Is anyone else wondering if the shutdown for COVID-19 will have a significant impact on carbon emissions? If it does, then it could actually save far more lives than it takes.
I doubt the shutdown will be long enough to have significant long term impact.
But maybe it will give people an appreciation for how nice the world can be with less pollution. A shift in attitude could cause long term changes in our tolerance for pollution.
A population’s physical health is very highly correlated with their economic health. [1]
If COVID-19 has a significant impact on carbon emissions it’s because it caused significant economic depression.
A significant economic depression dramatically increases poverty levels, and increasing poverty would cost significantly more lives even than will be lost to COVID itself. [2]
The life expectancy gap between the poorest and wealthiest Americans is about 15 years. [3]
> The life expectancy gap between the poorest and wealthiest Americans is about 15 years.
That's a function of our broken system, not our overall wealth as a nation. Poverty in the U.S. has been increasing alongside GDP for years now. Restoring the economy to the way it was won't solve that.
Some of the effects of poverty are due to long working hours and stress from long commutes. In the US, many people can never take time off work, so there should be some health benefits from a brief economic break for an extremely overworked population.
I have a hard time believing that this particular time off of work is going to lead to reduced stress, don’t you?
The stress isn’t typically so much caused by working, it’s caused by being in financial distress. I’ve had a few years with virtually no income. I’ve had to work 80 hours a week to provide for my family. I’m not saying my personal experience is particularly valid or applicable to the general population, but instinctively the times of my greatest stress and anxiety haven’t been the times I’ve worked hardest if that also meant I had enough income to buy groceries and pay rent.
It’s the times when no matter how hard you work you still fear for your financial security and worry where the next month’s rent payment is coming from... I’m generally “immune” to even extraordinary levels of at-work stress, but financial stress by far has been the worst anxiety (bordering on panic) I’ve ever felt.
You're right in that the psychological stress from uncertainty can be much more overwhelming than physiological stress from burnout. I doubt you're "immune" to burnout though.
Sorry, the quotes around immune were meant to relay that I didn’t mean it literally and indeed recognizing that it’s a common (and unhealthy) misconception people can have about themselves.
Those two bytes of ASCII didn’t fully communicate all of that? </s>
> health benefits from a brief economic break for an extremely overworked population
There might be if they could believe they were going back to work as usual -- meaning usual level of earnings -- any time soon. That's not at all clear. It's wishful thinking that this is a relaxing vacation for hourly service industry workers.
Depends how things play out once we are done with the virus crisis. It's possible that we will see crazy level of production and consumption to compensate the down time, resulting in way more carbon emissions. And governments will surely want to boost their economy at any cost, that could be quite bad for ecological policies.
Definitely not what I personally want, I'm in Europe and hope that EU members use the current situation as a way to work closer together and come with even stronger environmental regulation.
> EU members use the current situation as a way to work closer together
EU members are shouting "Every country for itself"
Pretty similar to the US states actually, other than US states can't close borders (but can enforce no travelling, which is basically a superset of closed borders)
Not really, no. They closed their borders but there is some level of collaboration at the moment, for example german states at the French border (e.g: Baden-Würtemberg) started to take in charge French patients who cannot be handled by the French healthcare system.
Comparing the US and the EU doesn’t often make sense IMHO, they have different and incompatible institutions with different goals.
In any case, what is happening now doesn’t define how countries will react after the crisis.
Yes, and I am waiting for the next updates on CO2 from Mauna Loa, HI to see if there is even a tiny blip in the rate of increase during the shutdown. So far, I can’t tell if there has been any meaningful change to the pattern. https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/monthly.html
While the effects on CO2 may be significant and possibly beneficial, I think we should focus on particulate matter, CO, NO and other pollutants directly poisonous to the human body.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the next looming crisis: Climate Change. On Bloomberg radio a few weeks ago, an analyst / money manager was talking about how his firm was looking at satellite imagery of pollution in China to measure their economic recovery. More pollution == “better”. Something is clearly unsustainable with that formula.
Like the virus, the longer we wait to take action, the more expensive it is and the narrower our options become. It seems more and more that there’s an illusion of public debate, while behind the scenes a decision has been made in favor of [adaptation]. I find that deeply sad.
The world has pressed the pause button for a moment. What it looks like on the other side of this crisis is in question. My (fools?) hope is that it makes us reflect on the fragility of the system we’ve created, the importance of global cooperation, democratic values, and what kind of future we want for ourselves and our kids.
Wow. Wouldn't want to invest with that money manager. If that signal wasn't already well known, giving away secret sauce in a public interview is not a recipe for outsize returns. But it is a well known signal so it's even less useful for investing.
If I've learned anything about the climate crisis from COVID-19, it's that we aren't going to solve the climate crisis unless it's more convenient to do so than not. COVID is a much more pressing problem than climate change and we didn't do anything about it until after it was already a catastrophe.
satellite imagery is already a common tool used by hedge funds. the correlation between pollution and productivity is also an obvious one. it's an interesting tidbit for laymen, but he's not giving away anything specific enough to be used by adversaries.
I think my concern would only be if he believes using that info could give him an edge. There are plenty of people, including many professional investment advisers, who believe that the obvious use of public info can give you the ability to outperform. If he's just explaining the relationship between economic output and pollution it's all good.
I also have hope that this tragedy brings humanity forward. Not only with climate change, but a lot of other things. More contacts between people (video calls to friends and family far away). Doctors are increasing the use of video calling and sending prescriptions via email already. Bill Gates' 2015 TED now doesn't seem just a faraway prediction now, so hopefully governments will form a "health NATO". Seeing Venice with clean water will maybe make the administration think, "wow, this is gorgeous, why don't we find a way to keep it like this?" Just disconnected thoughts of hope.
Doesn't Venice have "clean water" because all the silt that was suspended in the water due to gondola traffic has now settled on the bottom of the canals?
Venice doesn't have clean water. They're images from another town at another time in the latest iteration of "take an old picture, make up a lie relevant to current news, and pass it around for clicks"
"The swans in the viral posts regularly appear in the canals of Burano, a small island in the greater Venice metropolitan area, where the photos were taken. The “Venetian” dolphins were filmed at a port in Sardinia, in the Mediterranean Sea, hundreds of miles away. No one has figured out where the drunken elephant photos came from, but a Chinese news report debunked the viral posts: While elephants did recently come through a village in Yunnan Province, China, their presence isn’t out of the norm, they aren’t the elephants in the viral photos, and they didn’t get drunk and pass out in a tea field."
Thanks for the link, I appreciate it. I also find it very disappointing that I was fooled into believing this and I have a hard time understanding the motives behind the OP of the canal pictures.
I guess I was blinded by my really wanting to see something positive comming from this crisis, it is illogical but realizing this story was not true is making my eyes water right now.
It's natural to actively seek a silver lining when terrible things happen. We all want to know that someonesomewhere is better off in some moral or philosophical (as opposed to financial) way when tragedy strikes. Unfortunately, some people take advantage of that for internet points or to push their current agenda.
If you feel frustrated and hopeless, give to a local food bank, buy music or books from your favorite creators, have a virtual happy hour with friends or family, drop that friend a note and catch up, or work on that idea you've had.
There are lots of bright spots out there and we can create our own too.
> but realizing this story was not true is making my eyes water right now.
I didn't realize it could have such a powerful impact on you, sorry to hear that. I also saw something to that effect, accepted it, and moved on. I don't think there is really a way to consume information without trusting some things, but seeking deeper validation for things you may think are important. In light of other news, this didn't seem like something worth validating, so I assume many many people have internalized it as truth somewhat.
Turbidity, which is how cloudy water is, is on a different axis from pollution, toxicity, and mineral content of water. There are heavily stained lakes in Florida with a lot of silt mixed up that you can't see further than a couple feet in that would be fairly safe to drink out of.
I agree, hence my "clean water" in quotes. However, a lot of people do think that opaque water is inherently dirty and clear water is inherently clean, even if the opaqueness is simply due to suspended organic particles that will settle over time.
