7 ms·

Accord 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%

by revax 6y ago

Accord 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 6y 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 6y ago
  Even 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 6y ago
    Dunno, 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 6y ago
      Yes - 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 6y ago
      An 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.
      - m12k 6y ago
        Fewer airlines means lower supply, making air travel more expensive, which will make fewer people choose to buy it.
        derg 6y ago
        Which hopefully would be paired with more inter-urban high-speed rail regionally* where it would make sense in terms of mirroring or even beating your standard drive/flight time. Hell, even if a more widespread high-speed rail system were still slower than air travel I would still take it because air travel is absolutely miserable and I detest it with every fiber of my being. *I specify regionally because I know someone is going to "WELL AKSHUALLY " me on the fact that the US is a large spread out country and intercontinental high speed rail wouldn't work (though I would love to take a train from NYC to LA because why not?).
  - sitkack 6y ago
    What folks should have said is, "we need the comparable pandemics to double every 2 years". Some industries need to turn off. We are doing too much across the board.
    - derg 6y ago
      >Some industries need to turn off. We are doing too much across the board I've been thinking about this for a while, and with the pandemic, it's been on my mind regularly. We really need to re-think, well, almost every aspect of how we live and consume. Far less car use, more sustainable living, including increasing densities, which does not mean everyone needs to live in Manhattan or Tokyo level densities, just better land use and more pedestrian/bike-friendly infrastructure. Make it easier to get fresh food locally. More green space. One of the biggest changes in my life was moving to a city where I can walk anywhere and everywhere (most things are within a mile or two). It may take a little longer (and mass transit is there to pick up the slack) but the impact of regular, constant exercise cannnot be overstated by this kind of lifestyle change (and something most Americans desperately need, honestly. We are incredibly unhealthy, I was one of them).
- randallsquared 6y ago
  I thought immunity was "lost" because the common cold mutates so quickly, and the immune system response is too specific?
  - m12k 6y ago
    My impression was that unlike influenza, the common cold actually mutates very little, but that the immunity loss comes from the body 'forgetting' the antibodies for it after a while - I'm no doctor though.
  - scotty79 6y ago
    Flu has specific mechanisms that allow for very fast mutation and that's why it's coming back. Coronaviruses don't have those mechanisms. What's more they have some mechanisms that prevent mutations. And yet they come back as well. It's probably because immunity to them don't last long. Here's cool explanation of how flu mutates and how it compares with coronaviruses: https://www.city-journal.org/coronavirus-vaccine https://www.city-journal.org/coronavirus-vaccine
    - rimliu 6y ago
      Colds are caused by coronaviruses and rhinoviruses, and there is a bunch of them. So the reason you get them often is not the lack of immunity, but because you can get infected but yet another virus you have no immunity for.
      - scotty79 6y ago
        I'm talking specifically about colds caused by coronaviruses. They tend to peak about every two years and there are only few strains of them. Even if each peak is always caused by different strain we can pretty much rule out lifetime immunity. BTW, here's a cool movie that sums up what we know so far about possibility of developing long term immunity to the sars-cov-2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KBLtUBr1Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KBLtUBr1Os
mehrdadn 6y ago
> Its about a 4% drop each year for 30 years. Or a Coronavirus every 2 years. This is an incredibly misleading way to put it... there's no compounding effect to be had here. If a coronavirus drops by 4% from pre-coronavirus times the first year, it's still going to be only 4% lower than pre-coronavirus times after 30 years.
- mysterydip 6y ago
  So if everyone staying home and only driving when necessary* only reduces emissions a fraction of what's necessary, is it even possible? *I know not everyone is staying home
  - pteraspidomorph 6y ago
    There are a lot of major emissions sources not very affected (or even negatively affected) by people staying home, such as fossil fuel power plants, cargo ships and trucks, cattle farming, certain industries, etc.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - CalRobert 6y ago
