As the U.S. economy slowed this spring due to the novel coronavirus, an avenue of inquiry is how air emissions changed. One finding is that while passenger vehicle use decreased dramatically, freight traffic increased in some large cities.
“The demand for goods stayed up,” said Sarav Arunachalam, an environmental scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Grocery stores, Amazon, and Walmart had business. People were still looking for goods to purchase.”
As of early April, the world’s carbon emissions decreased by 17%, in part because of a 50 to 80% drop in road traffic and 75% drop in air traffic emissions in March.
Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S., Arunachalam was working on a project about vehicular emissions in the eastern U.S., broken down by vehicle classes — passenger vehicles, medium-duty trucks, heavy-duty trucks and buses — in each state. The project, which was part of a collaboration seeking to develop the clean energy economy, improve transportation and reduce carbon emissions in the transportation sector, analyzed potential health benefits of transportation policies aimed at curbing climate change.
Continue reading at University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.
Image via NASA.