
CO2 emissions set to fall nearly 8% this year, the largest drop in history - robos
https://twitter.com/IEABirol/status/1255731651956670464
======
baron_harkonnen
It'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.

~~~
twomoretime
>But pandemic is milder in every imaginable way

Ok, sorry, but this is just hysteria. A deadly pandemic is in absolutely no
way milder than climate change.

Climate change will see the occasionally bad storm, gradually more frequent
flooding, and displacement of a minority of the global population from the
coast over a period of >1 century.

People will gradually move inland and rebuild. Economies may shift over time,
power structures wax and wane, etc - the point is it will feel mild because it
will happen on a large timescale.

This is far less deserving of early mitigation strategies than a global
pandemic which is killing potentially millions of people in the span of a few
months. The two levels of danger are simply incomperable.

>Both cause major systemic economic damage, with long lasting consequences.

I hear this perspective a lot, but I think it's flawed fearmongering. The
gradual nature of climate change is such that the "damage" will be
indiscernible from normal turnover maybe increased by a couple percent on
average per year as storms and floodings increase in frequency. If anything,
this could be a perpetual infrastructure stimulus. That's even if it happens
on a short enough scale to matter. The anticipated timeline (and carnage) is
not and cannot be proven and given that we are dealing with geologic
timescales, it will likely be at hundreds of years at an absolute minimum.

~~~
paulintrognon
If it is hysteria, why do you think most world countries signed the Paris
agreement to keep global warming below 2° Celsius?

~~~
twomoretime
The fact that it's a consensus does not mean that it's not hysterical.

How can anyone have faith in these governments/organizations after we just
watched this global failure to deal with covid?

~~~
cmarschner
I think we haven‘t seen global failure, we have seen how different governments
have come up with different solutions to protect their people. It seems that
those with recent experience of handling epidemics (like MERS) have fared much
better than those who haven‘t. This is simply a learning curve effect - if a
pandemic were to happen again in the next 10 years, responses would be much
more swift and also more consistent; it is dependent on the resistence if the
healthcare system - state-run systems have much scarcer resources than other
systems, decentralized systems are more resistant than centralized ones; it
seems dependent on how much policy is influenced by science; populist leaders
seem to fare quite badly; and finally it‘s probably a good thing to have a
female leader on top.

------
adrianN
Neat, 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.

~~~
Joeri
A 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.

~~~
sitkack
That is nuts, that power _should_ be routable to somewhere else on the grid.
Hell even heating a greenhouse.

~~~
makomk
Electricity usage is probably down everywhere, so there's not going to be
anywhere on the grid to send it even if the interconnects are there.

------
revax
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.

~~~
RobinL
...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)

~~~
gedy
...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
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.

~~~
fastball
The earth doesn't care how many people are emitting. It cares about the
absolute emissions.

But obviously the earth is comprised of sovereign states, and in order to
collaborate you often need to convince those sovereign states that treatment
is fair. Given that, if you want to adjust emissions by some divisor, I'd
adjust it by land area. Land area is finite on earth. That means that there is
some value of CO2 output / m^2 that is sustainable for the planet. That number
is consistent. That number applies globally. That number can be a target for
everyone. It also can't be faked – some "unreliable" country can't say "hey,
global body, you think our population is 1B but it's actually 1.2B, so we get
to pollute more". You can't fudge land area like that (there might be some
marginal ability to do so, but obviously it is less feasible than with per
capita numbers). This has the additional benefit of aligning priorities
against worsening conditions in order to incentivize action _now_. Global
warming is causing rising sea levels, which in turn means that countries are
losing land area. That means that every year that global warming worsens, your
quota will actually _decrease_.

Meanwhile, population is _not finite_. If you say to a country as part of an
agreement to "get your CO2 output down to this level _per capita_ ", then it
is a very real possibility that this country's population grows to an extent
where that number you used last year is no longer small enough to stave off
serious global warming. And that is the purpose of all this, no?

Obviously carrots and sticks will be necessary for any agreement to be
effective (until it gets really bad), but either way I think _emissions /unit
land area_ as the line in the sand makes more sense than _emissions /per
capita_.

