COVID took a bite from U.S. greenhouse gas emissions
WASHINGTON — America’s greenhouse gas emissions from energy and industry plummeted more than 10 percent in 2020, reaching their lowest levels in at least three decades as the coronavirus pandemic slammed the brakes on the nation’s economy, according to an estimate published Tuesday by the Rhodium Group.
The steep drop, however, was the result of extraordinary circumstances, and experts warned that the country still faced enormous challenges in getting its planet-warming pollution under control. In the years ahead, U.S. emissions are widely expected to bounce back once the pandemic recedes and the economy rumbles back to life — unless policymakers take stronger action to clean up the country’s power plants, factories, cars and trucks.
“The most significant reductions last year were around transportation, which remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels,” said Kate Larsen, a director at Rhodium Group, a research and consulting firm. “But as vaccines become more prevalent, and depending on how quickly people feel comfortable enough to drive and fly again, we’d expect emissions to rebound unless there are major policy changes put in place.”
Transportation, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gases, saw a 14.7 percent decline in emissions in 2020 as millions of people stopped driving to work and airlines canceled flights.
Emissions from heavy industry, such as steel and cement, dropped 7 percent in 2020 as automakers and other manufacturers churned out fewer goods
amid the economic slump. America’s buildings, which produce carbon dioxide when they burn oil or natural gas for heat, saw emissions fall 6.2 percent, driven by both lockdowns and warmer-than-average weather.
In the electricity sector, emissions plunged by 10.3 percent in 2020, driven by a sharp decline in coal burning.
Overall, the fall in emissions nationwide was the largest one-year decline since at least World War II, the Rhodium Group said, and put the United States within striking distance of one of its major climate goals under the Paris agreement, a global pact by nearly 200 governments to address climate change.
As part of that agreement, former President Barack Obama had pledged that U.S. emissions would fall 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. Trump disavowed the Paris pact, and, before last year, it looked like the United States would miss that target. But in the wake of the pandemic, America’s industrial emissions are now roughly 21.5 percent below 2005 levels.
But that milestone comes with several caveats. First,
those numbers do not account for any uptick in emissions resulting from last year’s record-setting wildfires in the West.
One preliminary estimate in November from Bloombergnef suggested that wildfires could offset roughly 3 percent of last year’s drop in American emissions. While many trees that went up in flames will eventually grow back, absorbing carbon dioxide as they do, that process will take years. And scientists have warned that wildfires will become larger and more frequent as the planet warms.
The other caveat is that America’s emissions could tick back up again once vaccines are widely distributed and the economy recovers. The Rhodium Group noted that many sectors, like air travel and steel making, have already been rebounding in recent months.
“Unfortunately, 2020 tells us little about what we can expect to see in 2021and beyond,” the report concluded. “The vast majority of 2020’s emission reductions were due to decreased economic activity and not from any structural changes that would deliver lasting reductions in the carbon intensity of our economy.”