COVID-19, Climate Change, and Renewable Energy Research: We Are All in This Together, and the Time to Act Is Now

I must confess that, even though I generally understood the potential impacts of a pandemic that could propagate exponentially, the accelerating pace of this global crisis and the extent of its impacts on everyone’s daily life surprised me When I was traveling internationally in mid-February of this year to attend conferences in Australia, coronavirus was already on everyone’s mind and a common topic of discussion, but it mostly seemed to be a distant problem only for our scientist colleagues in China (or at most, from East Asia) I could not have imagined that we would be shutting down lab research activities and working from home in just another month in the small city of Madison, Wisconsin in the Midwest of the United States and that those conferences would be the last ones I would attend in the first half of 2020 (or maybe even most of this remaining year) But in retrospect, should the emergence of this crisis have been so surprising to us given the many dire warnings we have received over the years from our top infectious disease experts and global health leaders(2) and the several recent, smaller-scale but no less deadly, epidemic outbreaks? As the initial shock and confusion dissipated and the reality and routines of staying at home sank in, I began to see the connections between the COVID-19 crisis and the climate change challenge(3) that motivates many of us working on renewable energy research (Figure 1) No, I am not talking about the noticeable reduction of air pollution and carbon dioxide emission due to the shut downs,(4) which indeed has been observed and will contribute to the mitigation of climate change (though maybe temporarily) Instead, what I mean is that there are actually many parallels between the challenges in fighting this global pandemic and fighting the climate change in the longer term This clear and present COVID-19 crisis should serve as a wake-up call for us to act now and work even harder to prevent a climate crisis