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Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII
- jedberg 6y agoAnd personal savings are way up. But it's unlikely either of these trends will hold after 2021.
- badRNG 6y agoSource? Anecdotally most folks I know have had to burn through their savings after living off of unemployment or going through underemployment this past year.
- flatline 6y agohttps://www.statista.com/statistics/246268/personal-savings-rate-in-the-united-states-by-month/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/246268/personal-savings-...
- airza 6y agowhen your disposable income is zero, doesn't that drive the statistics way out of wack?
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoThe poorest X% not showing up in any statistics used for policy making is probably a longstanding problem... and it's probably hard to estimate by how much X has changed over the past year.
- flatline 6y agoI do not know whether it accounts for a negative savings rate, but the graph does show that people with disposable income were saving more this past year during the pandemic, which means they were spending less on consumer goods. There were probably two driving factors behind this: fear of economic instability due to the pandemic, and a lack of availability of paid activities due to the same. Presumably, consumer spending will rise again, as will travel and hence fossil fuel consumption per the original post.
- polka_haunts_us 6y agoAnecdotally as someone in a family all of whom are thriving financially during the pandemic, here are possible reasons it could be true. * My student loan payments are frozen, I believe the total balance of student loans that are frozen is something like 85% country wide. * People working remotely = low transit expenses. * No live events = low entertainment expenses. * Raging pandemic = low travel expenses. * Investment = stock market has been very profitable since march. I made 100% last year just on random long term investment. Basically, if you have a job that was exceeding the minimum threshold of living expenses, any of the extraneous things you were spending money on, other than eating out maybe, have evaporated. Obviously there is a notable segment of the population that is not doing well, can barely if at all cover day to day expenses, and unemployment has gone up, but that segment isn't necessarily a majority. That's all just speculation though, I'm not claiming parent is correct.
- ssully 6y agoYou most likely nail it. The flip side obviously is people who don't have remote jobs. More anecdote, but this has been really hard on family members who have service industry jobs, and while they haven't told me to directly, I assume their savings isn't doing great based on a number of different factors.
- minkeymaniac 6y agoAnd don't forget clothing... no need to get new outfits if you are home... no dry cleaning if you wore suits ...
- ogre_codes 6y ago> stock market has been very profitable since march. I made 100% last year just on random long term investment. Hmm. All this makes me wonder if the country opening back up is going to cause the market to flatten out for a bit as people have less money and incentive to invest. Food for thought.
- jedimastert 6y agoIntuition says that people who have to choose between investing and other things aren't the maority of investors. I'm think the economy will liven up a fair bit once people are out and about spending again, possibly even over-correcting.
- anewaccount2021 6y ago"Source" is no poor people use HN. Edit: this was not meant to disparage the poor. Quite the opposite. HN tends to have a blinkered worldview and part of that results from the filtered audience. Sorry, we just don't have people showing up here who got laid from serving bar, or single mothers with four kids, etc. Poor single mothers don't save money by skipping trips to Greece or not going out for Wagyu A5 twice a month...
- francisofascii 6y agoA recent episode of NPR: The Indicator covered this. "real disposable income per capita in the U.S. has gone up by about 6 percent year-to-date from last year. Right now, it's on track to reach the fastest rate of growth since 1984." Basically the super high savings rates by people who stayed employed and didn't vacation, go to restaurants, drive, etc. outweigh those getting hammered by unemployment. Also the stimulus checks were given to everyone. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510325/the-indicator-from-planet-money https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510325/the-indicator-from-plane...
- TheCoelacanth 6y agoThis is the problem with averages. For a majority of people, it is up. For a large minority, it is down catastrophically. That averages out to slightly up.
- jkinudsjknds 6y agoI'd wonder how evictions have affected this. What's your disposable income if your rent is $1,000 per month but you just don't pay it?
- mrfredward 6y agoSt Louis Federal Reserve: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT Keep in mind this is savings economy wide divided by personal income economy wide, so people with big numbers (high earners) disproportionately affect it.
- whimsicalism 6y agoThis has to do with the stimulus checks.
