An Unintended Consequence of COVID-19 Shutdowns? Blue Skies and Cleaner Air

In March, on day 48 of the strict lockdown to fight the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China, Rebecca Arendell Franks, a woman living in the epicenter of the outbreak, began to notice some surprising changes outside her apartment window. With no work, traffic, or ancillary pollution, “spring in Wuhan is absolutely stunning,” she wrote on Facebook.

“I used to think there weren’t really birds in Wuhan, because you rarely saw them and never heard them,” Arendell Franks shared. “I now know they were just muted and crowded out by the traffic and people. All day long now I hear birds singing.”

As economies across the world are halted and millions of people abide by stay-at-home orders in the effort to “flatten the curve” of COVID-19, many are observing similar unintended consequences: cleaner air and water in some of the most polluted cities on earth.

Across China, levels of nitrogen dioxide, an air pollutant produced by burning fossil fuels like gas, were down by as much as 30% in January, according to NASA satellite readings. With minimal cars on the road, Los Angeles’s notorious smog has lifted, giving way to clear blue skies and, according to Environmental Protection Agency data for March, better air quality than the city has experienced in almost 40 years. Carbon monoxide emissions are down by 50% in New York; the famed Venice canals are sparkling; and you can see the stars in Delhi, a city where people wore masks long before the coronavirus to protect themselves from thick car fumes and industrial exhaust. In the usually densely trafficked Nairobi, Mount Kenya can suddenly be seen towering 85 miles away—a sight so surreal, it sparked a disbelieving meme.

“It is helpful in letting people know that there is a different world possible,” Rhiana Gunn-Wright, director of climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute and an architect of the Green New Deal, told Vogue. “Seeing these things has helped people reconnect to nature, to realize that our actions are affecting it all the time.”

In an installment of Vogue’s Global Conversation series this week, designer Stella McCartney marveled at the malleability of the environment. “We’ve seen how incredible nature is, how she bounces back so quickly when we just stop for a second,” McCartney said. “I think that’s so hopeful. Will we ever be able to heal earth? It looks like we can.”

For environmental experts, it’s a glimpse at the cleaner, greener world that could be—but without a deadly pandemic and economic free fall. “This is a short-term positive,” Tom Steyer, the environmental activist and former 2020 presidential candidate told Vogue in a Zoom interview. “What’s really necessary is to re-create our society in a way that dramatically reduces emissions, and rebuild an America that is much more sustainable.”

While gains like the lifting of smog in L.A. and Delhi and improved air quality in China are inspiring awe on social media, pollution hasn’t fallen nearly as much as some experts would have thought, according to Leah Stokes, Ph.D., a climate policy expert and assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She cites projections saying carbon emissions could fall 4% in 2020—a historic decline in a single year, but hardly worth the price of a pandemic.

“Climate policy would be a lot less expensive, and a lot less disruptive,” Stokes told Vogue. “If we had electric cars and buses in Los Angeles, the air would be clean every day.”

The temporary easing of global pollution amid the pandemic is both a glimmer of hope, and a humbling reminder of the looming threat of climate change—another seemingly invisible natural threat (and one that is therefore often denied or downplayed) that could have widespread, devastating effects. Some are already upon us, from global warming and pollution to deadly wildfires, hurricanes, and heat waves. As the headline of a New York Times op-ed by Gunn-Wright put it this week: “Think This Pandemic Is Bad? We Have Another Crisis Coming.”

“It is good for us to realize that, in fact, we are not lords of nature,” Gunn-Wright said. “We are co-inhabitants.”

The relationship between the coronavirus crisis and climate change became even more direct this week with the release of a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health study that found that people with COVID-19 who live in parts of the U.S. with high levels of air pollution are more likely to die from the disease than people who live in less polluted areas. As Gunn-Wright notes, African Americans are more likely to live in communities exposed to toxic fumes (due to histories of racial segregation and redlining), leading to conditions like heart disease, asthma, diabetes, and cancer that make them more vulnerable to the coronavirus. This, after data had already shown that African Americans are dying from COVID at disproportionately higher rates.

“Of course, we’re all going to die. But with climate change, some of us are going to die first,” she said, “and it looks the same as the people who are dying of COVID.”

Climate advocates can’t help but notice that the Trump administration’s response (or lack thereof) to the pandemic feels all too similar to its repeated rebukes of climate change. “We saw Mr. Trump and the Republicans deny science and attempt to avoid dealing with the reality in hopes that COVID would go away,” Steyer said, calling Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic “his Katrina moment on steroids.” He added, “In the context of climate, the Republican party and Mr. Trump behaved the same way. They’ve refused to accept the data or even deal with the data.”

While environmentalists see the current crisis as an opportunity to rebuild a more sustainable and resilient economy with green jobs and investments in clean energy, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act failed to include even modest suggestions like limiting bailouts for fossil fuel industries. Several climate experts stressed that the best hope for combating climate change is to unseat Trump and flip Congress to Democratic leadership.

“I really hope voters in 2020 understand that what Mr. Trump is doing in climate is as bad as what he did in COVID,” Steyer said.

The sight of clearer skies and cleaner water amid the pandemic may be fleeting—in China, as lockdown restrictions have eased, emissions have, predictably, returned. But Gunn-Wright hopes people will come out of the coronavirus pandemic with a new, climate-related goal. “If you were reminded that the sky in your town is blue when it’s always gray,” she said, “maybe after this is over, we can pledge to keep the sky blue.”

Originally Appeared on Vogue