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I’ve been thinking a lot about the next looming crisis: Climate Change. On Bloomberg radio a few weeks ago, an analyst / money manager was talking about how his

• perfunctory 7y ago
  > while behind the scenes a decision has been made in favor of mitigation You probably mean adaptation?
  • gdubs 7y ago
    Thanks, it’s early here. Fixed.
• asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  Wow. Wouldn't want to invest with that money manager. If that signal wasn't already well known, giving away secret sauce in a public interview is not a recipe for outsize returns. But it is a well known signal so it's even less useful for investing. 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.
  • leetcrew 7y ago
    satellite imagery is already a common tool used by hedge funds. the correlation between pollution and productivity is also an obvious one. it's an interesting tidbit for laymen, but he's not giving away anything specific enough to be used by adversaries.
    • asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      I think my concern would only be if he believes using that info could give him an edge. There are plenty of people, including many professional investment advisers, who believe that the obvious use of public info can give you the ability to outperform. If he's just explaining the relationship between economic output and pollution it's all good.
• aledalgrande 7y ago
  I also have hope that this tragedy brings humanity forward. Not only with climate change, but a lot of other things. More contacts between people (video calls to friends and family far away). Doctors are increasing the use of video calling and sending prescriptions via email already. Bill Gates' 2015 TED now doesn't seem just a faraway prediction now, so hopefully governments will form a "health NATO". Seeing Venice with clean water will maybe make the administration think, "wow, this is gorgeous, why don't we find a way to keep it like this?" Just disconnected thoughts of hope.
  • jdhn 7y ago
    Doesn't Venice have "clean water" because all the silt that was suspended in the water due to gondola traffic has now settled on the bottom of the canals?
    • RhodesianHunter 7y ago
      Venice doesn't have clean water. They're images from another town at another time in the latest iteration of "take an old picture, make up a lie relevant to current news, and pass it around for clicks"
      • sigmaprimus 7y ago
        Citation? I was also fooled into believing those photos if your coment is accurate. Ty
        • caseysoftware 7y ago
          "The swans in the viral posts regularly appear in the canals of Burano, a small island in the greater Venice metropolitan area, where the photos were taken. The “Venetian” dolphins were filmed at a port in Sardinia, in the Mediterranean Sea, hundreds of miles away. No one has figured out where the drunken elephant photos came from, but a Chinese news report debunked the viral posts: While elephants did recently come through a village in Yunnan Province, China, their presence isn’t out of the norm, they aren’t the elephants in the viral photos, and they didn’t get drunk and pass out in a tea field." Ref: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-fake-animal-viral-social-media-posts/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/03/coronavir...
• johnchristopher 7y ago
  Yeah, like we did for the financial crisis, the climate crisis, etc. In a nutshell ? Either you approach this with a class warfare mindset or the usual suspects are going to come out on top again.
  • toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Genuine question: what’s wrong with class warfare if certain classes are causing an overwhelming amount of the problem? Typically, you go to war against whatever is putting your life in peril.
    • runarberg 7y ago
      I read the parent as if class warfare is the desirable outcome.
    • bosswipe 7y ago
      Do you mean the bottom or the top class?
      • toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Top most class. https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/the-worlds-richest-people-also-emit-the-most-carbon https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/the-worlds-richest-people-also-e... “On Wednesday, British charity Oxfam released a study that found the richest 10 percent of people produce half of the planet’s individual-consumption-based fossil fuel emissions, while the poorest 50 percent — about 3.5 billion people — contribute only 10 percent. Yet those same 3.5 billion people are “living overwhelmingly in the countries most vulnerable to climate change,” according to the report. According to the data used by the report, individual consumption — as opposed to consumption by governments and international transport — makes up 64 percent of worldwide climate emissions. Oxfam estimates that the world’s richest 10 percent of people have carbon footprints that are 60 times higher as the poorest 10 percent. Any estimation that generalizes large populations is difficult to make, but researchers at Oxfam also estimate that the emissions of the world’s richest 1 percent create an even larger emissions gap: the 1 percent could emit 30 times more than the poorest 50 percent and 175 times more than the poorest 10 percent.”
• amelius 7y ago
  > The world has pressed the pause button for a moment. 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?
  • briefcomment 7y ago
    I wouldn't think Christmas is similar to these past two weeks in terms of volume driven. Many people still drive to work during Christmas, and some even drive more, to get to relatives' places. Not to mention, air travel probably rises significantly. Right now, car travel and air travel are low.