Those photos of Venice having clean water were proven to be fake news. Technically the photos are part of the Venice district, but not the part people think of.
“On Wednesday, British charity Oxfam released a study that found the richest 10 percent of people produce half of the planet’s individual-consumption-based fossil fuel emissions, while the poorest 50 percent — about 3.5 billion people — contribute only 10 percent. Yet those same 3.5 billion people are “living overwhelmingly in the countries most vulnerable to climate change,” according to the report. According to the data used by the report, individual consumption — as opposed to consumption by governments and international transport — makes up 64 percent of worldwide climate emissions.
Oxfam estimates that the world’s richest 10 percent of people have carbon footprints that are 60 times higher as the poorest 10 percent. Any estimation that generalizes large populations is difficult to make, but researchers at Oxfam also estimate that the emissions of the world’s richest 1 percent create an even larger emissions gap: the 1 percent could emit 30 times more than the poorest 50 percent and 175 times more than the poorest 10 percent.”
Those in the developed west who get on those soapboxes probably already fall into crunchy green subcultures anyway and are cognizant of their own carbon footprints.
And the active HN reader, whether they fall into that camp or not, are unlikely to be in the actual part of that global 10% who dictate industrial policy that have far-reaching effects on the rest of the world.
Our buying habits have a drastic effect on the rest of the world. Just look at Avocados and Chocolate for two ridiculous examples. The average American's love for both has had a huge impact on the lives of those who farm as well as deforestation in affected areas.
Just having our preferred foods year-round can completely change the lives of others. Just thinj about the effect that owning things like cars and houses has on the rest of the world.
Don't kid yourself. Like it or not you and I are part of the problem.
Top 10% is like 700m people, a.k.a most Western World population. Not a lot of “class-warfare” can happen if you classify countries as just having a single class.
If class warfare is weak, then it probably just annoys the upper class and makes them less likely to cooperate. If you have some violent “glorious revolution” in mind, then you very probably wreck the economy and damn a huge portion of the lower class to extreme poverty, including the deaths of tens of millions and you also probably create a new, even narrower, more corrupt class of oligarchs with even more control over policy and the “means of production”.
That makes it sound like all outcomes are similar, whether through apathy of doing nothing or through violent revolution, no? We’re not quite at rock bottom but it appears in sight, regarding climate change. The economy is a bit in a wreck already as well.
All outcomes aren’t similar, they are proportionately worse the more violent “class warfare” becomes. The best path forward is almost certainly (in my view) incremental cooperative progress towards a stronger social safety net. Nothing good is going to happen over night.
I would agree with that analysis, but there is a minimum amount of progress we need to pull the curve away from catastrophic failure. The longer we wait, the more extreme the solution will need to be to pull on the curve, in my opinion. We shouldn’t let the current crisis go to waste.
Very similar to mitigating an asteroid impact. If you wait too long, no amount of force and course correction will save us.
> The world has pressed the pause button for a moment.
Well so far it has only been 1 or 2 weeks, comparable to the annual X-mas break in duration. So I'm curious: are the effects really significantly different here so far?
I wouldn't think Christmas is similar to these past two weeks in terms of volume driven. Many people still drive to work during Christmas, and some even drive more, to get to relatives' places. Not to mention, air travel probably rises significantly. Right now, car travel and air travel are low.
Yes. Actually during Christmas break, me and my friends in Michigan drive A LOT!! For breakfast coffees, then casual hangouts at places like zoos/museums, then for lunch, then for coffee again, then for dinner, all of us in separate cars.
Of. course that's not everyday, but it's many days. When we're back home from college, it's nice to see the friends from back home, and often it will involve all of us driving separate cars. This is I believe archetypical of the Midwest.
I think it's quite hard to reach all the places you may want to go if you just walk if you're in a suburban midwestern town. Really wish we could come up with reasonable non-driving communities. More small towns and villages. My college was situated such that you could walk to classes, bookstores, coffee shops, and groceries comfortably. Wish there were setups like this outside of colleges.
The world most certainly does not press pause for two weeks over Christmas. It's one of the busiest times of the year for retail, business, and travel industries. Manufacturing operations keep running as normal.
Just because office workers get a holiday, doesn't mean the whole world is on pause. This is nothing like Christmas.
Christmas you would most likely see a significant rise in activity and pollution as people mass travel, mass consume, and mass buy. How many turkeys were slaughtered for Christmas dinner? That's activity for the entire food chain.
For ALL of the service industries, Christmas and New Year are when they make a huge bulk of revenue.
Christmas is only a break for those who are privileged. Talk to you neighbourhood restaurant server. Ask them how restful Christmas season is and they will tell you that Christmas is their most stressful time in the entire year.
It's just so interesting how the same event could lead people to such drastically different observations and take aways.
For instance,
> the importance of global cooperation,
For me, and many others, this pandemic has highlighted the need to be less centralized and dependent on foreign nations, especially with respects to China. Relying on them for our global pharmaceutical supply chain, for instance, seems like a terrible decision to have had made now.
> democratic values
You would be excluding the majority of the world's population, who aren't under a system of primarily democratic values.
> the more expensive it is and the narrower our options become.
That is, until a new or emerging technology opens up a plethora of new options! Have some optimism! Because what is clear to me is, even with this current shutdown which has caused the lower pollution is, we cannot afford the cost it takes to do the kinds of drastic, immediate changes needed to lower the C02 emissions to what the majority of climatologists say it needs to be. Technology must be the answer here.
This doesn't require new technology. We know how to make electric cars, electric heat pumps, solar panels, nuclear reactors etc. This is all existing technology.
But take a look at oil prices right now. That's what happens if you start to reduce world demand for oil, and that's the real problem. All we need from governments is to put a sufficient tax on carbon that keeps carbon more expensive than alternatives even as the demand for oil and coal falls off a cliff.
Which doesn't even make oil dramatically more expensive -- it only keeps it at least as expensive as it was last year against declining demand, as economies of scale pick up for carbon alternatives and they become cheaper and thus more customers choose them.
A carbon tax doesn't destroy the economy, all it does is destroy the oil industry (faster).
You could make a great case for carbon tax + dividend right now, because people aren't driving as much and the people staying at home get the dividend too, so in addition to the economic impact of the tax being blunted by the low oil prices, you're also creating a net transfer to the people most impacted by having to stay at home. And giving people more financial incentive to stay at home instead of going out and spreading the infection.
>> Squint a bit and Canada's carbon dividend looks like UBI.
As an Albertan I'm not super-happy about paying for the country's party over the past 20 years and now being kicked out of the house when we're out of beer.
FWIW I am (was) seriously considering moving to Wyoming or other net beneficiary of our own federal largess.
Noting your work in asset planning, I'd love to find a counterpoint to VOX's David Roberts coverage of the energy industry, with respect to climate crisis, renewables, governance, financials, etc.
But it's not a great point. The oil industry has had a 100 year head start on the art of money, power, and influence. Human power dynamics are the primary drivers of societal and global change.
That is to say, the reality is you have a zilch chance of passing a carbon tax in the US government sufficient enough to facilitate the change you are hoping to see. The only way oil and gas goes for a carbon tax is if it ends up being a net benefit to them, and as long as there is oil to burn, I don't see that happening any time soon.
I would think California, for as progressive and liberal as it claims to be on the outset would pass something like this, but it's tough for me to be too optimistic there considering the influence and power Chevron has over the state.
Power dynamics are fluid. Oil and coal have a lot of power because they have a lot of money and a lot of employees and doing something that would completely destroy them -- which is necessary to save everybody else -- would require a countervailing amount of political capital on the other side.
But you start off with a dividend that would end up paying out more to the majority of voters than it would cost them to fund (because a significant fraction of the money would come from corporations and foreign oil interests), and that gets you a lot of support. Then you get all the companies that profit from the transition because they get to sell solar panels and electric heat pumps and stuff. Then you get all the people who are paying attention and notice that even if their current carbon footprint is above average, they could buy an electric car and switch to electric heat right away and still end up with a net profit from the dividend (which is still coming in large part from corporations and foreign oil).
