Global oil use heads for steepest annual contraction
worldoil.com
worldoil.com
All these online courses are probably going to be setup over the course of like a week. I don't imagine they will be well run online courses.
Good schools teach so much more. Teamwork, friendships, presentation skills etc. Those are a lot harder to homeschool.
This is a blip comparatively. But I take your point.
For me the most disruptive moment of my life was the 2008 financial crisis. I ended up homeless for a bit, and I was not prepared for that.
The Cold War lasted 40 years, almost resulted in world-wide nuclear war on multiple occasions, and dictates the US's extremely consequential foreign policy decisions (and the bedrock of US culture) even to this day. It is hard to overstate how influential the Cold War was and is to the US, Russia, China, and many Latin American countries.
HIV killed millions of people per year as recently as 2005, and it started out as a completely unknown infection with no known transmission mechanism that primarily attacked communities at extremely high social risk.
This pandemic will be an economic catastrophe for years that we'll feel a decade from now and it will kill many people until a vaccine is in widespread use, but it sure as hell is not "more stressful" than those events combined.
Honestly I don't know why that would be an issue. Say you go to school for 12 years and you miss 3 months because of this. That's 2% of the total time of going to school. I doubt you will have a measurable impact in performance later in life.
Hell, I slept through most of grades 7-9. I was a teenager, always sleepy and unmotivated. Then I started catching up in grade 10 and graduated at least in the top 5% of my class.
Also you can learn so much outside school, it might even be beneficial to have your parents at home, like it used to be pre-industrialization.
There's no arguing that observing this will be useful to science though.
I thought the same about middle school. Total waste of time, I could have done high school right after primary school, which actually was useful.
"Do contrails contribute to climate change?"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/climatechange/2009/05/911_contra...
For part (3) the general idea of "safe" has meant, allow people who are medically low-risk to return to the workplace and retail establishments. But we could see that could be expanded to also factor in carbon impact. In other words, we prioritize turning back on the low-carbon parts of the economy first, and maybe leave some high-carbon parts (international vacations) turned off or reduced for good.
I'd like to see the government pay anybody who wants a job to plant trees.
It sure would ... wouldn't it.
I feel somewhat strange writing that as someone who buys into the systems philosophy of "fix whats broken immediately, enhance it later". While that's true in computer systems, it doesn't seem uncommon in the realm of politics that periods of disasters are taken as opportunities to experiment with different ideas.
That’s not how politics works. You can’t abuse a crisis to ram something unrelated down the opposing party’s throat. You end up alienating everyone including the moderates.
This never works with even something as simple as a government shutdown over budget considerations.
This is exactly how it works in practice in the US because the government is in terminal gridlock.
> You end up alienating everyone including the moderates.
The largest political party in the US is the non-voting party. Again, how it works in practice is that almost half of the population is already alienated.
Hell, it was written by the oppositions party current presidential front runner.
Is the ability to travel, including all the business, leisure, and cultural exchange benefits worth less than 2% of our carbon footprint?
When costs are not priced in the benefits are weighed against nothing.
Efforts should be made to reduce all sources of emissions.
Wow - no, totally not.
The value derived from some kinds of emissions and resulting costs for changing them is infinitely differentiable from others.
For example, changing our electricity grid over to a more renewable resource, piece by piece, will maybe be a little bit more expensive, but it won't be disruptive.
'Stopping all flights' because airplanes emit CO2 could be devastating to the world economy, in addition to a massive reduction in the quality of life of people everywhere.
The factory that produces medical drugs needs some kind of Co2 emissions - probably worth it.
The one producing plastic bouncy balls for pets - probably not.
'The Market' has a lot of asymmetries, but it also contains a lot of intelligence, which is why it's always reasonable to be skeptical of arbitrary, system-wide controls.
Using this crisis for a 'massive experiment in what to turn online next as the basis for CO2' is excessively totalitarian, because we wouldn't really know why, how, what we are doing, and the resulting social pain would be great.
If there were a rational, clean path forward and 'good timing' for the introduction of specific measures, then yes, use the opportunity. But I don't see any of that.
General messaures of wellbeing and life satisfaction in the West haven't shifted over the last forty years despite a massive increase in air travel.
If a government doesn't keep that in mind it may bite them back somehow (see the beginning - as opposed to the follow-up - of the "gilets jaunes" movement in France).
The 'large policy changes' will have completely varying consequences across the economic spectrum, for good and bad, which is the general problem with centralized planning.