    Move somehere you can ride a bike, walk, or take electrified transport, heat and cool your extremely efficient NZEB timber-frame home with a solar or wind-fuelled heat pump, eat little meat (restore the grazing land to peatland, forest, etc. too), have 2 or fewer children, and take holidays via rail instead of plane, and you're mostly there.
    - pharke 6y ago
      That's both sad and funny that you think all of those things are possible in the same location in the US. I count 4 major infrastructure projects and 3 massive tax incentives that would need to be implemented in order to convince most people to do all of that. Not possible nation wide within a time frame of less than 30 years. Suggesting the majority of a large country's population move to regions where this is possible is also a non-starter without huge economic incentives and would have many unintended side effects due to depopulation of some areas and massive immigration to other areas. The only approach I see working in the US is a decentralized one that takes into account the unique geography and population distribution. Move the efficiencies out to the edges, electric vehicles, rooftop solar, small scale nuclear, more fibre rollout for remote working, incentives for local farms and land management. Work with the existing infrastructure and culture rather than against it and you'll get a lot further. As far as less cattle and more forest/peat, the US actually had a trend of decreasing agricultural usage and increase in forest cover for most of the last century. Forest cover began to diminish again with increased urbanization and timber cutting so encouraging migration to the regions with the highest population density, the coasts, would further increase deforestation since that's also where the majority of forests are. If you look at maps showing rangeland vs forest and peatland there isn't much overlap in the US, it turns out the best cattle producing areas in the US are those that were already grassland to begin with, go figure.
RobinL 6y ago
...which sounds totally unrealistic until you compare US energy usage to other countries: http://robinlinacre.com/country_energy_usage http://robinlinacre.com/country_energy_usage (Note: the above does not include the amount of energy embodied in imported goods, so if anything the energy of rich countries is even higher)
- oblio 6y ago
  > RuntimeError: pepc_def could not be resolved > Select metric to plot > RuntimeError: table_data_to_plot could not be resolved > RuntimeError: table_data_to_plot could not be resolved :-(
  - RobinL 6y ago
    looks like CORS anywhere doesn't like so much traffic: 'cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/http://api.worldbank.org/countries/all/indicators/TX.VAL.MRCH.CD.WT?date=2014%3A2014&format=json&per_page=1000:1 http://api.worldbank.org/countries/all/indicators/TX.VAL.MRC... Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 429 (Too Many Requests)' :-( the observablehq version is still working though: https://observablehq.com/@robinl/energy-usage-and-goods-imports-and-exports https://observablehq.com/@robinl/energy-usage-and-goods-impo...
- gedy 6y ago
  ...which is also misleading because comparison is "per capita" which means very little to actual climate change, only absolute numbers (like China's) matter.
  - enitihas 6y ago
    Per capita is what matters, absolute numbers don't make any sense. People consume resources per capita. Saying that if China was 10 different countries those countries would have 10x lower emission targets doesn't make sense. The per capita carbon emission of a US or another developed country citizen is much higher than that of developing countries like India. Staying in a smaller country by population shouldn't be a blanket license to emit more carbon per capita.
perfunctory 6y ago
Or, according to UN gap report [0], the globe needs to cut emissions by 7.6% per year to stay below +1.5C. So, it's a Coronavirus every 1 year. [0] https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/press-release/cut-global-emissions-76-percent-every-year-next-decade-meet-15degc https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/press-release...
cafebabbe 6y ago
Yep, CO2 or GDP, pick one. Gives you a sense of the size of the problem.
- EarthMephit 6y ago
  I don't understand - Why the choice? Solar + battery backup is currently cheaper than coal, and seems to be continuing its pattern of halving in price around every seven to ten years It doesn't make economic sense to build coal power plants for most of the world It takes on average six years to build a coal or gas power plant. During that six years, the price of solar will have almost halved again
  - cafebabbe 6y ago
    Well how do you mine lithium? What's the carbon footprint of recycling batteries ? (Do we even recycle them, or just make virtuous promises?) We are nowhere close to reducing the consumption of fossil fuels. Green energy is just a sexy proxy.