You add up all those people and it's basically the whole country lined up against the oil and coal industries. It's the kind of coalition that can get a bill passed -- but only if people care enough to demand it. Majorities get screwed over left and right when they can't be bothered to organize.
> This doesn't require new technology. We know how to make electric cars, electric heat pumps, solar panels, nuclear reactors etc. This is all existing technology.
We have some of the problems solved. While batteries are energy dense enough to support passenger cars, there's still a lot of progress to be made before the tech can meet the demands of shipping/bulk-cargo/intercontinental transport. For example, batteries still need to be 20 times more dense before we can build a cargo/passenger aircraft with one.
> For example, batteries still need to be 20 times more dense before we can build a cargo/passenger aircraft with one.
Significantly more than 20 times I'd bet. The airframe will have to be significantly reinforced to support a design where the maximum takeoff weight is equal to the maximum landing weight. At that point, aerodynamics start to look a lot more like a rocket equation where you can't dump stages.
I think medium to long term, nuclear or renewable powered synthetic fuel is far more likely, especially since we already have a lot of generic infrastructure applicable to fossil fuels and carbon taxes could be the thing that pushes synthetic fuel into the market.
Who says you have to use batteries for everything? For trains you electrify the tracks. For container ships you install a nuclear reactor on the ship the same as a submarine, or burn wood pellets or some other biomass in a steam boiler like the old days. For aircraft you use biofuels, or just buy offsets if that's cheaper (and aircraft are only a small percentage of fossil fuel use).
This doesn't require alien technology, it just requires carbon to be priced so that it isn't artificially cheaper than existing alternatives.
Centrally generated nuclear power with batteries at the point of use is the safest and cleanest tech that we have.
The state of biofuel today leaves a lot to be desired as far as the ability to scale without causing other environmental disasters, and many of them aren't even carbon neutral.
As for nuclear cargo ships -- I'd love to see them, but the liability and political hurdles are insane. You'd probably need a really big carbon tax before we'd see them.
Aircraft are only 2% of global CO2 emissions. Generating enough biofuel for just them should be within the realm of possibility.
Even without nuclear, container ships don't have major weight restrictions (they already weigh a hundred thousand tons), so you can fuel them with anything that will catch on fire. Make carbon expensive and they'll just buy whatever is the next cheapest -- sawmill residue, seaweed, whatever. A lot of the difficulty with "biofuels" is the process of making them into oils that can directly replace petroleum in road vehicles, but large ships don't need that. A large furnace like that can burn unprocessed solid biomass.
For that matter, all transportation combined is only 24% of greenhouse gas emissions. Tackling utility energy would be a much larger target, and easier to do. Nuclear power works.
Although, burning biomass in ocean-going vessels is not necessarily a net positive. If, for example, they start burning sawmill scraps which were previously being pressed into Ikea furniture, you're just replacing one carbon emission with another. Biofuels are complicated; you have to be careful not to offset sequestration, as well as being cognizant to other emissions generated both in the process of generation and in burning them. Because of the tangential effects, some biofuels emit more carbon than oil!
I'm hoping this is just a temporary indicator giving analysts a hint as to where to focus their attention, and not a lone metric plugged into whatever model they're using.
don't read anything too technical into it, in this case they're just measuring production by the by-product to try and get a leading indicator on actual trade goods. This is macro-level stuff like changes to China's GDP that I would doubt is very actionable
Tangentially, this crisis may accelerate transition from fossil fuels to renewables.
Reduced demand lowers both prices and cash flow. Many operators will no longer be able to service their debts. Resulting in bankruptcy.
Coal was already in a downward spiral.
Now that crude oil is down to $30, fracking is no longer viable.
IIRC, Shale was off the board at $60/barrel.
Etc.
Even more tangentially: I support keeping our current nuke power generation running as long as possible (to ease transition to renewables). Like coal's economics, nuke aren't doing well, and will need help just to keep running.
>> Reduced demand lowers both prices and cash flow. Many operators will no longer be able to service their debts. Resulting in bankruptcy.
This is largely a result of long-term excessive supply during a period of (relatively) short-term demand reduction though. This makes the huge upfront costs in renewables very unappetizing, and their variable costs less competitive.
I think we would need a much longer demand disruption to "reset" the capital outlay decision back to one of net-new fossil vs. net-new renewable, when we would actually have a chance of switching energy streams. If demand picks up by Q3 we will just ramp up existing O&G supply.
FWIW I work in the asset planning field for energy where we are often concerned with NPV of the entire project. If you can start to get close with renewables lots of primarily fossil-based energy companies will move forward, but I don't see the numbers yet without massive subsidies or taxes.
Seems this is the strategy Saudi Arabia is adopting. They don't care anymore if the barrel of oil is 20$ because they are among the very few who can still benefit from such a low price.
They clearly do think like that since they came up with the metric. They CHOSE to make that an analytical anchor because it benefits them to see production levels rise again.
nobody, except banks perhaps.. on a related note, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, covering thousands of hectares of pristine Alaska coastline with suffocating, deadly raw oil, was famously "good for the economy" .. because almost every measure of economic health increased in the aftermath of the events.. of course, millions of sea creatures died, and the area was poisoned for who-knows-how-long.. make sense?
I guess "good for the economy" here means it increased GDP for the affected area.
This is a common critique of GDP as a measure of economic health. And it's a fair one. But in the bigger picture, GDP remains the best measure I know of.
Accidents and disasters will happen, but their rate is fairly constant, and the noise they add to the measurement is far from invalidating it.
devils advocate, but if it ends up that democratic states don't handle the response as well as authoritarian ones out of differing views of individual rights, this isn't necessarily a 'win' for the democratic side of the fence
You'd also have to acknowledge that the (Chinese) authoritarian response is what allowed the outbreak to get this bad in the first place. In the United States the Federal response has looked much more like the authoritarian response — no action for regular people, misdirection, profiteering, and grabbing for more power. Compared to the responses we saw under more democratic government against Zika, Ebola, Avian Flu, and Swine Flu its an embarrassment.
The individual states that are responding the best are all heavily liberal/democratic led states - CA, WA, NY, IL. Some of the less liberal states are doing good (OH), but most are doing really terribly (FL). The evidence seems to point in the direction of working democratic government being best suited for handling this crisis. Since the world largely does not have working democratic government in 2020, we have a pandemic.
> You'd also have to acknowledge that the (Chinese) authoritarian response is what allowed the outbreak to get this bad in the first place.
I have so far seen zero reason to believe that if the outbreak originated in Kansas, or Poland, or Bangalore, it would not have spread across the world by now.
The difference in reaction between red/blue states has less to do with liberalism/authoritarianism, and more to do with the anti-science bent of the modern US right.
responding the most is not the same as responding the best. Time will tell. But given that many if not most people want to limit shutdowns, the above is a technocratic opinion, not a democratic one.
If improper response allows the outbreak to get bad then why are CA, WA, NY having bad outbreaks? Could it be that negative feelings about Trump do not protect from coronavirus?
Fortunately South Korea makes a great case that you can handle this without an authoritarian approach. At this point I think it's likely they become the model. Maybe a mix of Singapore and Japan as well.
If anything, the virus shows how mainstream media messaging that Global Warming is a CATASTROPHE and that we have to PANIC right NOW to prevent it, is counterproductive when a real panic comes around (and noone takes you seriously).
> I’ve been thinking a lot about the next looming crisis: Climate Change.
I wish people would not try to use one crisis as a justification for claiming another. Not everyone agrees that climate change is "the next looming crisis".
The reason we know COVID-19 is a crisis is that we can directly measure the impact. We don't have to rely on questionable computer models projecting things decades into the future. (And I don't just mean climate models--we also have to have economic and sociological models to estimate the impacts of what the climate models predict and calculate the net benefits vs. costs. Not all impacts of climate change are harmful. And if you really believe we have economic and sociological models that can make predictions decades into the future with enough accuracy to justify multi-trillion-dollar policy decisions, I have some oceanfront property in Tibet I'd like to sell you.)