    • ich_bin_abe 7y ago
      Yes. Actually during Christmas break, me and my friends in Michigan drive A LOT!! For breakfast coffees, then casual hangouts at places like zoos/museums, then for lunch, then for coffee again, then for dinner, all of us in separate cars. 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.
      • new2628 7y ago
        Why don't you just walk around instead of all that driving?
        • briefcomment 7y ago
          I think it's quite hard to reach all the places you may want to go if you just walk if you're in a suburban midwestern town. Really wish we could come up with reasonable non-driving communities. More small towns and villages. My college was situated such that you could walk to classes, bookstores, coffee shops, and groceries comfortably. Wish there were setups like this outside of colleges.
        • 7y ago
• alharith 7y ago
  It's just so interesting how the same event could lead people to such drastically different observations and take aways. 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.
  • AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    > 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).
    • toomuchtodo 7y ago
      All great points, and the time to start taxing carbon is now at this low price, as the shock to consumers won’t be as great.
      • 7y ago
• jagged-chisel 7y ago
  > More pollution == “better” 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.
  • nogabebop23 7y ago
    don't read anything too technical into it, in this case they're just measuring production by the by-product to try and get a leading indicator on actual trade goods. This is macro-level stuff like changes to China's GDP that I would doubt is very actionable
• specialist 7y ago
  Tangentially, this crisis may accelerate transition from fossil fuels to renewables. 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 $60/barrel. Etc. Even more tangentially: I support keeping our current nuke power generation running as long as possible (to ease transition to renewables). Like coal's economics, nuke aren't doing well, and will need help just to keep running.
  • nogabebop23 7y ago
    >> Reduced demand lowers both prices and cash flow. Many operators will no longer be able to service their debts. Resulting in bankruptcy. This is largely a result of long-term excessive supply during a period of (relatively) short-term demand reduction though. This makes the huge upfront costs in renewables very unappetizing, and their variable costs less competitive. I think we would need a much longer demand disruption to "reset" the capital outlay decision back to one of net-new fossil vs. net-new renewable, when we would actually have a chance of switching energy streams. If demand picks up by Q3 we will just ramp up existing O&G supply. FWIW I work in the asset planning field for energy where we are often concerned with NPV of the entire project. If you can start to get close with renewables lots of primarily fossil-based energy companies will move forward, but I don't see the numbers yet without massive subsidies or taxes.
  • the_monster 7y ago
    Seems this is the strategy Saudi Arabia is adopting. They don't care anymore if the barrel of oil is 20$ because they are among the very few who can still benefit from such a low price.
• BurningFrog 7y ago
  > More pollution == “better”. Something is clearly unsustainable with that formula. 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.
  • z3ncyberpunk 7y ago
    They clearly do think like that since they came up with the metric. They CHOSE to make that an analytical anchor because it benefits them to see production levels rise again.
    • BurningFrog 7y ago
      Who are these nefarious "they"?
  • mistrial9 7y ago
    nobody, except banks perhaps.. on a related note, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, covering thousands of hectares of pristine Alaska coastline with suffocating, deadly raw oil, was famously "good for the economy" .. because almost every measure of economic health increased in the aftermath of the events.. of course, millions of sea creatures died, and the area was poisoned for who-knows-how-long.. make sense?
    • BurningFrog 7y ago
      I guess "good for the economy" here means it increased GDP for the affected area. 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.
      • TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        That last sentence makes no sense at all.
• cat199 7y ago
  > democratic values 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
  • arrosenberg 7y ago
    You'd also have to acknowledge that the (Chinese) authoritarian response is what allowed the outbreak to get this bad in the first place. In the United States the Federal response has looked much more like the authoritarian response — no action for regular people, misdirection, profiteering, and grabbing for more power. Compared to the responses we saw under more democratic government against Zika, Ebola, Avian Flu, and Swine Flu its an embarrassment. 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.
    • vkou 7y ago
      > You'd also have to acknowledge that the (Chinese) authoritarian response is what allowed the outbreak to get this bad in the first place. 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.
    • fjk123 7y ago
      responding the most is not the same as responding the best. Time will tell. But given that many if not most people want to limit shutdowns, the above is a technocratic opinion, not a democratic one.
    • abstractartist 7y ago
      If improper response allows the outbreak to get bad then why are CA, WA, NY having bad outbreaks? Could it be that negative feelings about Trump do not protect from coronavirus?
• tomp 7y ago
  If anything, the virus shows how mainstream media messaging that Global Warming is a CATASTROPHE and that we have to PANIC right NOW to prevent it, is counterproductive when a real panic comes around (and noone takes you seriously).
• pdonis 7y ago
  > I’ve been thinking a lot about the next looming crisis: Climate Change. 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.