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CO2 emissions set to fall nearly 8% this year, the largest drop in history
- adrianN 7y agoNeat, but unfortunately the construction of renewable energy, the insulation of homes, the installation of heat pumps, and the replacement of ICE cars with electrics likely sees at least a similar drop. Since we can't shut down our economy forever, it is these sustainable changes that we must work for.
- jamil7 7y agoI think on top of that the crisis can hopefully help companies embrace a more remote and work from home culture. Decreasing the load on roads and public transport.
- juanuys 7y agoAlongside WFH to make do with less travel, especially those that require flights.
- icebraining 7y agoI fear it might provoke the opposite reaction. This WFH has been like teaching someone to swim by throwing them at the deep end; it may leave bad memories in the minds of workers and bosses alike, making them less inclined to try it in the future.
- Tade0 7y agoI was sort of forced to work remotely originally and one takeaway was that the daily commute had an outsized impact on my mental wellbeing that I wasn't aware of - perhaps more people share this sentiment. Probably not people with children who haven't planned for this though - that being said I know two absolute madmen who work remotely having four and five children respectively, so it's not like it's impossible.
- SubiculumCode 7y agoFor myself as well,even though my commute was only 30-40 minutes each way, it was draining.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago30 to 40 min each way sounds terrible. I did it for a couple years, but never again. Especially because the longer the commute, the larger the volatility.
- teekert 7y agoSpeak for yourself, I'm loving it. Getting stuff done while having breakfast/lunch/dinner with family and no more commute. I wish I could always keep working from home. Also dreading the day my 90 min commute is required again. I'm not going back to that.
- pjc50 7y agoFor me, I've concluded that I would like to work from home some, but not all of the time...
- dmihal 7y agoRegardless of whether people like WFH or not, it's forced companies to accommodate it. Companies in less-competitive industries previously had no incentive to support virtual meetings, VPNs, etc. Plus, it's showing many companies how much money they can save if they don't need to rent large offices, reimburse gas/transit costs, etc.
- vitaflo 7y agoAnecdotal, but the F500 company I'm at has already said they expect WFH to be a staple of company life moving forward, even after this is all over, mainly because it's been so successful. They did not expect productivity to stay as high as it has. Certainly this will vary from company to company and who knows if it was just upper management blowing smoke in this case, but I do feel like the overall outcomes will be positive for those of us who want more flexible work arrangements.
- icebraining 7y agoThat's great to hear!
- lazyjones 7y agoElectric cars are doing fine. ICE cars apparently aren't, despite the low oil prices. Just have a look at recent news about Ford, Tesla, Volkswagen, Audi...
- adrianN 7y agoIf we want to stay below 2° we need to completely stop selling ICE cars in the next few years. I don't see that happening.
- pedrocr 7y agoWe need to put a price on carbon and let the economy figure out how to adjust. Trying to set piecemeal policies like stop selling X product in Y time is not feasible. We already have a method by which to coordinate globally, trying to invent a new one for this won't work.
- adrianN 7y agoI agree, but I don't see a (sufficiently high) price of carbon coming either.
- neltnerb 7y agoUnfortunately I think it's too late for a carbon tax. Regulations are the only thing that we know works and can possibly work on the time scale required. Market forces would have maybe had time to work ten years ago... Edit: To quote unattributed from a friend that does this stuff for work, I don't think they'll mind as long as their name isn't attached: "I think it’s a distraction from more effective policy. Emission standards like CAFE have worked better than carbon taxes have and also have caused zero national protests in France. Decarbonizing is an infrastructure replacement problem, which is capital intensive. It needs solutions that encourage, subsidize, and mandate green capital investment. Carbon taxes affects capital decisions at the discount rates of corporations (10%) or consumers (20%ish), which gives them a short time horizon. They also don’t really kick the green tech adoption laggards in the butt enough to get to 99% decarbonization."