Directly measuring the impact of COVID-19 means we can test the predictions of people who projected various possible scenarios for how such a crisis would play out, and what kinds of actions in response would have what kinds of consequences. It's too early at this point to run all those tests, but when things are back to approximately normal we should definitely run those tests and assess the results. That will help us to be better prepared next time. It will also help us to see what kinds of behaviors we should discourage on the part of major actors who have a stake in trying to spin the public's perceptions. And it will also show us where our infrastructure is fragile so we can take steps to make it more robust, which will put us in a better position to respond to any future crisis.
Well yeah, more or less cripple the economy by forcing large amounts of people out of work for extended periods, as well as shutting down many businesses would reduce those things. I doubt really anyone here would like the long term cost of this.
So far, the COVID-19 pandemic is showing us that People, rather than Consumption, matter most.
We need consumption to support people, yes, but Economic expansion and increasing consumption can't go on infinitely.
Most people shouldn't be able to afford a car - they should be taking public transit - but they can obtain one because they take out loans.
The american fracking industry shouldn't exist, but it can because it has access to cheap, infinite lines of credit.
Our health suffers for it.
So many people and businesses are able to live beyond their means because of access to credit. If we eliminate the ability to create credit, then consumption would drop to a sustainable level and pollution would also drop and we would see an end to wasteful businesses, products, processes, and ways of life.
> So many people and businesses are able to live beyond their means because of access to credit. If we eliminate the ability to create credit, then consumption would drop to a sustainable level and pollution would also drop and we would see an end to wasteful businesses, products, processes, and ways of life.
What about housing? A mortgage is going to be the only way for a lot of people to ever afford their own home.
It's either (near) universal or communal. Anything in between gives elites so much power over the less advantaged that you see a stratification of society similar to, well, what we're seeing now. Here's a quarantine project for you: build a model that lets you push around the %age of renters vs land owners. Virtually any model that contains a significant number of renters will eventually have one land owner and many renters, unless you see significant economic disasters in the model.
At least in the current system, a home is the best hope that for many people if they wish to have an 'asset' that is concrete and tangible. The practicality of it (i.e. basic human need for shelter) also makes it one of the best 'assets' to pass to your children.
Remember: unless the house was seriously overvalued, as long as you held onto/maintained your house through the 2008 housing crash, it's still worth more than it was pre crash.
Because tenants rights are poor? The difference in safety felt between owning and renting is related to perception of tenants rights. I think they (the difference and the rights) vary accordingly worldwide.
> How could tenant rights be improved, and how would you answer that question in a world with "ideal" tenant rights?
It's difficult isn't it? You need to somehow reconcile the fact that it's not the tenant's home with their desire to treat it like it is.
I've had to fight to get basic repairs and redecoration work done. In some of these cases I've still had a battle despite funding them myself!
I think something you could probably address is the lack of security with tenancies. In the UK, after the initial fixed period of an AST, it's very easy for either party to terminate the lease. I'd prefer for this to be tipped in favour of the tenant, so that they can be flexible and leave if necessary - but they're not also in danger of homelessness at very short notice.
Probably a lot. I've never seen an apartment that lets you make any changes beyond putting in your own furniture. No painting walls, no hanging pictures, changing carpets, etc. You're stuck with whatever bargain bin ammenities the landlord picked, unless you feel like packing up and moving. Plus, your rent will probably go up at a similar rate to inflation, whereas a mortgage payment will stay the same as long as you didn't sign up for an adjustable rate mortgage.
>Most people shouldn't be able to afford a car - they should be taking public transit - but they can obtain one because they take out loans.
A car isn't a "want" for most people outside of major US cities. It's a need. Public transport has never been effective in most of the US. Hell, I'd have to cross an interstate on foot in order to reach work. How many weeks do you estimate it'd take me to get killed? Should I be taking that risk because some politician decided my life was less valuable than their golfing buddy getting to work 5 minutes quicker?
> A car isn't a "want" for most people outside of major US cities. It's a need.
It doesn't have to stay this way. Smaller cities and towns can invest in public transportation. Activities which must be in person could be decentralized to more local sites.
Seattle/King County metro diesel buses gets 50 passenger-miles per gallon of diesel. Better than average, but not enough for preventing climate change. They're also still running nearly all buses empty these past weeks, so that's 0 mpg.
I would really like for this to happen, but I'm skeptical this is really possible in the US, at least outside the NE corridor and a couple other dense regions. are there any examples of this transformation occurring in a place as sprawled out as a typical american city+suburbs?
I can believe the poor state of public transit in the older east coast cities is largely a failure of policy, but as you go further west, you see many more settlements built around cars from the ground up.
sure, anything can change in enough time. but for some places, we might be talking about decades.
I visited a friend at her parents place once in prescott, arizona. maybe places like these don't matter so much for emissions (population 40k within the city limits), but I was struck by how totally dependent we were on having a car, even more than being in an east coast suburb. iirc, the closest place to go for a quick bite was seven miles away, the closest shopping center 10+ miles. her parents weren't particularly wealthy, but their house was built on a multiple acre lot just like all their middle-class neighbors. her father drove forty or fifty miles each way to work in the middle of nowhere. whenever both of her parents were out, there was nowhere we could go. literally nothing but private homes anywhere within walking distance. in this kind of place, you would almost have to tear everything down and start from scratch to make public transit viable.
unintended good news consequence. earth is gonna have a great few months now. maybe a year. less consumption, less traveling, less pollution. nature rejoices
It makes sense that if people who can work home do so, the environment will be better than if they don't work from home. Also, many people who cannot work from home at the moment are still driving to work (restaurant workers, grocery store workers, other retail). This current situation isn't too far off from a state where just those who can work from home do so, and the rest drive to work. And anecdotally, the air where I live has gone from one of the worst in the nation to delightful.
> This current situation isn't too far off from a state where just those who can work from home do so, and the rest drive to work.
it seems pretty very far off to me. I'm having a nice time working from home, but all my friends that don't work at a grocery store (restaurant workers, tutors, social workers, theater techs) are sitting at home not getting paid.
I'm not sure how to estimate what fraction of the workforce actually needs to commute to work, but it seems like they make up a pretty significant amount of the people that are not driving right now.
I was comparing the current situation with the state where everyone is forced to stay at home. Right now, everyone is not forced to stay at home. If you're saying that the current situation is closer to everyone staying at home than to business as usual, you're probably right.
However, where I live, a majority of the restaurants are open (just doing drive through). Tutoring is possibly something that can be done online. I've known many high quality tutors running business entirely from home. Theater techs, social workers, and other similar jobs probably make up a very small fraction of the workforce compared to restaurant, retail (I believe the majority of retail stores in my area are open), and grocery workers. So I still think the current situation can give us a decent idea of what driving volume and pollution levels will look like in a situation where people that can work from home do so. The current situation is definitely biased towards less driving though.
Pretty much half the retail that doesn't sell food is closed where I live. The local mall is entirely closed, and many businesses that are open are reducing hours or doing "curbside service" meaning a lot of the staff is probably furloughed. My own business is either shut down for 10 more days, or 32 days at least, depending on whether we're under nonessential services.
This is not sustainable in the least man. Eventually all you guys working from home are going to feel it too, because a lot of the businesses you sell your software to are not earning revenue to pay you or to hire consultants.
"I was comparing the current situation with the state where everyone is forced to stay at home. Right now, everyone is not forced to stay at home. If you're saying that the current situation is closer to everyone staying at home than to business as usual, you're probably right."
So I'm not saying this is sustainable. This definitely gives us a better idea of what pollution and driving may look like if people who can stay home do stay home, than by trying to guess what it would look like before the shutdowns started. I also said "The current situation is definitely biased towards less driving though".
I just want to point out that we shouldn't label this situation as some unobtainable ideal when it comes to pollution, but rather as a real world glimpse of what pollution could be if more people worked from home than have in the past.
