Assessing the impact of COVID-19 on global fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions

L. Vanessa Smith, Nori Tarui and Takashi Yamagata

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of York

Abstract: The shock to the global economy from COVID-19 is predicted to be faster and more severe than the 2008 global financial crisis and even the Great Depression. We assess its impact on global fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions over a two-year horizon. For this purpose we employ a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model, which captures complex spatial-temporal interdependencies across countries due to the spread of the virus and associated international propagation of economic impact. The model makes use of a unique quarterly data set of coal, natural gas, and oil consumption, output and exchange rates, including global fossil fuel prices for 32 major CO2 emitting countries. We produce forecasts of coal, natural gas and oil consumption, conditional on GDP growth scenarios based on alternative IMF World Economic Outlook forecasts that were made before and after the outbreak. We also simulate the effect of a relative price change in fossil fuels, due to carbon pricing in all countries in the sample, on consumption and output. Our results show that fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions are expected to return to their pre-crisis levels, and even exceed them, within the two-year horizon despite the large reductions in the first quarter following the outbreak. Our forecasts anticipate more robust growth for emerging than for advanced economies. Recovery to the pre-crisis levels is expected even if another wave of pandemic occurs within a year. The results from our counterfactual carbon pricing scenario show that an increase in coal prices is expected to have a smaller impact on GDP than on fossil fuel consumption. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic would not provide countries with a strong reason to delay climate change mitigation efforts.

Keywords: COVID-19; CO2 emissions; fuel consumption; Global VAR (GVAR); conditional forecasts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 O50 P18 Q41 Q43 Q47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.york.ac.uk/media/economics/documents/discussionpapers/2020/2007.pdf Main text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Journal Article: Assessing the impact of COVID-19 on global fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions (2021)
Working Paper: Assessing the impact of COVID-19 on global fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:yor:yorken:20/07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of York Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Paul Hodgson ().