Hacker News Reader

Comment by hamburga | Hacker News Reader

The general Western game plan right now seems to be: (1) shut down the whole nonessential part of the economy, (2) buy time to not overwhelm medical systems, (3) gradually turn the economy back on where safe.

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.

View on HN

In the minds of people opposed to controlling CO2 emissions, your comment here justifies all of their worst fears of CO2 emission regulation as a means of social control.

Being a part of society implies a social contract and some social control, it’s not black and white. Right now environmental impacts are not priced into many of our products (e.g. meat) and services (e.g. travel).

I agree. But tying the recovery from this pandemic to an attempt to regulate CO2 emission would be an absolutely atrocious way to accomplish either pandemic response or CO2 emissions response.

Disagree. Crises are the best time to make political change. You have the attention of the whole country; rally them into making changes that can affect longer term gains.

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.

> You have the attention of the whole country; rally them into making changes that can affect longer term gains.

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.

Well, we did invade Iraq, so sometimes it works.

Worked with contaminated vape toxicity and the Juul flavor ban.

> That’s not how politics works. You can’t abuse a crisis to ram something unrelated down the opposing party’s throat.

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.

Have you seen the patriot act?

Hell, it was written by the oppositions party current presidential front runner.

The aviation sector currently accounts for about 2% of global emissions.

Is the ability to travel, including all the business, leisure, and cultural exchange benefits worth less than 2% of our carbon footprint?

We will know when we finally enable the carbon tax on everything. Just set a total cap per unit area and then set the tax per tonne so total emissions are near that. Then we'll see if it's actually worth more than 2% since we'll be paying.

Is 20% of that worth 80% of the benefit?

When costs are not priced in the benefits are weighed against nothing.

Everything is just a few percent here and there, and everybody shifts the blame saying we should be cutting XYZ instead of ABC.

Efforts should be made to reduce all sources of emissions.

"Everything is just a few percent here and there, and everybody shifts the blame saying we should be cutting XYZ instead of ABC.."

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.

massive reduction in the quality of life of people everywhere

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.

The point GP was trying to make, if I understood it correctly, is that large policy changes have social costs you need to factor in even if you're going to do them anyway.

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).

" is that large policy changes have social costs "

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.

Those measures are fuzzy at best but besides the point.

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.

We already have heavy handed centralized attempts to intervene, they are what has got us in this mess in the first place. It just happens that they came from big business.

No, that's not at all true and not fair to say. There are no businesses that can dictate all of the terms of the market.

There has to be a middle ground though, and it's ridiculous that the environmental impact of flying isn't factored into the price. Let's say a £30 Ryanair flight can produce as much as half a tonne of CO2 per traveller - how is that ok?

As we all know the best way to do something about climate change is to mentally divide the economy into 50 small pieces and then declare each of them is so small that it's not worth doing anything about it.

The aviation sector only accounts for a small amount of global emissions because globally almost nobody can afford to fly. For people who can afford to fly, an international flight can easily double their carbon footprint for the year.

For the people who fly it's a much bigger portion of their impact as even in the US more than half of people don't fly in any one year.

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.

Air transportation is a major contributor to CO2, if you limit the scope to the people who use it. It is estimated that about 80% of the world's adults have never taken a flight, and 94% of the world's adults have not taken a flight in over a year.

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.

To elucidate: there are a meaningful number of people - like people in West Virginia who feel Obama was pretty effective at using environmental regulation to essentially stop almost all domestic coal production (true) - that Obama wouldn't have hurt coal if it was found only in deep blue states. It is shockingly hard to hurt your political opponents livelihood and prove it was fair handed (which is almost certainly was) - at some point the politics of, anyone who hurts the field would by opposed by that field, take hold, and it feels like retribution, especially when they aren't given advance warning.

> … implies a social contract and some social control

"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?

Yeah, social contract theory is something form a time when there was actually somewhere else to go. Now every border meets a border of some other domain.

Personally, I would rather fight for making the world a cleaner/healthier place to live without trying to sacrifice socioeconomic well being, especially of those at the margins of our societies who can barely make a living doing the most laborious and strenuous tasks.

Trying to take away/cut things people have come to expect and offer nothing of equivalent in return? Good luck with that.

You must be responding to the wrong person.

No, I was just continuing on my thoughts, not you in particular, but for everyone to see… ignore me at your own convenience :P

The virus is certain to push the US and many other economies into recession, which becomes self-sustaining. After the health crisis has passed, we will be left with this economic crisis.

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.

The economy is pretty easy to restart with cash injections as you mentioned with infrastructure projects - be it trump or biden, one of them will do it.

Gentle reminder that the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee is slightly less than 4 months away, and Biden is not the nominee yet.

_Anything_ could happen between now and the convention/election. Surprisingly, I haven't seen this mentioned explicitly, but all of the remaining (major) candidates are squarely in the Covid-19 "danger zone". Some are known to have complicating health factors and there's a non-zero possibility that others do (despite what their doctors' notes say), which _doubles_ the risk.

The math currently does not work in Sanders Favor

There may also be spending on bootstrapping a return of industries that had been moved overseas that we now know are a huge risk to not have at home.

Like?

Generic drugs [1]

[1] https://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycomme...