Face-to-face interaction is very important to both roles. You can certainly offload some, maybe most, academic instruction to online, but not the tutoring part.
my tutor friend probably has a temporary problem. as soon as remote school gets going, I'm sure she'll be able to convince her clients to pay for remote tutoring.
but as a social worker, you can end up making house calls to some very dysfunctional (or at least, the opposite of tech savvy people). a lot of these people simply can't figure out how to do video calls reliably; they might not even own a computer or have a mobile plan with enough data for video. sometimes the social worker is helping them perform physical tasks.
> This current situation isn't too far off from a state where just those who can work from home do so, and the rest drive to work.
A lot of "the rest" are staying home, at least in California. Only certain businesses are allowed to remain open.
Unemployment claims are up quite a bit, especially in California and Washington due to the shelter in place orders -- and that's data from last week, when only portions of California were locked down.
Most retail and restaurant employees are at home not getting paid, and many have already been laid off. A lot of those people live paycheck to paycheck and won't be able to pay rent on April 1st.
I know some retail employees who are furloughed and still being paid, but their companies probably can't afford that for more than a few months.
I hope you realize that working from home when possible is great for the climate but in no way solves the global warming problem. We need to go carbon negative in the next few decades. You don't achieve that by having some fraction of the office workers work from home.
This is not a slam dunk by any means. Plenty of the working from home that's happening right now is not sustainable -- it's not like everyone has an extra room (or two!) in their house that they can just switch over to being an office for 8 hours a day.
This also distributes heating/cooling/electrical usage in a way that I would imagine is less efficient overall.
most commutes are BS. a lot of work does not need to be done in an office. a lot of office politics can be cut down when communications are proportionately more heavily documented. typical overhead for a single seat in the metro where I work is $50K a year. there was already a move to hoteling and telework. tremendous efficiencies gained in this should be retained. better for the environment, bottom lines, quality of life of workers. managers with the 20th century face-time attitude: deal with it.
businesses already face significant incentives to let people WFH when possible. they just need to be convinced it won't be a severe hit to productivity. after the current crisis runs its course, I bet we'll see a lot of companies realize they are wasting a lot of money on their office lease.
Despite the loss of human life, and the economic suffering of a great chunk of our species, a lot of good may come of the present pandemic. I believe this crisis has the potential to bring about a fundamental change in the way we relate to the world and to each other. It's as if humanity is at a crossroads: everything is possible, and we need to make a choice. I read this morning something that struck me as true: "We were in the process of losing our humanity, but a virus one thousands of a micron has has just given it back to us." [1]
A beautiful quote. I think it’s a little goofy that you’re being downvoted just for saying something vaguely positive. Please, people- keep your wits about you.
For all the bad that has happened, this has been an interesting time to reflect and gather a new perspective about some of the newfound good.
It’s like being thrown into a worldwide experiment that would otherwise never realistically happen. There’s so many understandings to gain from the results of our actions, habits, and lifestyles.
The world is changing before our eyes as a result of the changes in our behaviors. We can see how even when we slow down, the world keeps going. It’s an incredibly unique, enlightening circumstance.
Hopefully, as we move forward, we actually learn from the history unfolding today, and don’t just discredit it all to go back to the way things were for our own ego at the expense of the rest of the world.
My understanding is that pollution has a short term (~weeks) cooling effect due to global dimming, and a long term (~decades) warming effect due to the greenhouse effect.
So this may cause a short term spike in global temperatures over the next few months. If this goes on long enough it could paradoxically accelerate climate change.
Maybe we need a well place and timed nuke on the moon to compensate.
EDIT: On the other hand increased sunlight may boost photosynthesis. All in all should be intresting to see the effect. Because it may show that we need to be more careful about mitigating certain types to pollutants (CO2) first and leaving others for later.
Can someone please tell me what the name for the technology used to create the graphics is? The text for the place names over the image is highlightable.
I know you can handcraft these by having the text overlay over an exact X,Y on an image but that seems overblown for just these maps than having the text rastered into the image loaded.
So, is there some tool like an SVG creator that helps create these with the responsiveness and everything handled?
Slightly off-topic but the analyses here come from the nice folks at Descartes Labs (Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and with the Descartes Labs folks, we’ve even been skiing together in Taos).
If you’re into GIS or large-scale imagery processing, you should hit them up [1] especially if you’d like to live in Santa Fe (where the core team is). They also hire outside of Santa Fe, but as the core team is there, they strongly suggest you consider it.
I found this snapshot of traffic conditions in greater L.A. from Friday afternoon to be rather stunning. I've never seen so much green except during the night.
This situation makes me more pessimistic about solving global climate change.
The economic damage caused by "shelter in place" falls disproportionately on the poor and the lower middle class, who work in fields where working from home is not possible.
Emission regulations and fuel taxes also fall disproportionately on the same people, because they can't afford newer cars which are more efficient.
When the French government raised fuel taxes in order to ameliorate climate change, there were mass street protests. What started as a protest against fuel taxes developed into a widespread expression of grievance against inequality.
We can expect a lot more of that if we do what it really takes to make a big impact on climate change.
If climate policy is not balanced against economic inequality, there is a real risk that such anger will channel into support for populist political parties, who would roll back climate policy when elected.
I don't think people working in fields are being told to not go to work. Food production is critical work and is still allowed. It is the service industry (bars, restaurants, hotels, travel, sports, concerts, etc.) that is taking the hit, but it also has lots of low wage jobs.
If a carbon tax was applied to whole countries and the funds collected given back as a per person dividend instead of going into the general budget, I think most people would support that. There are ways forward. We just have to support ways that work with the system we have instead of using climate change as a crisis to implement the utopian ideas of a few.
The answer is, obviously, combining climate policy with populism. Tax CO2 / fuel / packaging / consumption / transport as much as you want, but spend that tax money on a UBI-like benefit. That by definition helps lowest earners the most, plus makes sure the government doesn’t waste the money.
That only works within one jurisdiction. What about when the rich/poor divide are not constituents of one government, but the average citizens in two different countries?
The U.S. couldn't even ratify Kyoto, and that only required (AFAICT) monetary payments for climate technology, not UBI. I can't imagine any scenario in my lifetime in which the U.S. Congress would approve a treaty which required UBI payments to people in developing countries.
As a human, I think that's an interesting idea that deserves serious consideration. As a citizen of a developed country whose government can't even agree to provide healthcare for its own people, I think it has no chance.
This has always been one of the big issues. I remember in college in the 1990's being told that you can't just enact pollution limits globally because developing countries would call foul over the injustice. The UK and the US and others got rich by (doing what we'd describe today as) polluting horribly, on their way to develop cleaner technologies. If you put pollution caps on all countries, it's going to hit developing countries right when they're trying to do the same.
After this current crisis is contained the world governments should mandate a mandatory work-from-home 6 week period starting each new year.
This would allow for an annual 'Earth Reset' and the effect of which might just be enough to turn things around, or hell, maybe even reverse course. It's remarkable how quickly nature has rebounded during all this.
This pandemic is now a grand experiment on so many levels, social, political, medical, economic, environmental, and more. These events will be studied for decades to come, and it will shape policy for longer still.
On the bright side, it will provide irrefutable evidence of anthropogenic climate change, and proof that drastic changes can produce immediate and drastic ecological improvements, and also the social and economic importance of vaccination. Hopefully science will be taken more seriously by the business minded that have been primarily driving policy.
Then again, we didn't learn much from the last crisis, so maybe I shouldn't get my hopes up that we can make a lot of positive global changes from this disaster.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadBut maybe it will give people an appreciation for how nice the world can be with less pollution. A shift in attitude could cause long term changes in our tolerance for pollution.
Now if we could only make sure it strikes the right people it'd be a perfect solution to major problems facing humanity
If COVID-19 has a significant impact on carbon emissions it’s because it caused significant economic depression.
A significant economic depression dramatically increases poverty levels, and increasing poverty would cost significantly more lives even than will be lost to COVID itself. [2]
The life expectancy gap between the poorest and wealthiest Americans is about 15 years. [3]
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/poverty-vs-life-expectanc...
[2] - https://twitter.com/ballouxfrancois/status/12388371731111403...
[3] - http://news.mit.edu/2016/study-rich-poor-huge-mortality-gap-...
