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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in LA and while I don't live there anymore I've seen pictures from the last few days.

Never in my life have I seen such blue skies over LA. And my parents don't ever remember it being clearer either.

At least this shows what some stricter climate controls can do to both the climate and the economy and the tradeoffs involved.

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Walking around my neighborhood and the silence is absolutely sublime. Airplanes, cars, highway noise, all diminished. The birds and chirps and friendly "Hellos" are amplified. It's bee n marvelous.

That reminds me about stories of people trying to record nature untouched by man-made sounds.

It has become increasingly difficult to find locations which are purely nature. I wonder how much easier it has become since the number of people generating "work noise" has fallen so much?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/24/machine-...

Maybe in Europe, but in the US there is a ridiculous amount of untouched space a <20 miles from almost every major city with the exception of California and the north east.

Surprisingly, this isn't really true (as far as noise is concerned). Noise pollution travels far, and if you're using sensitive equipment, you can easily pick up the noise of planes flying nearby at 30,000 ft.

This is in fact how airplanes were detected before radar was invented. Not a joke.

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/aircraft-detection-radar-19...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_location

Now you've made me want to dress up as an Airplane Detector for Halloween!

Standing on a mountaintop in Yosemite, I could easily hear the airplanes above, one approximately every few minutes.

It turns out there is no where you can go in the United States that is more than 20 miles from a paved road.

Is there a citation for that? I’d guess there are large parts of northern Maine that only have logging roads.

There are a bunch of articles about it but nothing scientific. For example:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42104894

And it turns out I was wrong. There is one spot 21.7 miles away from a road deep in Wyoming.

This is highly dubious. Logging roads might be considered "roads" but some are passable only by heavy equipment. If you have to stop and repair the road every few hundred meters then I don't think it counts as a road.

Not sure if that’s true but even if it is, 20 miles is a massive distance.

If you ever go camping far out in the wilderness you will realise how hard it is to get away from human noise at night. The sound of planes flying overhead is almost constant over the entire continental US, even in desolate and wild areas.

Maybe the Colorado Rocky Mountains are different, but they don’t have plane noise like that outside of the corridor the interstate follows, which the planes also mostly follow.

It definitely looks like there are some larger plane traffic gaps out that way compared to here in the midwest, but if you look at a live map (https://www.flightradar24.com/41.21,-101.72/6 ) they are still flying over even the remote areas pretty frequently unfortunately.

I am currently living in Korea and near a motor way. You can estimate the health of the economy by the sound emanating from the motor way.

Keep in mind stricter climate controls wouldn’t even hurt the economy this bad. A harsh carbon tax on all fossil fuels in exchange for COVID-19 to disappear to be gone would be a welcome relief to the economy.

With ya on this one, but what kinds of problems would this cause for people who don't have another option to get to work? Un-doing this ridiculous culture of driving 40 minutes to work will take a lot time.

Still, I wholeheartedly agree on the concept. I'm curious as to how to fix the followup problems that will occur from fixing the primary problem.

Invert zoning, say housing must be built with businesses, and it must be mixed together.

This helps, but it seems vanishingly unlikely that both spouses will always be able to find good jobs in the same neighborhood for as long as their kids are in school.

Public transportation. They don't need to both be 5 minutes walk away

Honestly, a grotesque carbon tax of 300% on a barrel of oil would only put prices back to where they were before the Russia/Saudi dump.

You’ll find that people will adapt quite quickly as the price ramps up (we can smear over a year if we need to). Carpooling, switching to electric, or just getting a closer job will all suddenly seem very feasible when the numbers are concrete.

Do that tax and make a dividend. Amen.

I'm surprised no one brought up the idea more people will just telecommute and work remotely, as so many are now discovering they can.

I'm sure plumbers, nursing home workers, retail employees, carpenters and skilled trades, factory workers, and more will telecommute.

Do people not get that not everyone is a knowledge worker whose work is always done on a computer?

That's true, but I think the point is: people will witness first-hand how reducing pollution and emissions leads to much better environment in the span of weeks.

I also hope that there will be some dip in relevant global climate measurements, so there will be something to point to and say: "here's direct empirical evidence that climate change is man-made and that reducing emissions helps mitigate it".

This thread seems to be confusing climate change / carbon (dioxide) with local pollution.

climate change / carbon (dioxide) and carbon taxes are about long-term temperature change due to C02 concentration and the effects of that. COVID-19 isn't changing that in 1 year.

Local pollution is caused by burning gasoline and factory smoke.

I was talking both. They're related - local pollution does local damage to the environment; climate change is bad because it does damage to the environment everywhere simultaneously.

I don't expect COVID-19 to show up too strongly in temperature graphs, but I hope some of its effects show up somewhere with large enough effect size that we have a statistically significant dip in the chart to point to as direct evidence that human activity is causing this, and changes are meaningful to fixing it.

Why does global warming damage the environment everywhere?

because environments everywhere have adapted to a rhythm of temperature that will no longer exist due to global warming. a good definition of damage is "harmful change."

Yes, but Cars are the intersection of the two. That's a big intersection.

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