The corona virus does not stop climate change.

Billions of people are required to stay home, schools, shops and restaurants remain closed, borders are narrow: in a few months, the coronavirus has paralyzed business and commerce worldwide, millions of people are out of work.

Hope is obvious, at least for the weather it could be a good year. After all, factories produce less or no greenhouse gases, planes remain on the ground, and cars remain in the garage. Traffic on Swiss roads has decreased by 30 percent, in some places by 70 percent. All this reduces the consumption of fossil fuels. However, this is just good news for the weather at first glance.

CO has never been so much_2nd saved as through lock

Climate scientists forecast the biggest decrease in CO this year_2nd-Emissions that have existed in the world. Blocked countries used about a quarter less energy, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported. Consumption in apartments is increasing, but the shutdown of industry and commerce more than makes up for it. In general, IEA experts expect CO_2ndEmissions will decrease by 2.6 billion tons in 2020.

In absolute numbers, that’s more than ever. World War II or the oil crisis in the early 1980s reduced CO_2nd– Exit for less than half. The financial crisis of the last decade was only a seventh.

Proportionally, that is, as a percentage, the decrease was greater due to the depression of the 1930s (26 percent), before the Second World War (19 percent) and the Spanish flu (15 percent).

For comparison: the approximately 2,600 million tons of CO_2nd, which the world is forecast to save in 2020, would correspond to a decline of just 8 percent. The big bar suddenly seems small.

An 8 percent reduction in emissions is a little more than would be necessary to limit expected global warming to 1.5 degrees, but it does so annually. 1.5 degrees of warming is the value that the IPCC suggests to limit the dangerous consequences of global warming. At the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, states agreed on the somewhat vague goal of “well below 2 degrees.”

For the earth to heat no more than 2 degrees with a probability of 66 percent, global emissions must decrease by 2.7 percent annually over the next ten years, estimates the United Nations Environment Program ( UNEP), for which 1.5-Degree target at 7.6 percent.

That means: in ten years, annual emissions should be more than half. A glance at the diagram is enough to see how big the challenge is. The line should return roughly to where it was in the 1970s.

Climate protection needs conversion, not a simple reduction

All of the cuts and lack of quality of life that many of these days complain about mean less to the climate than some expect. This is due firstly to the fact that greenhouse gases are accumulating and secondly to the existing infrastructure.

On accumulation: Unlike smog, greenhouse gases do not disappear from the air when we stop producing them. Emissions have accumulated in the atmosphere since industrialization and intensify the greenhouse effect there every year. This explains an apparent paradox: although we will emit less in 2020 than in the previous year, CO_2ndThe concentration in the atmosphere will be higher than ever. Therefore, one objective of the Paris Climate Conference is for greenhouse gases that have already been emitted to be removed from the atmosphere to offset emissions in the coming decades. This technique is still under investigation.

The second point is the importance of infrastructure. Climate protection is often viewed as an individual decision by consumers who may be climate friendly or harmful. But that is only a partial view.

Air travel, for example, makes a big difference in personal footprints. Anyone flying from Zurich to Berlin and back should consider emitting 2 tons of CO_2nd consider. That is more than three times more than what a person should cause on average per year if global warming is to stop. The maximum amount per person would be 0.6 tons if the load is distributed equally worldwide.

EU citizens currently produce more than 8 tonnes of CO per year_2nd-Equivalents per capita, in Switzerland there are more than 5. However, international flights are missing in these national calculations. This would add another 14 percent more emissions in Switzerland, a relatively high figure. If, as is currently the case, only 3 percent of Swiss planes take off, this makes an accounting difference, but worldwide, flights only account for 2 to 3 percent of emissions. This also means that even if planes did not take off tomorrow, we would be far from being climate neutral.

Electricity generation (25 percent), the agriculture sector (24 percent), and industry (18 percent) have a higher share of global emissions – a total of about two-thirds. The pandemic has a limited impact in these sectors.