- snoshy 6y agoBut also because households have lower expenses due to not being able to engage with the service industry, travel, shopping, and leisure expenditures. People are simply spending less because they're stuck at home.
- chrisseaton 6y agoIf you haven't lost your job then your savings are both up (markets) and not being spent (as there's nothing to spend them on.)
- kube-system 6y agoFor every 3 people that lost their jobs in the peak of unemployment there's 17 people who still had their jobs and most of them got a couple of stimulus checks. The pandemic has increased inequality.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ThomPete 6y agoThat started before covid.
- nostromo 6y agoNot true... US carbon emissions have been going down for over a decade, even as population increases. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carbon-co2-emissions https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...
- jedberg 6y agoOf course, by not by the amounts we saw in 2020. I suspect we'll move back to the previous trend line by 2022.
- andromeduck 6y agoMostly due to displaced manufacturing though no?
- youeseh 6y agoSounds like de-centralized power generation, maximizing remote work, and delivery vehicles powered by electricity and hydrogen is the way forward.
- r00fus 6y agoYeah, everything except the hydrogen part sounds like a good move.
- gecko 6y agoHydrogen as part is totally reasonable. It gives us hydrocarbon density without us needing to add to the CO2 in the atmosphere. The important thing to remember when discussing it is that it's an energy storage medium, not an energy generation medium. Most of the time I get irritated is when people treat hydrogen as the latter. But if our culture is just too damn wedded to cars for now, and battery tech just isn't there yet, then using hydrogen as a stopgap--provided the hydrogen is made from renewable energy--seems fine to me.
- ozborn 6y agoThe problem is that hydrogen is more likely to be made with steam-methane reforming, not electrolysis using clean energy sources. It is also difficult to store, so I suspect the hydrogen ship has sailed.
- gecko 6y agoYep, and that's a very legitimate concern and why I'm certainly not bullish about hydrogen. I just don't want to reflexively throw it out; sufficient energy production from clean sources would make electrolysis quite reasonable, even if it's not ideal, and there are approaches to handling the storage, too, if that ends up being the last bit. I suspect, based on current trends and sciences, that we'll see better batteries instead, but I don't see harm in continuing to look at hydrogen for now.
- DennisP 6y ago
- cblconfederate 6y agoYeah but people already miss being stuck in traffic and their daily commute so it's not going to last
- kristopolous 6y agoI've heard people actually say this. The horror, the horror.
- renewiltord 6y agoIt's the "I like 4 seasons" of commuting.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoFor a lot of people it was their only alone time.
- alexfromapex 6y agoDon't forget about the cows eating seaweed development, that will be huge for the climate too
- hntrader 6y agoTo what extent has this been rolled out already?
- snakeboy 6y agoFrom what I remember from previous discussions, 1. It's more expensive than standard cattle feed so it would need a subsidy to incentivize its use (probably a worthwhile investment for the Biden administration if they're serious about climate policy) and 2. there are some hurdles to massively scaling up the growth of the algae to supply the massive US cattle population.
- hntrader 6y ago(1) is interesting. I'm a big fan of a carbon tax over subsidies and direct govt intervention but this seems like an example of something that a tax would have a hard time incenting. I wonder if there are other examples like that. Maybe a tax on cows but a rebate if they use this technology. But that seems like an easy system to game so maybe the direct subsidy is superior in this case.
- fred_is_fred 6y agoI wonder if this or fake/lab meat will have a larger impact in 10 years.
- epistasis 6y agoBeef is only 3% of US emissions, meat has very little to do with the US's climate woes. The big problem is transportation. Ideally we'd have lots more muxed-use walkable neighborhoods than we have. Roughly 50% of people want to live in walkable neighborhoods, but centralized planning has virtually banned this type of low-carbon living over the past 75 years.
- savanaly 6y agoIs it possible that Sars-cov-2 epidemic will eventually save more lives than it cost, through the long term and short term effects of decreased pollution and climate change? If that's true, we have to entertain the theory that the virus was purposefully initiated by a time-traveler charged with averting climate catastrophe through the only means possible.
