Environmental gains during pandemic prove short-lived

The coronavirus pandemic isn’t having the lasting environmental boost some had hoped for, as emissions tick back up and single-use products like disposable face masks and takeout cutlery clog landfills. At the height of the COVID-19 outbreak in the spring, greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 17 percent globally as commutes came to a halt and people stuck closer to home. At the same time, many cities with bans on plastic bags and styrofoam containers suspended those policies to ease burdens on restaurants and avoid potential transmission at grocery stores, though surface contact is no longer suspected to be a major contributor to virus spread. The net effect: a negligible dent in climate-warming emissions and a surge in plastic and other waste that can take centuries to break down. “We just published a paper that looks at how much COVID would reduce climate change and the effect is 0.01 degrees Celsius, so it’s actually essentially nothing,” said Corinne Le Quéré, a professor of climate change science at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. Despite the massive drop a few months ago, emissions are now hovering within 5 percent of what they were around the same time last […]

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