- Joeri 7y agoA local wind energy company took out a full page ad complaining they had to shut down their wind farm because the reduced base load is fully covered by the local nuclear power plant, which cannot easily scale down production. So there may even be existing green energy capacity that is lost due to bankruptcy if the lockdowns persist long enough.
- polotics 7y ago...under the assumption that wind energy is greener than nuclear.
- neltnerb 7y agoOr that both are green and one is underutilized...
- lallysingh 7y agoIs there much CO2 coming out of that nuclear plant?
- therealdrag0 7y agoNo, but that's a fortunate situation to be in. Many places don't have a nuclear alternative. Their alternative is gas or coal :|
- VBprogrammer 7y ago> green energy capacity that is lost due to bankruptcy I think large capital intensive infrastructure is never truly lost to bankruptcy. The name on sign might change and the people profiting from it might even be different but once it's been constructed and operational there is very little incentive to remove it.
- TheSoftwareGuy 7y agoMaybe, but you still want the people with renewable infrastructure to be the ones with the capital to create new infrastructure. Although tbh, nuclear is fine and I don’t care if we have more nuclear power
- globular-toast 7y ago> the replacement of ICE cars with electrics I'm not convinced that this will change anything. What we need to do is simply cut down on car size and car usage in general. Dragging around literal tons of weight consisting of unoccupied seats, AC equipment and other unnecessary items is always going to require a lot of energy. I seriously doubt that it could ever be sustainable. Why would it be? We've been tapping into fossil fuels for so long now with sustainability not even given an afterthought. Bicycles are almost certainly sustainable, though.
- the8472 7y agoIt's not an either-or. We need all of the above.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoFrom what I can tell, it’s all Bandaids on gaping wound. Pollution scales with energy use, and energy use scales with how far mass has to be moved, which means it all depends on how densely people live. But people won’t opt to live in higher density unless extremely high taxes on fuel sources are enacted, globally. Also, reduction in population would result in less energy usage.
- globular-toast 7y agoWhat we need is to radically change our lifestyles and start with sustainability first. That's the only real way.
- ForHackernews 7y agoI guess this is one silver lining from the pandemic, but it's worth highlighting that this 8% drop in emissions rate only means that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising more slowly. It's still rising. So we've got the second derivative going in the correct direction, at least.
- elihu 7y agoWell, technically this is right about the time of year when CO2 concentration stops increasing and drops sharply for the next couple of months, corresponding to the Northern hemisphere growing season. CO2 doesn't increase monotonically, it's actually more like a sine wave with an upward trend. It's that upward trend that has everyone rightfully worried, but the seasonal oscillation is part of the pattern too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve
- coffeefirst 7y agoAlso worth noting that the ways to realistically address climate change require a massive, historic investment. I don’t know what the limit is on world governments’ ability to write a giant blank check, but I can’t imagine the trillions we need to spend on the current crisis makes turning around and dropping trillions on the next one any easier.
- PoachedSausage 7y agoIt might actually. Once you have had one impossible thought before breakfast, subsequent impossible thoughts surely become easier to have.
- cmendel 7y agoTruly? How many Trillions of dollars have we spent to slow the descent of the stock market in the last few months? How many more are we planning on spending? We aren't on the gold standard, we're on the idea standard. As such, our money is worth what we say it is worth and we can have as much of it as we want. If we said tomorrow "Here's 100 Trillion USD to fix climate change" we could do so. Yes I'm ignoring the inflationary effects for this example, but ultimately it doesn't matter. If we don't have a world to live in we'll have much larger concerns than inflation.
- garyclarke27 7y agoYes CO2 emmisions have obviously dropped. Interestingly levels of most pollutants measurable in the atmosphere have dropped sharply, whilst CO2 levels have continued to rise, ie the crisis has had zero effect on CO2. Joe Bastardi (weather genius) explains that this is because most CO2 comes from the ocean, not mankind. He also reminds us that recent warming simce the cool 70’s is mostly driven by slight increases in water vapour in the arctic regions, where it has a dramatic effect, because they are so dry and so cold. Maybe time to revist those pseudo scientific, crystal ball gazing, climate models, the ones that have to keep postponing their predictions of doom and catastrophe - kind of similar to the recent pandemic models - which have also driven ruinessly expensive policy making.