So if the government 'shut down all co2 emitting factories' it might have small consequences here, and terrible consequences over there.
But if the government institutes a 'carbon tax' that makes your 'pet toys' and 'medicine' 10% more expensive, then given the inelasticity in demand and surpluses derived from medicine, people will continue to buy it at the same rate, and possibly buy fewer 'pet toys'. If travel rose by 20%, then maybe we'd see less leisure, fewer business trips, but the 'important trips' would still happen.
That we are 'happier because we can travel, but sadder because we have Facebook' is another can of worms entirely.
But this 'no improvement in wellbeing' argument is mostly undermined by the fact that given the choice, almost 0 people chose to 'live like 50 years ago'. Everyone today can do that easily. They can go back to not having dishwashers, not wearing seatbelts, smoking a pack a day, black and white TV if they want to, but for some reason, they mostly chose modern convenience.
But the real issue is the fact that economic activity is diverse, and heavy-handed centralized attempts to intervene will have crazy consequences.
If there are 'obvious' ways to use a crises for 'obvious good' then sure, but I don't see any such thing.
When you consider that it makes it much harder to convince the average person to lower their emissions when they can see their boss jetting off to Bali on a whim.
Also that 2% figure is wrong in so many ways.
So, the real picture is that this 2.5% of global CO2 emissions are caused by as few as 6% of the population, who also are incidentally the richest and bear a high personal carbon footprint in other domains than transportation.
Also please remember that the aviation sector is growing, and therefore its global contribution to GHG emissions will grow as well in the future. Discounting the carbon footprint of the aviation sector based on today's numbers is a mistake.
If you do not want to impede on your ability to travel, you shouldn't object to it for the 94% of the population that want the same thing as you, and when it becomes available to them the aviation sector's emissions will increase 15-fold.
"Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority (of the ruler, or to the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order"
And of those who refuse to consent, explicitly or tacitly and disagree with others definitions of "social order"? Do people expect them to just roll over without fighting?
Trying to take away/cut things people have come to expect and offer nothing of equivalent in return? Good luck with that.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
If the climate were so sensitive to CO2 levels, where we've seen it go from 250 to over 400 ppm...we would see much more dramatic warming than we have. It was not that much cooler 100 years ago. So far, we have yet to have a year significantly warmer than 1998. It's been 22 years and the CO2 has been rising all that time. In spite of billions of people coming out of poverty. Minimal difference in maximum temps. Antarctica had record sea ice extent in 2014. Antarctica has been trending positive for sea ice over the past 30 years: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/sea_ice_so...
There's never ever been a geologic extinction event associated with high levels of CO2. In fact quite the opposite: the abundant and biodiverse periods in Earth's history are associated with high CO2.
Plants literally suffocate at 150ppm. We are near historical lows for the planet Earth.
And stop reading bad science.
Best indications are that a series of super-volcanic events triggered massive drought, which probably led to drying conditions and decreased sunlight for photosynthesis, which triggered massive fires which burnt up tons of oxygen and caused hypoxic conditions for tens of thousands of years. This whole episode is also associated with geomagnetic instability [2]. Now, the two are related, because geomagnetism is caused by movement of the inner and outer core of the Earth. If the earth sees periodic disruptions in the normal movement of the cores, I can easily imagine that to trigger massive volcanic activity.
Now, in that case, a release of CO2 occurred from all the plant matter dying off as a result of drought, fire, flood, and volcanism. The CO2 itself didn't cause the extinction. The volcanism caused the extinction.
[1] http://www.biocab.org/Geological_Timescale.jpg [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13429...
Watch Dr. Patrick Moore's 2015 talk on this: "The Sensible Environmentalist" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFHX526NPbE
Or Dr. Richard Lindzen's 2018 talk: "Global Warming For The Two Cultures" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2q9BT2LIUA
Or geologist James Kanis's talk on Plate Climatology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=GX1e_uU5u3A...
Or you could also dig into the science yourself, with a skeptical, rational mind and care for the scientific method, and come to your own conclusions. I would recommend learning about everything from thermodynamics to geology to atmospheric science. It's fascinating stuff. We live in an era where it's easy to do that.
With any other hard physical science, the math is derivable. I can look at the equations for special relativity, I can read about the aether-related theories that preceded it (which were consensus at the time), I can see where they fell short and how they failed to measure up, I can read about Einstein's thought experiments that the led to the theory, I can read about the fundamental experiments that validated the theory. I can see how it evolved since then and led to developments in quantum physics. I can do all this. And I submit to you that if quantum physics is accessible then certainly climate science and geology are accessible. We have Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, numerous sources for contemporary publications and you can absolutely follow it and you can play a part in it. And then you will know the topic.