That's a function of our broken system, not our overall wealth as a nation. Poverty in the U.S. has been increasing alongside GDP for years now. Restoring the economy to the way it was won't solve that.
Poverty rates in the US peaked at 15% in 2010 and have been going down since. Last year 11.8%. [1]
Poverty causes a lot of damage, see for example, opioid deaths.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/200463/us-poverty-rate-s...
The stress isn’t typically so much caused by working, it’s caused by being in financial distress. I’ve had a few years with virtually no income. I’ve had to work 80 hours a week to provide for my family. I’m not saying my personal experience is particularly valid or applicable to the general population, but instinctively the times of my greatest stress and anxiety haven’t been the times I’ve worked hardest if that also meant I had enough income to buy groceries and pay rent.
It’s the times when no matter how hard you work you still fear for your financial security and worry where the next month’s rent payment is coming from... I’m generally “immune” to even extraordinary levels of at-work stress, but financial stress by far has been the worst anxiety (bordering on panic) I’ve ever felt.
Those two bytes of ASCII didn’t fully communicate all of that? </s>
There might be if they could believe they were going back to work as usual -- meaning usual level of earnings -- any time soon. That's not at all clear. It's wishful thinking that this is a relaxing vacation for hourly service industry workers.
Definitely not what I personally want, I'm in Europe and hope that EU members use the current situation as a way to work closer together and come with even stronger environmental regulation.
EU members are shouting "Every country for itself"
Pretty similar to the US states actually, other than US states can't close borders (but can enforce no travelling, which is basically a superset of closed borders)
Comparing the US and the EU doesn’t often make sense IMHO, they have different and incompatible institutions with different goals.
In any case, what is happening now doesn’t define how countries will react after the crisis.
Like the virus, the longer we wait to take action, the more expensive it is and the narrower our options become. It seems more and more that there’s an illusion of public debate, while behind the scenes a decision has been made in favor of [adaptation]. I find that deeply sad.
The world has pressed the pause button for a moment. What it looks like on the other side of this crisis is in question. My (fools?) hope is that it makes us reflect on the fragility of the system we’ve created, the importance of global cooperation, democratic values, and what kind of future we want for ourselves and our kids.
You probably mean adaptation?
If I've learned anything about the climate crisis from COVID-19, it's that we aren't going to solve the climate crisis unless it's more convenient to do so than not. COVID is a much more pressing problem than climate change and we didn't do anything about it until after it was already a catastrophe.
Ty
Ref: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/03/coronavir...
If you feel frustrated and hopeless, give to a local food bank, buy music or books from your favorite creators, have a virtual happy hour with friends or family, drop that friend a note and catch up, or work on that idea you've had.
There are lots of bright spots out there and we can create our own too.
I didn't realize it could have such a powerful impact on you, sorry to hear that. I also saw something to that effect, accepted it, and moved on. I don't think there is really a way to consume information without trusting some things, but seeking deeper validation for things you may think are important. In light of other news, this didn't seem like something worth validating, so I assume many many people have internalized it as truth somewhat.
Such is the nature of disinformation.
Turbidity, which is how cloudy water is, is on a different axis from pollution, toxicity, and mineral content of water. There are heavily stained lakes in Florida with a lot of silt mixed up that you can't see further than a couple feet in that would be fairly safe to drink out of.
Mono Lake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_Lake, by contrast is very clear, but it's a soda lake and most normal aquatic life can't live there.
I agree, hence my "clean water" in quotes. However, a lot of people do think that opaque water is inherently dirty and clear water is inherently clean, even if the opaqueness is simply due to suspended organic particles that will settle over time.
https://youtu.be/EwusbaOFr2Y?t=116
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22619638
In a nutshell ? Either you approach this with a class warfare mindset or the usual suspects are going to come out on top again.
Typically, you go to war against whatever is putting your life in peril.
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/the-worlds-richest-people-also-e...
“On Wednesday, British charity Oxfam released a study that found the richest 10 percent of people produce half of the planet’s individual-consumption-based fossil fuel emissions, while the poorest 50 percent — about 3.5 billion people — contribute only 10 percent. Yet those same 3.5 billion people are “living overwhelmingly in the countries most vulnerable to climate change,” according to the report. According to the data used by the report, individual consumption — as opposed to consumption by governments and international transport — makes up 64 percent of worldwide climate emissions.
Oxfam estimates that the world’s richest 10 percent of people have carbon footprints that are 60 times higher as the poorest 10 percent. Any estimation that generalizes large populations is difficult to make, but researchers at Oxfam also estimate that the emissions of the world’s richest 1 percent create an even larger emissions gap: the 1 percent could emit 30 times more than the poorest 50 percent and 175 times more than the poorest 10 percent.”
And the active HN reader, whether they fall into that camp or not, are unlikely to be in the actual part of that global 10% who dictate industrial policy that have far-reaching effects on the rest of the world.
Just having our preferred foods year-round can completely change the lives of others. Just thinj about the effect that owning things like cars and houses has on the rest of the world.
Don't kid yourself. Like it or not you and I are part of the problem.
Very similar to mitigating an asteroid impact. If you wait too long, no amount of force and course correction will save us.
Well so far it has only been 1 or 2 weeks, comparable to the annual X-mas break in duration. So I'm curious: are the effects really significantly different here so far?
Of. course that's not everyday, but it's many days. When we're back home from college, it's nice to see the friends from back home, and often it will involve all of us driving separate cars. This is I believe archetypical of the Midwest.
The person you're replying to is describing about 30 miles of travel, at a rough estimate.
So, there's your answer.
Just because office workers get a holiday, doesn't mean the whole world is on pause. This is nothing like Christmas.
Fun fact: Truck traffic is waaaay up right now, as JIT inventories have depleted many grocery staples. Also, Amazon.
For ALL of the service industries, Christmas and New Year are when they make a huge bulk of revenue.
Christmas is only a break for those who are privileged. Talk to you neighbourhood restaurant server. Ask them how restful Christmas season is and they will tell you that Christmas is their most stressful time in the entire year.
For instance,
> the importance of global cooperation,
For me, and many others, this pandemic has highlighted the need to be less centralized and dependent on foreign nations, especially with respects to China. Relying on them for our global pharmaceutical supply chain, for instance, seems like a terrible decision to have had made now.
> democratic values
You would be excluding the majority of the world's population, who aren't under a system of primarily democratic values.
> the more expensive it is and the narrower our options become.
That is, until a new or emerging technology opens up a plethora of new options! Have some optimism! Because what is clear to me is, even with this current shutdown which has caused the lower pollution is, we cannot afford the cost it takes to do the kinds of drastic, immediate changes needed to lower the C02 emissions to what the majority of climatologists say it needs to be. Technology must be the answer here.
This doesn't require new technology. We know how to make electric cars, electric heat pumps, solar panels, nuclear reactors etc. This is all existing technology.
But take a look at oil prices right now. That's what happens if you start to reduce world demand for oil, and that's the real problem. All we need from governments is to put a sufficient tax on carbon that keeps carbon more expensive than alternatives even as the demand for oil and coal falls off a cliff.
Which doesn't even make oil dramatically more expensive -- it only keeps it at least as expensive as it was last year against declining demand, as economies of scale pick up for carbon alternatives and they become cheaper and thus more customers choose them.
A carbon tax doesn't destroy the economy, all it does is destroy the oil industry (faster).
Squint a bit and Canada's carbon dividend looks like UBI.
I'm fully on board.
As an Albertan I'm not super-happy about paying for the country's party over the past 20 years and now being kicked out of the house when we're out of beer.
FWIW I am (was) seriously considering moving to Wyoming or other net beneficiary of our own federal largess.
Noting your work in asset planning, I'd love to find a counterpoint to VOX's David Roberts coverage of the energy industry, with respect to climate crisis, renewables, governance, financials, etc.
That is to say, the reality is you have a zilch chance of passing a carbon tax in the US government sufficient enough to facilitate the change you are hoping to see. The only way oil and gas goes for a carbon tax is if it ends up being a net benefit to them, and as long as there is oil to burn, I don't see that happening any time soon.
