According to the EPA: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

The largest greenhouse gas emissions come from these sectors:

1. 29% Transportation: (cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes)

2. 25% Electricity (Generation)

3. 23% Industry (Factories, mining, etc)

4. 13% Commercial & Residential (Waste processing and heating homes/offices)

5. 10% Agriculture (Making food, does not count carbon sinks)

The only thing that really changed for a majority of people was commuting (cars + trains) and heating residential offices. We all still needed electricity, we kept many factories running (only pausing in a few locations), and shipping was even more prevalent (especially from online delivery services).

To reduce warming we need to do one of the following:

1. Reduce the amount of CO2 we produce below the amount existing life on Earth can consume.

2. Increase the amount of CO2 life on Earth can consume (make more living things that can photosynthesize).

3. Do both.

The lower amount of commuting probably helps quite a bit but it's only a start and wasn't really in full effect in the biggest polluters for the latter half of the pandemic.

Massive wildfires didn't helped.

But they also weren't a large contributor. In California over 3 months wildfires released more than 75 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That number is larger than any year in the past 20, but it's also never expected to be 0. The annual worldwide CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels is expected to total about 33 billion tons this year.

I'm not sure what the sum of all wildfires over the year were, but I can't imagine they'd make any sort of dent compared to just burning fossil fuels.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/climate/wildfire-emission...