by revax 6y ago

scotty79 6y 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 6y ago
Even 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 6y ago
  Dunno, 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 6y ago
    Yes - 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 6y ago
    An 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.
    - m12k 6y ago
      Fewer airlines means lower supply, making air travel more expensive, which will make fewer people choose to buy it.
      - derg 6y ago
        Which hopefully would be paired with more inter-urban high-speed rail regionally* where it would make sense in terms of mirroring or even beating your standard drive/flight time. Hell, even if a more widespread high-speed rail system were still slower than air travel I would still take it because air travel is absolutely miserable and I detest it with every fiber of my being. *I specify regionally because I know someone is going to "WELL AKSHUALLY " me on the fact that the US is a large spread out country and intercontinental high speed rail wouldn't work (though I would love to take a train from NYC to LA because why not?).
- sitkack 6y ago
  What folks should have said is, "we need the comparable pandemics to double every 2 years". Some industries need to turn off. We are doing too much across the board.
  - derg 6y ago
    >Some industries need to turn off. We are doing too much across the board I've been thinking about this for a while, and with the pandemic, it's been on my mind regularly. We really need to re-think, well, almost every aspect of how we live and consume. Far less car use, more sustainable living, including increasing densities, which does not mean everyone needs to live in Manhattan or Tokyo level densities, just better land use and more pedestrian/bike-friendly infrastructure. Make it easier to get fresh food locally. More green space. One of the biggest changes in my life was moving to a city where I can walk anywhere and everywhere (most things are within a mile or two). It may take a little longer (and mass transit is there to pick up the slack) but the impact of regular, constant exercise cannnot be overstated by this kind of lifestyle change (and something most Americans desperately need, honestly. We are incredibly unhealthy, I was one of them).
randallsquared 6y ago
I thought immunity was "lost" because the common cold mutates so quickly, and the immune system response is too specific?
- m12k 6y ago
  My impression was that unlike influenza, the common cold actually mutates very little, but that the immunity loss comes from the body 'forgetting' the antibodies for it after a while - I'm no doctor though.
- scotty79 6y ago
  Flu has specific mechanisms that allow for very fast mutation and that's why it's coming back. Coronaviruses don't have those mechanisms. What's more they have some mechanisms that prevent mutations. And yet they come back as well. It's probably because immunity to them don't last long. Here's cool explanation of how flu mutates and how it compares with coronaviruses: https://www.city-journal.org/coronavirus-vaccine https://www.city-journal.org/coronavirus-vaccine
  - rimliu 6y ago
    Colds are caused by coronaviruses and rhinoviruses, and there is a bunch of them. So the reason you get them often is not the lack of immunity, but because you can get infected but yet another virus you have no immunity for.
    - scotty79 6y ago
      I'm talking specifically about colds caused by coronaviruses. They tend to peak about every two years and there are only few strains of them. Even if each peak is always caused by different strain we can pretty much rule out lifetime immunity. BTW, here's a cool movie that sums up what we know so far about possibility of developing long term immunity to the sars-cov-2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KBLtUBr1Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KBLtUBr1Os

mehrdadn 6y ago

> Its about a 4% drop each year for 30 years. Or a Coronavirus every 2 years. This is an incredibly misleading way to put it... there's no compounding effect to be had here. If a coronavirus drops by 4% from pre-coronavirus times the first year, it's still going to be only 4% lower than pre-coronavirus times after 30 years.

