"Thousands are dying and millions are at risk, but hey, at least carbon emissions are down."
Carbon Brief (2/19/20) blog: "Electricity demand and industrial output remain far below their usual levels across a range of indicators, many of which are at their lowest two-week average in several years. All told, the measures to contain coronavirus have resulted in reductions of 15% to 40% in output across key industrial sectors. This is likely to have wiped out a quarter or more of the country’s CO2 emissions over the past two weeks, the period when activity would normally have resumed after the Chinese new-year holiday. Over the same period in 2019, China released around 400m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2), meaning the virus could have cut global emissions by 100MtCO2 to date. The key question is whether the impacts are sustained, or if they will be offset – or even reversed – by the government response to the crisis...However, the Chinese government’s coming stimulus measures in response to the disruption could outweigh these shorter-term impacts on energy and emissions...If consumer demand is reduced – for example, due to unpaid wages during the crisis cascading through the rest of the economy – then industrial output and fossil-fuel use might not recover, even though capacity is available to do so."
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