I would think California, for as progressive and liberal as it claims to be on the outset would pass something like this, but it's tough for me to be too optimistic there considering the influence and power Chevron has over the state.
But you start off with a dividend that would end up paying out more to the majority of voters than it would cost them to fund (because a significant fraction of the money would come from corporations and foreign oil interests), and that gets you a lot of support. Then you get all the companies that profit from the transition because they get to sell solar panels and electric heat pumps and stuff. Then you get all the people who are paying attention and notice that even if their current carbon footprint is above average, they could buy an electric car and switch to electric heat right away and still end up with a net profit from the dividend (which is still coming in large part from corporations and foreign oil).
You add up all those people and it's basically the whole country lined up against the oil and coal industries. It's the kind of coalition that can get a bill passed -- but only if people care enough to demand it. Majorities get screwed over left and right when they can't be bothered to organize.
We have some of the problems solved. While batteries are energy dense enough to support passenger cars, there's still a lot of progress to be made before the tech can meet the demands of shipping/bulk-cargo/intercontinental transport. For example, batteries still need to be 20 times more dense before we can build a cargo/passenger aircraft with one.
Significantly more than 20 times I'd bet. The airframe will have to be significantly reinforced to support a design where the maximum takeoff weight is equal to the maximum landing weight. At that point, aerodynamics start to look a lot more like a rocket equation where you can't dump stages.
I think medium to long term, nuclear or renewable powered synthetic fuel is far more likely, especially since we already have a lot of generic infrastructure applicable to fossil fuels and carbon taxes could be the thing that pushes synthetic fuel into the market.
This doesn't require alien technology, it just requires carbon to be priced so that it isn't artificially cheaper than existing alternatives.
The state of biofuel today leaves a lot to be desired as far as the ability to scale without causing other environmental disasters, and many of them aren't even carbon neutral.
As for nuclear cargo ships -- I'd love to see them, but the liability and political hurdles are insane. You'd probably need a really big carbon tax before we'd see them.
Even without nuclear, container ships don't have major weight restrictions (they already weigh a hundred thousand tons), so you can fuel them with anything that will catch on fire. Make carbon expensive and they'll just buy whatever is the next cheapest -- sawmill residue, seaweed, whatever. A lot of the difficulty with "biofuels" is the process of making them into oils that can directly replace petroleum in road vehicles, but large ships don't need that. A large furnace like that can burn unprocessed solid biomass.
Although, burning biomass in ocean-going vessels is not necessarily a net positive. If, for example, they start burning sawmill scraps which were previously being pressed into Ikea furniture, you're just replacing one carbon emission with another. Biofuels are complicated; you have to be careful not to offset sequestration, as well as being cognizant to other emissions generated both in the process of generation and in burning them. Because of the tangential effects, some biofuels emit more carbon than oil!
I'm hoping this is just a temporary indicator giving analysts a hint as to where to focus their attention, and not a lone metric plugged into whatever model they're using.
Reduced demand lowers both prices and cash flow. Many operators will no longer be able to service their debts. Resulting in bankruptcy.
Coal was already in a downward spiral.
Now that crude oil is down to $30, fracking is no longer viable.
IIRC, Shale was off the board at $60/barrel.
Etc.
Even more tangentially: I support keeping our current nuke power generation running as long as possible (to ease transition to renewables). Like coal's economics, nuke aren't doing well, and will need help just to keep running.
This is largely a result of long-term excessive supply during a period of (relatively) short-term demand reduction though. This makes the huge upfront costs in renewables very unappetizing, and their variable costs less competitive.
I think we would need a much longer demand disruption to "reset" the capital outlay decision back to one of net-new fossil vs. net-new renewable, when we would actually have a chance of switching energy streams. If demand picks up by Q3 we will just ramp up existing O&G supply.
FWIW I work in the asset planning field for energy where we are often concerned with NPV of the entire project. If you can start to get close with renewables lots of primarily fossil-based energy companies will move forward, but I don't see the numbers yet without massive subsidies or taxes.
Except nobody actually thinks that.
This is only about finding a way to measure if life in China is returning to normal, without having to trust the Chinese authorities.
This is a common critique of GDP as a measure of economic health. And it's a fair one. But in the bigger picture, GDP remains the best measure I know of.
Accidents and disasters will happen, but their rate is fairly constant, and the noise they add to the measurement is far from invalidating it.
devils advocate, but if it ends up that democratic states don't handle the response as well as authoritarian ones out of differing views of individual rights, this isn't necessarily a 'win' for the democratic side of the fence
The individual states that are responding the best are all heavily liberal/democratic led states - CA, WA, NY, IL. Some of the less liberal states are doing good (OH), but most are doing really terribly (FL). The evidence seems to point in the direction of working democratic government being best suited for handling this crisis. Since the world largely does not have working democratic government in 2020, we have a pandemic.
I have so far seen zero reason to believe that if the outbreak originated in Kansas, or Poland, or Bangalore, it would not have spread across the world by now.
The difference in reaction between red/blue states has less to do with liberalism/authoritarianism, and more to do with the anti-science bent of the modern US right.
I wish people would not try to use one crisis as a justification for claiming another. Not everyone agrees that climate change is "the next looming crisis".
The reason we know COVID-19 is a crisis is that we can directly measure the impact. We don't have to rely on questionable computer models projecting things decades into the future. (And I don't just mean climate models--we also have to have economic and sociological models to estimate the impacts of what the climate models predict and calculate the net benefits vs. costs. Not all impacts of climate change are harmful. And if you really believe we have economic and sociological models that can make predictions decades into the future with enough accuracy to justify multi-trillion-dollar policy decisions, I have some oceanfront property in Tibet I'd like to sell you.)
Directly measuring the impact of COVID-19 means we can test the predictions of people who projected various possible scenarios for how such a crisis would play out, and what kinds of actions in response would have what kinds of consequences. It's too early at this point to run all those tests, but when things are back to approximately normal we should definitely run those tests and assess the results. That will help us to be better prepared next time. It will also help us to see what kinds of behaviors we should discourage on the part of major actors who have a stake in trying to spin the public's perceptions. And it will also show us where our infrastructure is fragile so we can take steps to make it more robust, which will put us in a better position to respond to any future crisis.
We need consumption to support people, yes, but Economic expansion and increasing consumption can't go on infinitely.
Most people shouldn't be able to afford a car - they should be taking public transit - but they can obtain one because they take out loans.
The american fracking industry shouldn't exist, but it can because it has access to cheap, infinite lines of credit.
Our health suffers for it.
So many people and businesses are able to live beyond their means because of access to credit. If we eliminate the ability to create credit, then consumption would drop to a sustainable level and pollution would also drop and we would see an end to wasteful businesses, products, processes, and ways of life.
What about housing? A mortgage is going to be the only way for a lot of people to ever afford their own home.
Remember: unless the house was seriously overvalued, as long as you held onto/maintained your house through the 2008 housing crash, it's still worth more than it was pre crash.
It's difficult isn't it? You need to somehow reconcile the fact that it's not the tenant's home with their desire to treat it like it is.
I've had to fight to get basic repairs and redecoration work done. In some of these cases I've still had a battle despite funding them myself!
I think something you could probably address is the lack of security with tenancies. In the UK, after the initial fixed period of an AST, it's very easy for either party to terminate the lease. I'd prefer for this to be tipped in favour of the tenant, so that they can be flexible and leave if necessary - but they're not also in danger of homelessness at very short notice.
A car isn't a "want" for most people outside of major US cities. It's a need. Public transport has never been effective in most of the US. Hell, I'd have to cross an interstate on foot in order to reach work. How many weeks do you estimate it'd take me to get killed? Should I be taking that risk because some politician decided my life was less valuable than their golfing buddy getting to work 5 minutes quicker?
It doesn't have to stay this way. Smaller cities and towns can invest in public transportation. Activities which must be in person could be decentralized to more local sites.
I can believe the poor state of public transit in the older east coast cities is largely a failure of policy, but as you go further west, you see many more settlements built around cars from the ground up.
