9.2% Projected Drop In GHG Output From US Economy Offset By Forest Fires; Now It'll Be 6.4% Lower
Greenhouse gases generated by the U.S. economy will slide 9.2 percent this year, tumbling to the lowest level in at least three decades, a new BloombergNEF study says. Battered by the coronavirus pandemic, the stalled economy is projected to have generated 5.9 billion metric tons of emissions, about the same level as 1983, according to the private research organization.
As a result, the United States has been inadvertently pushed back on track to meet the commitments the Obama administration made at the Paris climate agreement in December 2015, despite the fact the Trump administration pulled the country out of the pact. Before 2020, the United States had fallen badly behind its targets under the accord.
Still, net emissions are expected to be 6.4 percent lower after taking into account the unusually extreme forest fires that swept the West Coast and Rocky Mountains earlier this year, pumping carbon dioxide and other pollution into the air and offsetting much of the drop in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
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The BloombergNEF analysts said the effects of the economic disruption would linger through 2021 and emissions in the coming year could still be 5 percent lower than 2019 emissions. That level, said Thomas Rowlands-Rees, BloombergNEF’s head of North American research, could become a “new normal” if people change driving habits and the power sector continues to shift to renewable power. But the study says the United States could take little comfort from that. “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.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/11/19/us-emissions-climate-bloombergnef/