I outsource thinking to other people all the time. That's essentially what it means to live in a modern society.
Also, the problem is not that humans in general are incapable to withstand the increased temperatures, but that the extreme changes in climatic patterns and the changes weather patterns will wreak havoc with infrastructure and agriculture. Any species whose lifecycle is tied to the seasons will face decline and possible extinction. With every species removed from the ecosystem, this ecosystem becomes more weak and fragile. Changes to seasonal weather patterns will make living in some areas untenable, causing local and global migration. And we all know how well established societies are dealing with migration (hit; not good at all).
Monetary policy is maxed already, so we will need fiscal stimulus. This will be the opportunity to invest in green infrastructure. We will need the government to step up and provide jobs and spending, and it should direct both with wisdom to prepare for the climate challenge.
[1] https://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycomme...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/13/asia/china-coronavirus-us-lij...
"Hundreds of athletes from the US military were in Wuhan for the Military World Games in October 2019."
Huge amounts of wealth is going to be destroyed and people are going to suffer.
Development is going to slow down further limiting our ability to respond to those problems.
Meanwhile you are cheering for an emission rate blip and suggest it's worth hurting us even further ? That's going to do what exactly ?
I'm surprised at how regressive the popular opinion is around here - I wouldn't expect it from people who are in the filed of problem solving with technology.
I don't think you realise how bad things are going to get as this panic drags on, think unemployment and poverty waves 2008 levels.
I'm not saying climate change is irrelevant - I'm saying proposing to slow down economic activity to reduce emissions has no quantifiable or tangible benefit - it's basically wishful thinking - and the downsides are going to be very harsh
I'm measuring how bad things are relative to how rightly fucked things can be, and climate change offers up a whole wenu of awesome things. Widespread crop failures, Ecosystem collapse, Food supply shortages, violent uprisings, Mass human migrations, Famines, the collapse of the global supply chain and upheavals in the global balance of power. How bad can it get, and when? I don't know exactly but 2020 is off to a very exciting start.
2 months ago The pandemic felt unreal to North America, even though the warnings were easy to read. Now it's real, and hopefully it's waking us up, as people, as governments, and as businesses as to how quickly, suddenly, and shockingly the unreal can become real.
And I agree with you, the economic fallout is going to be terrible. There are many things to worry about, and one of the things I worry about is that thousands of small businesses are going to go under, and their employees, who are often young and living paycheck to paycheck won't have a job to go back to after this blows over.
If this pandemic causes an economic heart attack, I'll see it like a middle aged guy keeling over trying to climb 2 flights of stairs. As in: hopefully that heart attack will scare you into a greater appreciation for taking care of yourself, and it is in fact a blessing in disguise. Or maybe all those businesses will go under and Gen-Z will have to work at the Amazon warehouses until they're 30. Difficult choices need to be made.
The reason I see the above solutions as regressive is because I believe these things have a high probability of occurring irregardless of emission control at this point.
But the timeframe is longer - we're better off trying to prepare for the outcome of those scenarios - and technology is going to be a key component. If technological development collapses as a result of an economic collapse we are going to be majorly screwed emissions or not.
Also I think the "reduce emissions" crowd is sucking all the air out in the discussion about handling climate change. Climate change is just one of the risk factor our society faces in this new era - viral infection spread, nuclear disasters, etc. society right now is very fragile and humans have a huge influence on our environment for the first time in history - the society must adapt and hoping things will go back to the good old days if we just stop doing things is very narrow-minded
But at least low oil prices will help stall the development of shale gas and oil sands in North America.
Only effective cartels can raise prices at will. And OPEC’s power to do this is pretty clearly diminished, if not destroyed, by expanded US and Russian capacity.
Indeed. I was able to put a bit over 15 gallons of premium in my car tonight for ~$45. I was shocked, pleasantly so. I had gotten used to paying nearly $70 to fill my 18 gallon tank.
Yeah, I don't drive the most fuel efficient car, but I've also only put on a little of 50k miles over the 8 years I've owned it. That's 6250 miles per year. Far less than most (US) Americans with a car.
The other interesting angle is what will happen to electricity emissions as demand drops, it should increase the market share of renewables as the highest cost generators drop out first.