- StreamBright 6y agoNot really, there are very few climate related deaths. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-natural-disasters?time=earliest..2018 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-nat... I think more people die from diabetes and covid than climate.
- JimiofEden 6y agoThere are CURRENTLY very few climate related deaths. The person you're responding to is wondering if more lives would be saved in the long run, maybe the next 1000 years.
- renewiltord 6y agoThe relative value of future deaths is interesting, right? To be honest you have to discount them a little because if you kill a guy today before he has kids, you've killed his kids too.
- corty 6y agoIf I refuse to mate with someone, I also killed a few thousand people over the next millenium. That doesn't mean I will loose any sleep over saying no to his proposition.
- savanaly 6y agoWhen it comes to short term deaths (like could be measured right now or in the coming years) I think the bigger mechanism would be pollution which causes deaths from people with respiratory illnesses and such in major cities. Not so much in the US (although LA is a problem I think?) but definitely in China and India.
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoRecessions/Depressions have really been the only significant reduction in GHG emissions in recent history, the paper treaties have been pretty insignificant. I won't say that the massive progress in alternative energy infrastructure buildout isn't blunting it as well, and the promise of EVs for alleviating transportation emissions, but the Mortgage Recession and the COVID recession have been the historically largest reductions emissions in recent history. I have good faith that alt energy + EV will result in a massive improvement, but I wonder if it will be enough. I guess what I'm saying is ... financial deck chair rearrangers, let's cook us up a steady diet of structural financial malfeasance.
- mrtweetyhack 6y agoall thanks to Covid-19. Do your thang Covid-2021
- marstall 6y agowould this be expected to have a (temporary) detectable impact on atmospheric carbon concentration (ie ppm)?
- FooHentai 6y agoYes, in a slight slowing of the rate at which it is increasing. Hard to attribute with confidence since it's a global figure based on pooled local measurements, but so long as you agree that human-caused release of co2 contributes to increasing atmospheric co2 levels, the reduction is a safe assumption. The depressing part is the reduction needs to be 10x greater, and permanent, and global, for atmospheric co2 to halt it's increase and start dropping.
- exporectomy 6y agoCertainly not an obvious impact, at least not yet, according to this graph: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
- just_steve_h 6y agoThe biggest takeaway here for me is that we collectively achieved something previously considered impossible: by making different behavioral choices, as a species, we achieved the largest cut in CO2 emissions in 75 years. It's tragic that only the threat of a deadly disease could compel such a change, but perhaps we may find other levers to help us achieve such widespread beneficial changes in the future?
- breakfastduck 6y agoAll it does it prove how fruitless the prevention of climate change is. A total shutdown of the entire world economy on an unprecedented scale still doesn't track enough to prevent climate change. If that isn't a clear indicator of how severe the situation is then I don't know what else is.
- anigbrowl 6y agoWhen you're driving, there are two kinds of accidents; the ones that happen suddenly with no warning, and the ones where you realize things are going wrong but you still have some control over your vehicle. In the latter case, going off the road or being involved in a collision is still very unpleasant, but you can mitigate a lot of the damage as long as you don't panic. In many cases you can even get back on the road and resume your journey safely.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nostrademons 6y agoUnpopular prediction: we're going to solve global warming by the 22nd century, but we're going to "solve" it with nuclear winter and the destruction of 80-90% of humanity. Once we're down to a billion people or so and most of what passes for advanced civilization has been destroyed, carbon emissions and warming won't be a problem.
- hammock 6y agoBill Gates wants to test an artificial nuclear winter... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7350713/Bill-Gates-wants-spray-millions-tonnes-dust-stratosphere-stop-global-warming.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7350713/Bill...
- justinzollars 6y agoI wonder if the California wildfires were factored into this? The state was on fire for 3 months.
- supernova87a 6y agoBut this is like taking off your boots and congratulating yourself for losing 5 pounds.
- smileysteve 6y agoThe more apt analogy would be it's like catching a cold and losing 5lbs on a soup only diet. You actually lost weight, but not in a healthy way, and as soon as you feel better you're going to gain it, plus some.
