OPINION:
Thinkers of lofty thoughts have high hopes for a “Great Reset,” a wholesale reordering of society in order to achieve “fairer outcomes.” Conveniently, the COVID-19 pandemic has ripened the moment for the envisioned transformation. Integral to the process, according to reset advocates, is a switcheroo from a consumption economic model to a sustainably “green” one, with the added benefit of saving the planet from global warming. The only problem is it’s not working.
Leading champions of change nonetheless are reassuring each other that the pivotal time has arrived. “The Great Reset will happen,” says John Kerry, U.S. special presidential envoy for climate in a Biden administration. And I think it will happen with greater speed and with greater intensity than a lot of people might imagine.”
Years ago, Barack Obama had a similar premonition, believing his ascendance signaled “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
To be sure, it’s not unusual for big dreamers to imagine themselves at the center of the universe with the power to change the world. Earth is a pretty big place, though, and change of great magnitude is usually measured over eons. Except for times like the present, the dreamers suppose, when the coronavirus crisis has played havoc with the orderly progression of human activity. Accordingly, those who, like Mr. Kerry and Mr. Obama, believe “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” sense an opportunity to seize this juncture and fashion a world of economic equity and climate equilibrium.
Disappointment awaits, though. Economic activity, the bane of the ecosphere, plummeted across the virus-infected planet in 2020, but Mother Nature took no notice. Global economic activity, projected to decrease by 5.2% due to COVID-19 according to the World Bank, resulted in no accompanying drop in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas produced by billions of busy human beings.
This unhappy fact is confirmed by the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization (WMO): “The lockdown has cut emissions of many pollutants and greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. But any impact on CO2 concentrations — the result of cumulative past and current emissions — is in fact no bigger than the normal year-to-year fluctuations in the carbon cycle and the high natural variability in carbon sinks like vegetation,” wrote the organization in a Nov. 23 press release.
In other words, a decrease in emissions resulting from a worldwide, coronavirus-caused economic recession had no effect on the atmosphere that can be distinguished from natural fluctuations in greenhouse gas concentrations. By comparison, Biden administration plans to fashion a net-zero emissions economy would make the pandemic decline look puny in comparison.
If economic disruption wrought by the coronavirus has been but a whisper amid the whirlwind of Mother Nature’s billion-year cycles, the sort of worldwide “reset” envisioned in green dreams would require a regression to humanity’s pre-industrial past. What would be so “great” about that?
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