could be turned toward other devices, like heat pumps, which transfer heat in and out of a home instead of generating heat. Heat pumps don’t burn fuel like a furnace does, so they can instead run on clean energy, and they’re more efficient, saving homeowners hundreds of dollars a year.
Hell, if billionaires really wanted to fight the climate crisis they helped create, they’d do it with heat pumps which, OK, aren’t particularly sexy. “I wish Jeff Bezos would buy $10 billion worth of heat pumps and have Amazon deliver them and then install them with local contractors in your home,” says Foley. “That would have a much bigger impact than whatever he's probably doing and forever tip the price from an old technology to a new technology. It suddenly becomes the better, cheaper, cooler choice.”
So maybe 2021 wasn’t a total loss when it comes to climate action. The infrastructure and social bill funds may not be enough to fix the grid, but they can help nudge the US toward renewables. The Civilian Climate Corps, should it ever get through Congress, may arrive too late to stimulate the pandemic economy, but its members can still fan out to fortify the landscape against climate change. And some of the changes people made to adapt to pandemic life—working from home more often, commuting less, not taxing the electrical grid every night at exactly 6 pm—may be habits worth keeping when the world fully opens up again. Maybe then it won’t just be a glimpse of a better world. Maybe it will be more like a vision.
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