Many things but most obvious now would be drugs and drug compounds. China being able to refuse to sell us drugs is a national security issue. We didn't learn from the oil embargo of the 70s apparently.

I assure you that people will be so desperate for jobs that carbon management will not enter their thoughts even one iota.

It would be nice to think that a lot of the new jobs would be in carbon and environment management.

I'd like to see the government pay anybody who wants a job to plant trees.

With what new revenue? Are you also proposing a new tax burden for a recently slammed economy? That’s gonna be a hard sell.

There have been long periods of higher taxes and economic growth. If the private sector can't keep people economically active then the state will step in.

It's called a stimulus package!

> It would be nice to think that [...]

It sure would ... wouldn't it.

The economy is going to get more broken each day this is affecting us, supply chains are going to break down, demand is going to sink, investment will grind to a halt.

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.

The consequences of not responding proactively to the environmental crisis is orders of magnitude more serious than the pandemic. I can't think of anything more regressive than willfully destroying the planet.

What does that mean ? Are you saying that the climate change issue is going to be fixed if we slow down emission rampup over the next year ? Mind sharing that analysis ?

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 think you're measuring how bad things are relative to what is considered normal. Relative to normal, absolutely, the pandemic is terrible.

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.

>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.

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

There's a good argument, I think, for allowing the low risk to get infected. They have a low chance of needing hospital care, so best to get them through this (and not propagating the disease) as quickly as possible.

Western? Isn't this literally what China did back in January?

Yes, but that isn't a good optic for domestic propaganda. Instead, the COVID-19 virus is being branded as a US Army bioweapon by Chinese state media. They've even published a book about it, already.

Source?

Quick google search:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/13/asia/china-coronavirus-us-lij...

This is not an official position of the Chinese government, is just a tweet by someone. And the tweet doesn't say that the coronavirus is a US biological weapon, only that patient 0 might have come from the US- and specifically in the army, and have brought the virus to China during some internal military athletic competition.

"Hundreds of athletes from the US military were in Wuhan for the Military World Games in October 2019."

No one is dying from global warming. It's still much cooler than it was in the early Holocene (the Neolithic, or stone age era of humanity) and this was a time of abundance and expansion for farming and agriculture. Even the Sahara was richly farmed at the time. Plants not only thrive under warm temperatures, they also thrive with high levels of CO2. The world is greening:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...

There is an asymmetric risk, though. Due to feedback loops like methane release, we don't know at what temperature the warming will stop, or how fast it will go. The upper-range estimates are well beyond any temperature from the last 10 million years.

A lot of methane is coming from deep sea hydrothermal sources. You cannot stop that. But methane itself is unstable in the atmosphere and only accounts for less than 2 parts per million.

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.

There has been a geological extinction event associated with high levels of atmospheric carbon - it was the biggest one of all time, and it nearly wiped out all life on Earth. Look up the Permian Extinction. (Yes there are multiple theories of cause, but one of which - and perhaps the most likely - is run away global warming.)

And stop reading bad science.

First of all, I sourced from NASA. You provided no such sources despite making an extraordinary claim about the Permian extinction. The theories for that event include meteors, volcanoes, microbes, underwater methane release (from geothermal sources) and there is tons and tons of uncertainty about that event. You are oversimplifying by even attempting to attribute blame to CO2, which was already much lower in the Permian than in other eras like the Cambrian and Carboniferous [1], furthermore, temps aren't correlated with CO2 in Pre-Quarternary eras.

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...

Doesn't it bother you that the temperature rised first, the CO2 levela just followed it. To me if A happened after B, A could not be made responsible for B, i.e. rising CO2 levels for rising temperature levels.

We didn’t have trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure and other investments, or our food supply, in low lying areas at that time.

Sea level is rising at an unalarming 2-3mm per year. About a foot a century. Believe me, we can adapt to that. Even if you could control the sea level, by the way, due to tectonics, a lot of land is moving at millimeters per year as well. Some landmasses move up, some move down. Change is constant on this planet. Adaptation is the only way.

Sea level rise will accelerate. Either you are being deliberately obtuse, or you are completely uninformed.

Actually no, not everywhere, in places sea-levels are about to drop: https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate/sea-level-drop-sc...

It actually may drop around Greenland and Antarctica, as well. The reduced mass of ice causes the water level to drop despite the overall sea level rise. This of course means higher rises elsewhere. Surprisingly, this didn't occur to anyone until just a few years ago.

That's... not how it works.

I guess you think you are smarter than PhDs who have studied this for decades, then?

Oh, I'm a very smart cookie, but surely I'm often wrong, as is everyone. However, if I were to present you with Ph.Ds that agree with me, what would you say? Who is right? Would your instinct be to fall back on consensus...or to fall back on the scientific method?

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.

On topics were you personally don't do research it's always a good bet to fall back on the consensus of people who actually know the topic.

Never outsource your thinking to someone else. We live in an age where you can do your own research quite easily.

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 have a PhD and did some research. It would be ridiculous to suggest that people can do research in my field without first investing years of training. I assume it's equally ridiculous to assume that I can do research in climate science without years of training.

I outsource thinking to other people all the time. That's essentially what it means to live in a modern society.

People are already dying from global warming and its consequences. For example the deaths of 868 people are attributed to the 2019 European heat wave ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2019_European_heat_wave).

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).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com