Climate change fell out of the public eye as COVID-19 took over the
world. But this year is likely to be the most pivotal yet in the fight
against climate change.
From
our vantage point today, 2020 looks like the year when an unknown virus
spun out of control, killed hundreds of thousands and altered the way
we live day to day. In the future, we may look back at 2020 as the year
we decided to keep driving off the climate cliff–or to take the last
exit. Taking the threat seriously would mean using the opportunity
presented by this crisis to spend on solar panels and wind farms, push
companies being bailed out to cut emissions and foster greener forms of
transport in cities. If we instead choose to fund new coal-fired power
plants and oil wells and thoughtlessly fire up factories to urge growth,
we will lock in a pathway toward climate catastrophe. There’s a divide
about which way to go.
In
early April, as COVID-19 spread across the U.S. and doctors urgently
warned that New York City might soon run out of ventilators and hospital
beds, President Donald Trump gathered CEOs from some of the country’s
biggest oil and gas companies for a closed-door meeting in the White
House Cabinet Room. The industry faced its biggest disruption in
decades, and Trump wanted to help the companies secure their place at
the center of the 21st century American economy.
Everything
was on the table, from a tariff on imports to the U.S. government
itself purchasing excess oil. “We’ll work this out, and we’ll get our
energy business back,” Trump told the CEOs. “I’m with you 1,000%.” A few
days later, he announced he had brokered a deal with Russian President
Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to cut oil
production and rescue the industry.
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| Art by Jill Pelto for TIME |
Later
in April, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European
Commission, in a video message from across the Atlantic, offered a
different approach for the continent’s economic future. A European Green
Deal, she said, would be the E.U.’s “motor for the recovery.”
“We
can turn the crisis of this pandemic into an opportunity to rebuild our
economies differently,” she said. On May 27, she pledged more than $800
billion to the initiative, promising to transform the way Europeans live.
For
the past three years, the world outside the U.S. has largely tried to
ignore Trump’s retrograde position on climate, hoping 2020 would usher
in a new President with a new position, re-enabling the cooperation
between nations needed to prevent the worst ravages of climate change.
But there’s no more time to wait.
We’re
standing at a climate crossroads: the world has already warmed 1.1°C
since the Industrial Revolution. If we pass 2°C, we risk hitting one or
more major tipping points, where the effects of climate change go from
advancing gradually to changing dramatically overnight, reshaping the
planet. To ensure that we don’t pass that threshold, we need to cut
emissions in half by 2030. Climate change has understandably fallen out
of the public eye this year as the coronavirus pandemic rages.
Nevertheless, this year, or perhaps this year and next, is likely to be
the most pivotal yet in the fight against climate change. “We’ve run out
of time to build new things in old ways,” says Rob Jackson, an earth
system science professor at Stanford University and the chair of the
Global Carbon Project. What we do now will define the fate of the
planet–and human life on it–for decades.
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