The current lack of transportation and part of consumption in the closure, which is currently being forced by the Corona crisis, is a conceivably inefficient way to protect the climate. Because the infrastructure remains intact and produces emissions: More than 80 percent of the energy consumed still comes from fossil sources: oil, coal, and gas engines and machines, and it heats our buildings.

To protect the climate, it is not necessary to temporarily close the economy, but rather to restructure the infrastructure.

State aid could be used to protect the climate.

Before the Corona crisis, this reconstruction seemed to be slowly increasing on the agendas of Western governments. Demonstrations of the Friday for the Future movement raised climate change, and green parties benefited in many countries.

The perception of priorities has now changed. The pandemic is an acute threat to human life, then the economy and climate protection follow later. The COP26 climate conference scheduled for November in Glasgow has been postponed to next year.

To cushion the economic downturn, states are making money available to the economy; in Germany, the United States and Japan, they are the largest aid programs in history. Airlines are saved. The German auto industry requires government subsidies for car buyers. Is climate protection now in the background?

To prevent this from happening, some suggest that government intervention also takes into account climate impact. IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol warned that financial crisis packages should support the conversion of the economy into renewable energy.

Technologies such as hydrogen or the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (carbon capture and storage) urgently need research funds to further develop. Solar and wind energy are cheaper than ever and should be used. According to the IEA, 70 percent of investments in the energy sector are controlled directly or indirectly by governments.

Right now, cheap oil is working against an infrastructure restructuring. This reduces the incentive to buy a fuel efficient car or insulate buildings to save energy. After all, this is a good time for Birol to cut fossil fuel subsidies.

ETH climate scientist Sonia Seneviratne said it would be fatal if politicians lost sight of the climate: “Of course, the crown crisis is pushing harder right now. But someday we will have a vaccine. But the climate crisis will not go away », she says. Seneviratne sees the most urgent construction sites in terms of traffic emissions, heating and waste treatment: “We must tackle this conversion in the next five years to minimize risk.”

Although it does not fully support the call by climate protectionists not to provide state support to airlines during the Corona crisis due to jobs and social function, “the support must be conditional. Society should not subsidize routes that are easily viable by train. ” France took this route by rescuing Air France. The weather was mentioned when Switzerland was rescued, but the specific requirements are only of an economic nature.

The crown and climate crises are very distinguishing

The fact that climate change is contained does not depend on the blockade due to the corona virus, but on how societies now deal with the corona’s interaction with the climate crisis.

Some argue that you can learn something about climate change from the crown crisis, from the experience that societies can act quickly and responsibly. However, there are big differences: Sars-CoV-2 is a difficult problem, but not a complex one: a virus spreads through infection by droplets, for some it is fatal. Images of overcrowded hospitals go around the world. The danger is easy to understand. The uncertainties are great, but they decrease over time.

In the climate, the connections between causes and consequences are much more complex. For example, we know that global warming is already making droughts and violent weather events more likely, but the fire disaster in Australia cannot be attributed directly and monocausally. Time horizons are also completely different. Global warming has been going on for centuries; In just a few short weeks, the coronavirus has turned from a poorly known pathogen to the trigger of a crippling pandemic.

This makes it more difficult to identify global warming as a specific hazard. And while the pandemic can largely combat each country on its own, the entire world is connected in terms of climate: savings and omissions always have a global impact.

However, there are some similarities.

However, what crises have in common: they show that nature cannot be controlled at will and that our economic system is sometimes very vulnerable to natural hazards. In both crises, scientific knowledge is needed. And time counts in both crises: By investing early to avoid risk, you can ultimately save costs.

Climate scientist Sonia Seneviratne uses a corona metaphor to explain the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees of global warming: “There are tilting elements in the climate system from which the consequences for life on Earth suddenly worsen: how crowded hospitals in the Corona crisis. We cannot say exactly when that happens. But we know that it is much more likely to happen when the temperature is 2 degrees. “