mysterydip 6y ago
So if everyone staying home and only driving when necessary* only reduces emissions a fraction of what's necessary, is it even possible? *I know not everyone is staying home
- pteraspidomorph 6y ago
  There are a lot of major emissions sources not very affected (or even negatively affected) by people staying home, such as fossil fuel power plants, cargo ships and trucks, cattle farming, certain industries, etc.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- CalRobert 6y ago
  Move somehere you can ride a bike, walk, or take electrified transport, heat and cool your extremely efficient NZEB timber-frame home with a solar or wind-fuelled heat pump, eat little meat (restore the grazing land to peatland, forest, etc. too), have 2 or fewer children, and take holidays via rail instead of plane, and you're mostly there.
  - pharke 6y ago
    That's both sad and funny that you think all of those things are possible in the same location in the US. I count 4 major infrastructure projects and 3 massive tax incentives that would need to be implemented in order to convince most people to do all of that. Not possible nation wide within a time frame of less than 30 years. Suggesting the majority of a large country's population move to regions where this is possible is also a non-starter without huge economic incentives and would have many unintended side effects due to depopulation of some areas and massive immigration to other areas. The only approach I see working in the US is a decentralized one that takes into account the unique geography and population distribution. Move the efficiencies out to the edges, electric vehicles, rooftop solar, small scale nuclear, more fibre rollout for remote working, incentives for local farms and land management. Work with the existing infrastructure and culture rather than against it and you'll get a lot further. As far as less cattle and more forest/peat, the US actually had a trend of decreasing agricultural usage and increase in forest cover for most of the last century. Forest cover began to diminish again with increased urbanization and timber cutting so encouraging migration to the regions with the highest population density, the coasts, would further increase deforestation since that's also where the majority of forests are. If you look at maps showing rangeland vs forest and peatland there isn't much overlap in the US, it turns out the best cattle producing areas in the US are those that were already grassland to begin with, go figure.

RobinL 6y ago

...which sounds totally unrealistic until you compare US energy usage to other countries: http://robinlinacre.com/country_energy_usage http://robinlinacre.com/country_energy_usage (Note: the above does not include the amount of energy embodied in imported goods, so if anything the energy of rich countries is even higher)

oblio 6y ago
> RuntimeError: pepc_def could not be resolved > Select metric to plot > RuntimeError: table_data_to_plot could not be resolved > RuntimeError: table_data_to_plot could not be resolved :-(
- RobinL 6y ago
  looks like CORS anywhere doesn't like so much traffic: 'cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/http://api.worldbank.org/countries/all/indicators/TX.VAL.MRCH.CD.WT?date=2014%3A2014&format=json&per_page=1000:1 http://api.worldbank.org/countries/all/indicators/TX.VAL.MRC... Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 429 (Too Many Requests)' :-( the observablehq version is still working though: https://observablehq.com/@robinl/energy-usage-and-goods-imports-and-exports https://observablehq.com/@robinl/energy-usage-and-goods-impo...
gedy 6y ago
...which is also misleading because comparison is "per capita" which means very little to actual climate change, only absolute numbers (like China's) matter.
- enitihas 6y ago
  Per capita is what matters, absolute numbers don't make any sense. People consume resources per capita. Saying that if China was 10 different countries those countries would have 10x lower emission targets doesn't make sense. The per capita carbon emission of a US or another developed country citizen is much higher than that of developing countries like India. Staying in a smaller country by population shouldn't be a blanket license to emit more carbon per capita.

perfunctory 6y ago

Or, according to UN gap report [0], the globe needs to cut emissions by 7.6% per year to stay below +1.5C. So, it's a Coronavirus every 1 year. [0] https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/press-release/cut-global-emissions-76-percent-every-year-next-decade-meet-15degc https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/press-release...

cafebabbe 6y ago

Yep, CO2 or GDP, pick one. Gives you a sense of the size of the problem.

EarthMephit 6y ago
I don't understand - Why the choice? Solar + battery backup is currently cheaper than coal, and seems to be continuing its pattern of halving in price around every seven to ten years It doesn't make economic sense to build coal power plants for most of the world It takes on average six years to build a coal or gas power plant. During that six years, the price of solar will have almost halved again
- cafebabbe 6y ago
  Well how do you mine lithium? What's the carbon footprint of recycling batteries ? (Do we even recycle them, or just make virtuous promises?) We are nowhere close to reducing the consumption of fossil fuels. Green energy is just a sexy proxy.