Short Research Article Planet Mayday: COVID-19 and Global Warming

Has COVID-19 changed the world forever? Is it the signal to treat Nature differently and mobilise effective policies against global warming? Well-known commentators on climate change argue thus, but this argument is wrong. COVID-19 is entirely different from global warming. And COVID-19 will ruin the states: How to pay for both lockdown and energy transformation?


Introduction
Now several governments in well-ordered societies emerge themselves into debt supporting in various ways firms and employees in various ways. The rationale is to halt the spread of the virus as well as to avoid further even larger costs when the economies begin operating .
There are two problems involved, as in all public programme implementation: (1) adverse selection -ex ante: who really needs government money?
(2) moral hazard -ex post: how will these enormous sums of money be spent?
Like what happened in the great financial crisis, it is not certain that governments can manage the huge sums properly.
Yet, COVID-19 and climate change are very different as threats to mankind, and the government responses have a different logic.

Game against Nature
Governments all over the planet employ different strategies in the combat against the spread of the Corona virus. The challenge is to device a strategy that minimizes the number of casualties while simultaneously minimizing the economic impact of lockdown. There seems to be three different strategies with varying tradeoffs: It has been much debated whether the Swedish strategy is more effective than the practice in Italy, Spain, France the UK and the USA, but it is obvious that the New Zealand strategy works excellently for islands (e.g., Australia) and peninsulas (e.g., South Korea). When will the virus vanish? There has to be either herd immunity or access to a vaccine. Government are prepared to spend incredible amounts for both protecting their populations and stopping an economic meltdown. A total lockdown is only feasible for a shorter period of time, or governments will run out of resources and incur risks for hyper inflation.

Ocean PD Game
At the same time as the Corona crisis unfolds, the governments of the nations of the world must recognize that climate change is becoming Hawking irreversible. It draws the attention that the Keeling measure of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has reached its highest point ever recorded on May 1, 2020, at 4:17 pm. The United Nations approach with huge global meetings seem to result merely in transaction costs. The major polluters use public international law to engage in opportunistic behavior with guile. Table 1 shows that the biggest countries are also the biggest consumers of energy and coal power in particular.

Climate Change: Not Abrupt, but Slow
By 2030, the Earth will experience temperature increases between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius, somehow considered as magical breaking points by experts like Nordhaus and Stern, who argue that the cost of global warming will become too high when these limits are exceeded (Stern, 2006;Nordhaus, 2013). In reality, the social and economic effects of global warming would be very much exacerbated when the rise is greater than 2 degrees Celsius (Stern, 2006). At present, we stand at almost 16 billion tonnes of oil equivalent in annual world production, which has led to a near one degree rise in global temperatures. The future holds the scenarios presented in Table 2. We should target coal-fired plants as well as the omni-present usage of charcoal in poor countries. The consumption of coal leads to the worst record of CO2 emissions of all fossil fuels, and it can be replaced by other fossil sources, renewables or nuclear power.

Phasing out Coal Power
Below we make an attempt to calculate how much solar energy would be required to replace coal power. As benchmark the Bhadla Solar Park in India is used, projected to deliver 2255 MW once construction is ready from December 2019. In all, 900 such plants would be necessary to completely eliminate all coal power generated in 2018. Table 3 illustrates how many solar plants of this size each of the ten biggest coal producing nations would need to install to replace their entire coal power production. Germany 32

South Africa 14
It is less expensive to start closing down dirty coal fired power plants then to build up lots of expensive carbon capture plants.

Conclusion
It is obvious that developing countries raise demands on developing countries to assist them with energy transformation. They have been pledged huge economic support in the Paris Agreement, and the industrialised world has shown in the fight against COVID-19 that they are capable of raising enormous amounts of money when needed to fight against internal costs caused by the spread of lethal viruses. The only way to combat the external costs of CO2 emissions is to start NOW the phasing out of coal power, and not build new such plants. Surely, the rich countries can afford to help the developing world to move away from coal power. The major polluters have until now not lived up to their responsibility, as the UN IFCC process merely adds transaction costs. The big difference between COVID-19 and global warming is that governments behave opportunistically in relation to CO2 emissions: myopia, delay, cheating, and climate denial. Such a strategy would be revealed as catastrophic in relationship to COVID-19, but concealed with regards to global warming because of the long time frame.