- ajdegol 7y agoClimate models take into account the oceans; and predict pretty well https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-models-projected-global-warming https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m... If there was some way of letting you stand on the train tracks while I stood next to it, I would argue that rumbling might be a train so maybe don’t stand there. But in this analogy I still argue but you hold me onto the tracks with you; what is it you really stand for?
- asdkjh345fd 7y agoIn this case it doesn't matter, because the tracks are long since abandoned and there are no trains coming. Once the UN updates their "facts" to reflect the actual facts and no longer promotes climate hysteria, will you stop screaming about the impending train coming to mow us down?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- CuriousSkeptic 7y agoCan’t reply to the dead post. But in case the author wanted to learn something: Yes you are correct, most carbon is cycled through the oceans. Problem is that we’ve been moving non-cycling carbon from fossils sources into that cycle. Here’s a good animated model https://youtu.be/dwVsD9CiokY https://youtu.be/dwVsD9CiokY
- billars 7y agothank you coronavirus.. I guess?
- H8crilA 7y agoEnergy usage is a leading indicator of GDP. That chart makes me super uneasy.
- buzzkillington 7y agoYou should read about the famine projections: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people/hunger-makes-us-forget-disease-famines-threaten-greater-devastation/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago"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.
- makomk 7y agoThe 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.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoNot completely, clearly people would have changed their behaviour without any lockdown.
- buran77 7y agoSaying "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.
- yread 7y agoHere is a view from the observatory at Mauna Loa https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/index.html#co2change https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/index.html#co2change TLDR; no difference visible on actual CO2 levels
- enqk 7y agoThat is actually the scariest thing about CO2. It's going to stay in our atmosphere for 100 of years. So even just stopping emitting is just about maintaining the status quo. Once the crisis becomes really bad, we don't have any more means to reduce it. (I set a very low belief in sequestration methods because they're thermodynamically crazy..)
- ben_w 7y ago> I set a very low belief in sequestration methods because they're thermodynamically crazy. With current tech I agree completely. In the sci-fi future of my fantasies [0], industrial oil for plastics etc. will come from GM algae or similar, which would sequester CO2 from the air by photosynthesis. [0] which may or may not even be possible — I don’t know, I’m not a biologist, and there has to be a reason why the previous efforts have failed
- jooize 7y agoWhat do you think about Project Vesta[1]? [1]: https://projectvesta.org/ https://projectvesta.org/ [2]: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nature-based-climate-change-technology-hits-key-milestone-in-demonstrating-gigaton-scale-carbon-dioxide-removal-301045099.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nature-based-climat... (2020-04-22) [3]: https://twitter.com/project_vesta https://twitter.com/project_vesta
- ben_w 7y agoI don’t know enough, to be sure. How large are global olivine reserves compares to historical and future CO2 emissions? What are the side effects at the required scale? I’m glad they’re doing the experiments, and I’m sure they consider any question I can come up with (including the above) to be trite to the point of cliché. From the cost and quantity requirements in their FAQ, this will cost $232.4 billion/year. While that ought to be considered affordable vs. the world economy… well, call me cynical, but I don’t think voters or politicians think like that. As grid scale PV reportedly costs $0.7/watt (peak) in the USA, that money could also install 332 GW of additional solar every year. As the panels look like they should last 30 years, that gives a steady-state equivalent of 9.96 TW (peak), compared to total (not just electrical) global consumption of double that continually, and I’ll fudge-factor as another x2.5 on top to convert peak solar output to time-averaged solar output to make PV x5 the cost of olivine. So, economically that looks good with current tech, but may look bad if grid-scale PV goes below $0.14/watt (peak). But that analysis assumes that fossil fuels are free, and as current solar prices are already cheaper than fossil fuels (0), people will probably switch to PV regardless of olivine and save money while doing so. But olivine is probably still useful for the CO2 sources that are hard to substitute with eco-friendly alternatives. (0) What’s that Skippy, current oil prices are negative?