- frongpik 6y agoWell, I'd welcome the idea of once a year total shutdown for a couple weeks: no cars, no economic activity, except maybe hospitals and other infra. That would be a sort of worldwide retreat. I still remember how clean the air felt the first time the us did a hard shutdown (empty roads, people were scared). I'm sure the capitalists will hate the idea to halt the factory for 2 out of 52 weeks.
- asiando 6y agoNobody would like to be locked at home. No restaurants and no travel… for what? 2 weeks aren't enough to slow down the warming.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- coding123 6y agoThe pandemic reminded me of my childhood days when not everything is so damn crowded all the time. My personal wish is for travel to keep staying low, but I don't think it's going to stay low forever.
- olivermarks 6y agoThe headline is annoying to me, I feel it should read '2020 emissions in biggest fall since WWII due to pandemic'. The prefix 'climate change' is redundant, I wish the BBC could get back to being more objective.
- fred_is_fred 6y agoYou find the prefix "Climate Change:" not objective? It is setting the context for the article. Like "COVID-19: Scientists work on a vaccine".
- olivermarks 6y agoThe context is the global pandemic greatly reducing travel, manufacturing and therefore emissions. Concepts around 'Climate Change' are very much secondary to that IMO, not the lead
- lcamach84 6y agoThis proves that we need a system change. Covid made that, we change from a system with the objective of producing stuff to a system with the goal of saving lives. People of HN should take a look of the clube of rome book "limits of growth". GND will not save us beacause it will demand energy and resources to swap all the infraestructure. At most developed countries will shift their enviromental cost to the poor ones
- florimondmanca 6y agoThis. Thank you for bringing this up. My take: Thermo-industrial consumer societies don’t need to change. Rather, as you said, we need a system change. We need to swap our current model for something else. The outcome should (and will) be different from a thermo-industrial society — it will be another society altogether. What sort exactly I don’t know yet. But « a systemic problem can only be approached by systemic solutions » seems like a reasonable assumption to make. :) If we don’t do it ourselves, then the currently overstretched Earth system will just regulate itself, causing pain and suffering. COVID might just be an appetizer of what lies ahead if we don’t realize old ways (more technology, keep the economy growing at all costs, etc, ie things that demand more or too energy or impede resiliency) are very likely to fail the test. I like how you mentioned the Club of Rome’s report because it was an early work that goes beyond the scope of IPCC (whose role is limited to climate change, which to be clear has a ton of merits in its own right) and presents the problem for what it is: a systemic problem that is riddled with feedback loops and that has deep ties with the roots of our society model as it developed over the 20th century. I don’t like the idea of a systemic change. It’s uncomfortable, and at first it sounds ludicrous. But if we’re serious and dig into the topic with a critical eye towards our own mental models, that’s a conclusion we reach very soon.
- florimondmanca 6y agoI see this answer is being downvoted; I’d be happy to discuss points of discord. I was definitely being radical on purpose — perhaps to highlight what seems to me as a blatant reality that our can’t go on forever (and that we can work towards remodeling so it doesn’t happen that way). Instead, I see downvotes and the parent comment received a straw man argument. I wouldn’t be surprised if I was being seen as an « integrist », except trust me — I’m not. Please, let’s discuss and not fight against one another. I know HN is much better suited to that than some other platforms. :)
- brandelune 6y agoInteresting to see that even a world war would not be enough to drop C02 emissions to a safe level...
- somerandomboi 6y agoI hope humanity is able to maintain these responsible habits to reverse the course of such potential consequences on future generations.
- ggm 6y agoA significant number of respondents read like members of a hedonist death cult. If you really believe it's hopeless, please do not roadblock people aiming to achieve a better outcome.
- Andys 6y agoInteresting that we had a warmest year on record simultaneously.
- mschuetz 6y agoUnsurprisingly. There is still more CO2 being emitted than removed.
- k__ 6y agoSo maybe the pandemic was an Extinction Rebellion coup?
- MrPatan 6y agoThis is clearly Trump's fault for not signing the Paris climate accord.