Carbon emissions: straight back to bad habits? – EDJ News

On the subject of climate, a swallow has never made a summer. But still, never in living memory have we seen a swallow like this one. The reductions in CO₂ emissions and energy consumption brought by the Covid-19 crisis are unprecedented. Neither the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 nor the 2009 crisis had such an impact. In its annual report on global energy trends , the consulting firm Enerdata predicts a 7.5 per cent drop in the planet’s energy consumption in 2020 and an 8.5 per cent drop in its energy-related CO₂ emissions. This is of course the result of the global recession – the IMF forecasts that world GDP will fall by 3 per cent in 2020.

For France, the drop is set to be even bigger: -10 per cent for energy consumption and -12 per cent for CO₂ emissions, figures more or less in line with the European average. In Europe the economic shock (a contraction of GDP of 8.2 per cent, based on a May estimate that has since been exceeded) has been greater than elsewhere in the world due to the scale of lockdown measures and the associated economic freeze.

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