Traffic and Pollution Plummet as U.S. Cities Shut Down
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
[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.
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...
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.
In a nutshell ? Either you approach this with a class warfare mindset or the usual suspects are going to come out on top again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
<!-- data processed in process/freebird/process-graphic.js -->
<!-- asset wrapper : start -->
<!-- ASSET : START -->
<div class="g-asset g-graphic" style="max-width: 945px">
<!-- Intro elements -->
<!-- inner graphic element -->
<!-- print .html file -->
<!-- Generated by ai2html v0.100.0 - 2020-03-22 00:19 -->
<!-- ai file: maps_la.ai -->
<!-- preview: 2020-03-19-coronavirus-us-cities-shutdown -->
<!-- scoop: coronavirus-usa-traffic -->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.
It was around this time that I started backpacking again. I had forgotten how much urban din there even when not in a city.
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?
- 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?
https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/blog_...
Never have we had events as large as this to observe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.