- jakeogh 7y agoOne year of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011700/a011719/11719-1920-MASTER.mp4 https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011700/a011719/11719-...
- revax 7y agoAccord to the Paris climate agreement the USA need to reduce their greenhouse gas emission by 75% by 2050 in order to stay in the +2°C scenario. Its about a 4% drop each year for 30 years. Or a Coronavirus every 2 years.
- scotty79 7y ago> Or a Coronavirus every 2 years. This seems plausible. Other coronaviruses that cause common cold make a comeback roughly every two years without mutating. So if we don't have a vaccine we might have exactly that.
- jfk13 7y agoEven if we had a comparable pandemic every 2 years, it seems unlikely the associated CO₂ reductions would be cumulative and persistent, which is what we really need.
- m12k 7y agoDunno, making a bunch of airlines go bankrupt and teaching people to do meetings online might have lasting effects on how much people fly in the future too. One way or another, the world after the corona crisis is going to look rather different than the world before it.
- jfk13 7y agoYes - so maybe a noticeable part of the current 8% dip will "stick". But if it does, do you suppose the next pandemic will cause an equivalent additional dip? No, because whatever lasting changes have already been made are changes that aren't available to make when the next virus sweeps through. To make real progress, we need to do far more than stay home, because staying home wins us 8% but we need 75%.
- beervirus 7y agoAn airline going bankrupt doesn’t mean that its planes will never fly again. It just means they’ll be flown by by the airline’s creditors once people start flying again.
- lucb1e 7y agoOnly 8%? I was waiting for news on this but 8% is on the worst-case side of my hopes. We're going to need so much more to even get close to neutral.
- mehrdadn 7y agoAnd this is assuming we don't emit extra to make up for it whenever the economy ramps back up...
- saiya-jin 7y agoI wonder if there can't be some compound effect on sudden spike on pollution once things go back. But maybe it will be so gradual it won't happen, and anyway things like consumption and traveling will not be the same I believe
- seanwilson 7y agoWhat would it take to drop it by say 50%? How is the drop not higher?
- kabanossen 7y agohttps://grist.org/climate/the-world-is-on-lockdown-so-where-are-all-the-carbon-emissions-coming-from/ https://grist.org/climate/the-world-is-on-lockdown-so-where-...
- frusciante19 7y agoI'm worried about this sudden decrease; can we do something to make the values to return to a normal value?
- williesleg 7y agoTHINK OF THE TREES!!!!
- paulcole 7y agoThis should show that climate change is likely an unwinnable battle with the approach taken to this point. This isn’t the life people want and they’re more than willing to fuck over everyone else to get what they do want.
- RunawayGalaxy 7y agoIs coronavirus the Earth's antibodies?
- rimliu 7y agoCan we please stop with this narrative? Earth is just a dumb rock. Humans are just one of the species living on it. We are chaning the world, but so did cyanobacteria.
- titzer 7y agoWell monkey, it's a dumb rock that has absolutely annihilated life on a mass scale in one cataclysm after another. We're inviting our own destruction by farting up a storm in a century that in previous cycles has taken tens of thousands or even millions of years to create. You should have more respect for the dumb rock that gave rise the impossibly varied and rich life here. It's our only home in a vast, empty, and horribly inhospitable universe.
- robos 7y agoSource: https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2020 https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2020
- Aunche 7y agoThe mass quarantine is most likely going to cause another baby boom. I wonder if the longer term effect of the pandemic is actually going to accelerate climate change.