I visited a friend at her parents place once in prescott, arizona. maybe places like these don't matter so much for emissions (population 40k within the city limits), but I was struck by how totally dependent we were on having a car, even more than being in an east coast suburb. iirc, the closest place to go for a quick bite was seven miles away, the closest shopping center 10+ miles. her parents weren't particularly wealthy, but their house was built on a multiple acre lot just like all their middle-class neighbors. her father drove forty or fifty miles each way to work in the middle of nowhere. whenever both of her parents were out, there was nowhere we could go. literally nothing but private homes anywhere within walking distance. in this kind of place, you would almost have to tear everything down and start from scratch to make public transit viable.
Never have we had events as large as this to observe.
All it took was a government mandate that folks who can and should be working from home do so.
Hopefully we all have the common sense to continue this long term, mother earth deserves a break
It makes sense that if people who can work home do so, the environment will be better than if they don't work from home. Also, many people who cannot work from home at the moment are still driving to work (restaurant workers, grocery store workers, other retail). This current situation isn't too far off from a state where just those who can work from home do so, and the rest drive to work. And anecdotally, the air where I live has gone from one of the worst in the nation to delightful.
it seems pretty very far off to me. I'm having a nice time working from home, but all my friends that don't work at a grocery store (restaurant workers, tutors, social workers, theater techs) are sitting at home not getting paid.
I'm not sure how to estimate what fraction of the workforce actually needs to commute to work, but it seems like they make up a pretty significant amount of the people that are not driving right now.
However, where I live, a majority of the restaurants are open (just doing drive through). Tutoring is possibly something that can be done online. I've known many high quality tutors running business entirely from home. Theater techs, social workers, and other similar jobs probably make up a very small fraction of the workforce compared to restaurant, retail (I believe the majority of retail stores in my area are open), and grocery workers. So I still think the current situation can give us a decent idea of what driving volume and pollution levels will look like in a situation where people that can work from home do so. The current situation is definitely biased towards less driving though.
This is not sustainable in the least man. Eventually all you guys working from home are going to feel it too, because a lot of the businesses you sell your software to are not earning revenue to pay you or to hire consultants.
"I was comparing the current situation with the state where everyone is forced to stay at home. Right now, everyone is not forced to stay at home. If you're saying that the current situation is closer to everyone staying at home than to business as usual, you're probably right."
So I'm not saying this is sustainable. This definitely gives us a better idea of what pollution and driving may look like if people who can stay home do stay home, than by trying to guess what it would look like before the shutdowns started. I also said "The current situation is definitely biased towards less driving though".
I just want to point out that we shouldn't label this situation as some unobtainable ideal when it comes to pollution, but rather as a real world glimpse of what pollution could be if more people worked from home than have in the past.
but as a social worker, you can end up making house calls to some very dysfunctional (or at least, the opposite of tech savvy people). a lot of these people simply can't figure out how to do video calls reliably; they might not even own a computer or have a mobile plan with enough data for video. sometimes the social worker is helping them perform physical tasks.
A lot of "the rest" are staying home, at least in California. Only certain businesses are allowed to remain open.
Unemployment claims are up quite a bit, especially in California and Washington due to the shelter in place orders -- and that's data from last week, when only portions of California were locked down.
Most retail and restaurant employees are at home not getting paid, and many have already been laid off. A lot of those people live paycheck to paycheck and won't be able to pay rent on April 1st.
I know some retail employees who are furloughed and still being paid, but their companies probably can't afford that for more than a few months.
This also distributes heating/cooling/electrical usage in a way that I would imagine is less efficient overall.
[1] https://www.causeur.fr/coronavirus-covid-19-guillaume-bigot-...
It’s like being thrown into a worldwide experiment that would otherwise never realistically happen. There’s so many understandings to gain from the results of our actions, habits, and lifestyles.
The world is changing before our eyes as a result of the changes in our behaviors. We can see how even when we slow down, the world keeps going. It’s an incredibly unique, enlightening circumstance.
Hopefully, as we move forward, we actually learn from the history unfolding today, and don’t just discredit it all to go back to the way things were for our own ego at the expense of the rest of the world.
So this may cause a short term spike in global temperatures over the next few months. If this goes on long enough it could paradoxically accelerate climate change.
Maybe we need a well place and timed nuke on the moon to compensate.
EDIT: On the other hand increased sunlight may boost photosynthesis. All in all should be intresting to see the effect. Because it may show that we need to be more careful about mitigating certain types to pollutants (CO2) first and leaving others for later.
It was around this time that I started backpacking again. I had forgotten how much urban din there even when not in a city.
I know you can handcraft these by having the text overlay over an exact X,Y on an image but that seems overblown for just these maps than having the text rastered into the image loaded.
So, is there some tool like an SVG creator that helps create these with the responsiveness and everything handled?
"ai2html" sounds like the source is Adobe Illustrator and probably refers to this tool: https://github.com/newsdev/ai2html
Not sure what "freebird" is, some internal software. I can't find much about it with Google search.
As for freebird, my search led me to this. https://github.com/freebirdjs/freebird
Seems to be the NYT has an array of pollution sensor IOT across the cities and they are using Freebird to control them. Just my guess.
If you’re into GIS or large-scale imagery processing, you should hit them up [1] especially if you’d like to live in Santa Fe (where the core team is). They also hire outside of Santa Fe, but as the core team is there, they strongly suggest you consider it.
[1] https://jobs.lever.co/descarteslabs.com/55bcc68b-f7ba-448f-b...
Do you want a medal?
https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/blog_...
The economic damage caused by "shelter in place" falls disproportionately on the poor and the lower middle class, who work in fields where working from home is not possible.
Emission regulations and fuel taxes also fall disproportionately on the same people, because they can't afford newer cars which are more efficient.
When the French government raised fuel taxes in order to ameliorate climate change, there were mass street protests. What started as a protest against fuel taxes developed into a widespread expression of grievance against inequality.
We can expect a lot more of that if we do what it really takes to make a big impact on climate change.
If climate policy is not balanced against economic inequality, there is a real risk that such anger will channel into support for populist political parties, who would roll back climate policy when elected.
If a carbon tax was applied to whole countries and the funds collected given back as a per person dividend instead of going into the general budget, I think most people would support that. There are ways forward. We just have to support ways that work with the system we have instead of using climate change as a crisis to implement the utopian ideas of a few.
I didn't mean literal field workers. I mean field as in "job field".
The U.S. couldn't even ratify Kyoto, and that only required (AFAICT) monetary payments for climate technology, not UBI. I can't imagine any scenario in my lifetime in which the U.S. Congress would approve a treaty which required UBI payments to people in developing countries.
As a human, I think that's an interesting idea that deserves serious consideration. As a citizen of a developed country whose government can't even agree to provide healthcare for its own people, I think it has no chance.
To be fair, in France protests are a pretty common occurrence. They often turn violent as well.
https://www.france24.com/en/20181207-france-yellow-vest-prot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unr...
This would allow for an annual 'Earth Reset' and the effect of which might just be enough to turn things around, or hell, maybe even reverse course. It's remarkable how quickly nature has rebounded during all this.
- Close city centers for any traffic where possible (European downtowns are most suitable)
- Close city centers for non-electric cars (and double subsidies for purchasing them)
- Drastically expand bike lanes
- Drastically expand public transport (e-buses obvs)
- Ban sale/smoking of tobacco
- Drastically raise taxes on animal products (after all they are the sources of so many pandemics)
- Make contactless payments mandatory
- Implement contactless sign-in (I was just asked to sign in KFC using a pent that's been sitting there for days)
What else I am missing?
On the bright side, it will provide irrefutable evidence of anthropogenic climate change, and proof that drastic changes can produce immediate and drastic ecological improvements, and also the social and economic importance of vaccination. Hopefully science will be taken more seriously by the business minded that have been primarily driving policy.
Then again, we didn't learn much from the last crisis, so maybe I shouldn't get my hopes up that we can make a lot of positive global changes from this disaster.