When the pandemic forced Bay Area residents to shelter in place in March, chemist Ron Cohen saw an opportunity to see how air quality was affected.
In the six weeks after the San Francisco Bay Area instituted the nation’s first shelter-in-place mandate in response to the growing COVID-19 pandemic, regional carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 25%, almost all of it due to a nearly 50% drop in road traffic, according to new study from the University of California, Berkeley.
Though emissions have steadily increased since then, the dramatic response to a sharp cut-off in vehicular fossil fuel burning shows how effectively a move toward broad use of electric-powered vehicles would reduce the major greenhouse gas responsible for climate change and global warming.
The data come from a network of carbon dioxide sensors set up around the Bay Area by UC Berkeley scientists over the past eight years — a network that is already being replicated in several cities around the world. Glasgow, Scotland, will announce tomorrow (Nov. 10) that it plans to install 25 of these monitors within the next year in time for the Nov. 1, 2021, start of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in that city.
Continue reading at University of California Berkeley
Image via University of California Berkeley