- garraeth 7y agoPlease forgive my ignorance - why is this being down-voted (rhetorical)? Shouldn't this be discussed, at least? In preparation of the various scenarios. Wouldn't it make sense with everyone stuck at home and bored, "things" might happen? In a few years we might refer to children born in 2021 as "Corona/Covid Kids", no? And with a population "boom", pressures on the planet may increase? Perhaps. People may become desperate for the "good old days", and/or won't care so much about the planet because they are desperate to survive financially at any cost [to the planet]...? Perhaps not - if society becomes more conservative relative to "dirty" energy usage (oil, plastics, etc)...? And beings to enjoy, and appreciate things like working from home, cleaner air, etc... [edit]: I should say that the "boom" may be tiny, if so none of this may matter.
- marcosdumay 7y agoIt could as easily go the other way, and cause a drop on births. Either way it goes, the effect will probably be small and localized (where each place will have things differently). The US baby boom was caused by a coincidence of many important factors (people thinking "today is probably my last free day ever" was a huge one). We have none of them today.
- Izkata 7y ago> (people thinking "today is probably my last free day ever" was a huge one) The US baby boom coincided with when WWII ended, not began or during. Mainly it was families that would've gotten started during the war getting delayed until after.
- pjkundert 7y agoWhat will be the immediate effect of, what, a 90% drop in high-altitude cloud formation by water vapour emitted by jets? The major drop in soot flowing over the north poll? Immediate and shocking drop in average daily temperatures, and dramatic accumulation of snow in the north polar area over this next winter/spring, I predict. And, a stunning repudiation of the models that have basically ignored these 2 major factors.
- jxub 7y agoMind expanding on that a bit? The conclusion seems counterintuitive.
- pjkundert 7y agoRemoving or dramatically reducing the two greatest factors in surface temperature and snow pack accumulation will prove scientifically interesting. It should reinforce or repudiate the assumptions underlying our climate models - which have chosen to basically ignore these 2 factors. I predict, in the next 6-12 months, that statistically significant deviations in predicted vs. actual temperatures and snow accumulation will appear, repudiating this assumption that ignoring these factors was scientifically sound.
- bdamm 7y agoMy personal experience has been that the weather forecasts have been consistently colder/wetter than the actual weather over the last 6 weeks, which has been surprisingly sunny almost every day. (Oregon, USA)
- baron_harkonnen 7y agoIt's amazing how many comments here are as optimistic about climate change as they were about coronavirus in early February. Climate change and the pandemic are very similar processes. The are both extreme events that are easy to predict existentially (yes both will happen) but hard to specify exactly when they will unfold. They are both theoretically preventable, but require initial economic damage very early on to do so. Both cause major systemic economic damage, with long lasting consequences. But pandemic is milder in every imaginable way. Pandemic has more immediate evidence that it is happening, it can be dealt with in a much shorter time span (months rather than years or decades), the total economic damage is far less, and the time to recovery from the pandemic is less (it might take years but climate change will take much longer to adapt to). So in every major way pandemic is a toy exercise for how to handle climate change and we are failing that test spectacularly and still the response to climate changes is largely "don't worry, we'll figure it out, we have time and solutions..." As the economic damage from this starts to really unfold remember that this is the change in our way of life to get 8% So imagine the change in life style and economic damage required to get to 75%, and then keep in mind that that is still preferable to the economic damage we will likely see from a +2 C global warming. I suspect climate change discussions will die down after the pandemic because it's to much to really face the reality of what it will mean. People want to return to normal, spend money and co2 again.
- cmarschner 7y agoMerkel has called for using the changes necessary to get out of this recession to invest in sustainable tech, and has called for targeting CO2 reductions on the aggressive end.
- Qub3d 7y agoToo bad her country as a whole is killing Nuclear power then, given its the best short-term path to cutting CO2. [0]:https://www.dw.com/en/how-far-along-is-germanys-nuclear-phase-out/a-18547065 https://www.dw.com/en/how-far-along-is-germanys-nuclear-phas...
- 7y ago
- foob4r 7y agoThis is unfortunately not permanent. Of course the emissions are down - transportation and industries are shut down. The sad return is when economies grow they pollute more and faster.
- TearsInTheRain 7y agoWe need to break the correlation between gdp and emissions