Also, my hope is that low oil prices drive US frackers out of business (US shale needs ~$40-90/barrel to break even, current WTI price as of this comment is a bit below $30/barrel); this will cause the price of natural gas to spike, causing utility scale battery storage combined with renewables to become immediately cost effective against quite a bit of current natural gas fired generation. Battery storage is already replacing the most expensive "once through" peaking plants (these are essentially jet engines bolted to the ground), and as the economics become more marginal for more efficient combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT), battery uptake will increase. That firm capacity is permanently clean moving forward.
These are "one way ratchets" we need to find every opportunity to pull. I will concede that low oil prices do not help with efforts to electrify transportation; the fight continues for a carbon tax and outlawing combustion whenever possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic... (Jurisdictions with planned fossil-fuel vehicle bans)
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019 (Levelized Cost of Energy and Levelized Cost of Storage 2019)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/what-... (How Inexpensive Must Energy Storage Be for Utilities to Switch to 100 Percent Renewables?)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/12/wind-and... (Wind and solar plants will soon be cheaper than coal in all big markets around world, analysis finds)
https://pvbuzz.com/renewables-capacity-overwhelms-coal-gas-o... (United States: Over the next three years, renewables will add nearly 50,000-MW of new capacity and be more than a quarter of total, while gas, coal, oil, and nuclear will drop by 4,200-MW)
If you drive US frackers out of business, you'll also spike oil prices. Fracking has added so much supply to the world that it's turned the US into an oil exporter on occasion[0]. Removing that much supply from the markets would cause it to tighten, and by doing so would make fracking viable again.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/08/business/us-oil-exports-saudi...
I dont understand this if the $30 price is driven by the saudis and russians. There was immediate talk of furloughs/layoffs and striking rigs. The rigs (and crews) can go up and down in a matter of weeks. The wells and equipment will persist and be mothballed, or acquired in a fire sale. Why wouldnt production start up as soon as the price goes back to $60?
I argue this is going to go on for more than a few weeks. Saudi Arabia and Russia can hold out longer than most over leveraged US fracking orgs, especially with the US credit markets in turmoil. No one is going to be racing to extend further credit to frackers already in financial distress. Production won't start back up immediately because it'll take time to start back up.
Airplanes and pilots will also be a dime a dozen I suppose, but perhaps it will even put.
Rail is best used for freight.
Autonomous busses and cars (electric) are the best long-term solution for travel.
The best approach is simply to enact a Carbon Tax and let the market figure it out.
We would be better off promoting mass-contraception to the developing world and halting land clearance in terms of massive targeted CO2 reductions.
I think high speed rail could be potentially a game changer for the job market. In the UK if you could easily commute in from Birmingham or Newcastle then London salaries would be more accessible outside London.
"...let the market figure it out" would work in a market that isn't already so strongly shaped by subsidies, regulations, and nationalist protectionism.
Autonomous vehicles will have a very large and currently underestimated impact on all kinds of other modes of transportation, but there is a wide range of expert views on when that will happen.
You don't even necessarily need special high speed rail, just more rail makes it more high speed because you can mix slow and fast traffic (e.g. no-stop direct trains can run side by side with freight and services that makes 10 stops).
Speed doesn't have to come up so much to at least beat road traffic.
In 1997 a $20 dollar barrel of oil is $32 in today's money.
Calculator: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
However, this site seems to have been broken for quite a while: https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
In any case, I still don't think gas is down to those prices, even with your inflation factor.
It seems to me that public transport / ride sharing could take quite a hit (at least in the next few months).
Probably not. Different areas have different costs of extraction.
Shale oil/tar sands = expensive
Saudi Arabia proven reserves = low cost
This might put some of the North American oil companies out of business, but those assets will be bought in bankruptcy, so they'll eventually come back online when the price of oil gets high enough again.
> Or could it have the opposite effect and make us use more cheaper fuel for individual transport?
This seems more likely. Oil is primarily used for transportation. Cheap oil means less reason to go electric.
How much of an effect is the questions. I, personally, have no idea. Electric cars are improving at a very rapid rate. However, there doesn't seem to be a good solution for people who don't own a garage. There is some condo/apartment charging sprinkled here and there, but it's not very common.
> It seems to me that public transport / ride sharing could take quite a hit (at least in the next few months).
Typically, public transport is mostly funded through taxes, so it's not really in much danger.
Ride sharing will probably take a beating - especially since flying and night life are getting hammered.
What we have so far, is cutting fossil fuels without any of the support to prevent this from hurting those who are already struggling. It does give the earth a break, at least, but we need the other stuff to help people and make the change stick.