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Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

Energy usage is a leading indicator of GDP. That chart makes me super uneasy.

You should read about the famine projections: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...

"Now Aminata Yanogo, a seasoned vegetable seller, has to dodge police beatings along Ouagadougou’s dusty roads to make ends meet."

That might be triggered by the virus but it's a fundamentally different problem.

The incoming famine, like the economic damage and the CO2 emissions drop, is going to primarily be a result of the lockdowns we chose to impose to fight the virus rather than the virus itself.

Saying "chose to impose" sends the message that it was completely avoidable but we chose to shoot ourselves in the foot. The measures were the only accessible thing most countries could have done to avoid a heavy death toll. And it's not like people especially in the most affected brackets would have happily gone to work every day anyway. On top of the accelerated spread you probably would have seen mass layoffs of people who decide their life is more important than the job anyway. Coincidentally the same age brakey that would have the biggest challenges to get re-hired.

The rest seems like a nitpicky statement like "it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden deceleration". Except we don't know what the true fallout of facing the virus with no restrictions. Just that the experts suggest it would have been worse.

Not completely, clearly people would have changed their behaviour without any lockdown.

Would you have been glad to die to keep the economy moving?

Are you glad to kill blacks for the sake of old whites?

Even in Europe we face big trouble as April was way too dry again and significant parts of the summer harvest may be lost already. These problems stack and we become more vulnerable.

Not really, yes we mjight lose some of animal feed crops but in France i know for a fact that even with closed borders we will be able to feed everyone and then some. At most we will reduce our exports. Not counting that we should cut animal protein intake by at least 50%.

The only issue was with vegetable are we are employing cheap workers from poorest countries to pick them, but the government notice to allow people to work in the field if they want while still getting unemployment benefits will probably be enough.

Not yet, and hopefully it will rain, but the East is extremely dry right now. Poland, parts of Germany, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania etc.

At least the wild fires around Chernobyl are not a problem any more, but the fire danger in the forests is still high.

Here are some maps of Germany, for example.

https://www.ufz.de/index.php?de=37937

The deeper layer (first map) is still depleted from 2018. February was very wet, but that has been overcompensated for by the no-rain April.

We haven't reached the 2018 level of dryness yet I think, but there has to be a lot of rain, soon. Yes, nobody will starve, and be it because we can buy from the world market, but if this keeps happening we will have to find better ways to deal with it. No export also means that there is potentially too little food somewhere else.

But I agree, we do have some leeway with the animal protein production.

What should make you uneasy is your first sentence. (I.e. the fact that the most reliable indicator of "our economy doing well" is how fast we're moving to an unlivable climate.)

Energy consumption doesn't have to be tied to CO2, but it seems to me that there will always be a relationship between energy consumption and economic activity. After all, the energy is literally being used to do work.

Yeah, exactly. I'm not saying we should be burning co2, but we do - and it's a solid indicator for the time being.

I.e., separate your analysis of the world from what you wish eventually happened.

>Energy consumption doesn't have to be tied to CO2,

Is it not for the foreseeable future?

Are you saying GDP necessarily causes a high energy usage, that we can't be more efficient and prosperous at the same time?

That has been the case for the past 5000 or so years -- it could be that this time is different, but highly unlikely.

Are you making the argument that someone in 3000BC, who couldn't even read or communicate further than voice could carry, didn't take enough action on the global warming problem that wouldn't exist for another ~4950 years? We're trying to solve a problem that has become apparent in the last ~50 years, it's a bit weird to mention a trend that long predated the existence of the problem and use that as argument for why we can't solve the problem without more pollution. I guess it's a bit like someone in 1800 saying that ever-more horses were involved in becoming more prosperous and therefore we can't have prosperity without at least two horses per person.

I am not saying we won't need more energy ever again, but long-term we can find solutions for that, and short-term (as a stopgap solution) we already know that nuclear power can deliver that power without the global warming. It has other problems, but not ones that threaten our lives as much as global warming does. Of course, in the long run we'll need other forms of energy to take over completely, but even in the short term we can (as in, physical ability, not political will) make this work without reducing our energy needs.

I don't believe there's a causal relation between more pollution and more prosperity.

There is a causal relation between more energy and more prosperity, not pollution. Pollution is a byproduct of how we have chosen to produce that energy. There is no fundamental reason it has to stay that way.

>I am not saying we won't need more energy ever again, but long-term we can find solutions for that, and short-term (as a stopgap solution) we already know that nuclear power can deliver that power without the global warming.

If you increase supply of energy via nuclear, it will decrease price of fossil fuel energy, and there’s a few billion people ready to go on vacations to Maldives/Tahiti/etc and experience what it’s like to live in detached single family homes with their own personal SUVs.

And there’s no way nuclear power can be developed in a quick enough timeframe, there’s not enough people with expertise or materials.

We need to curtail consumption of fossil fuels yesterday, which means heavily tax it, which means less traveling, less purchasing of plastics, fewer cars, and these are all the opposite for how prosperity is measured today.

I don't know for sure whether nuclear plants can be built fast enough so I can't really agree or disagree with you there, but while I do certainly agree that we need to curtail consumption of fossil fuels yesterday, so far it looks like that curtailing gets us at most 8% (we're not going to get a stronger example than cancelling air and most car traffic in all of the most pollutive-per-capita countries: nobody would go follow such measures if it weren't for a pandemic but for a potential extinction event more than a year in the future).

We need more than 8%, way more.

Sure, it's just that until now growth has been coupled with more intensive energy use. There were some talks by Vaclav Smil on this that I found very informative.

GDP has taken at least a 5% hit from the crisis.

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