An even better metric would probably be "emissions/unit arable farmland", as
it gives weight to both land area and population, but obviously that is much
more difficult to establish / less likely to stay static.

~~~
pasabagi
This sounds very strange to me. Countries like Japan and Holland would be
shafted, while countries like Russia could literally burn car tires all day. I
think because of the vast differences in population density, quite a few
countries would probably have to go to zero emissions, while others would have
absolutely no reasonable limit. Australia, for instance, would probably have
no limits under such a scheme.

~~~
fastball
High population density for an entire country is arguably antithetical to the
goals of reducing global warming. We want low population density, not high. So
seems like this encourages exactly the right behavior.

~~~
dtwest
But if you asked those people to spread out, wouldn't they use more resources?
Longer distances to transport goods, more land to live on, less opportunities
to walk or use mass transit, etc.

~~~
fastball
What I mean is that more people == bad. The single easiest way to eliminate
global warming to have fewer people in general. Looking at per capita stats
does the opposite – encourages more people so that even if it increases your
absolute emissions, your per capita ones go down. This is not what you want.

Yes, there are obviously efficiency gains from cities. The whole problem is
that those gains are not worth a densely packed cities capacity to just have
_more people_ , because the earth / global warming doesn't care about your
efficiency, it cares about absolute numbers.

------
lucb1e
_Only_ 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
And this is assuming we don't emit extra to make up for it whenever the
economy ramps back up...

~~~
saiya-jin
I 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

------
ForHackernews
I 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.

~~~
coffeefirst
Also 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.

~~~
cmendel
Truly? 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.

~~~
coffeefirst
Exactly. We don’t have a choice. And as powerful as that toolkit is, nothing
is infinite.

------
seanwilson
What would it take to drop it by say 50%? How is the drop not higher?

~~~
kabanossen
[https://grist.org/climate/the-world-is-on-lockdown-so-
where-...](https://grist.org/climate/the-world-is-on-lockdown-so-where-are-
all-the-carbon-emissions-coming-from/)

------
pjkundert
What 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.

~~~
bdamm
My 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)

~~~
pjkundert
Many environmental changes produce almost imperceptible results.

Removal of high level cloud formation isn’t going to be one of them, I
predict!

But, I could be wrong. We’ll know with statistical certainty almost
immediately (months).

~~~
bdamm
Thanks to 9/11 it's already been studied, and surely this pandemic will add to
that body:

[https://news.psu.edu/story/361041/2015/06/18/research/jet-
co...](https://news.psu.edu/story/361041/2015/06/18/research/jet-contrails-
affect-surface-temperatures)

------
RunawayGalaxy
Is coronavirus the Earth's antibodies?

~~~
rimliu
Can 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
Well 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.

------
jakeogh
One year of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide:
[https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011700/a011719/11719-...](https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011700/a011719/11719-1920-MASTER.mp4)

------
foob4r
This 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
We need to break the correlation between gdp and emissions

------
robos
Source: [https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-
review-2020](https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2020)

------
Aunche
The 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
Please 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
It 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
> (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.

------
yread
Here 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
That 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..)

~~~
VBprogrammer
It's probably a fatalist way of looking at things but if the lockdown, with
it's massive changes to our normal lifestyles, isn't doing enough then is it
even realistically possible for us to change?

~~~
adrianN
The lockdown is not an appropriate means of stopping climate change. People
still need to eat and to heat their homes. We need to switch to sustainable
means of providing for these (and other) necessities. We don't need to stop
our economy to stop producing CO2. We need to stop burning fossil fuels.

~~~
VBprogrammer
Sure, the intention of the lock down is not to prevent climate change.
However, the knock on effects are clearly beneficial; a complete halting of
nonessential travel, anyone who can work from home working from home, a lot of
business and industry shut down. In effect it is at or beyond the upper bound
on what personal choice could achieve.

All of that and it basically sets the rate of increase back a decade or so.

To stop burning fossil fuels requires huge advances in energy storage (grid
scale batteries, hydrogen / ammonia, thermal storage), energy production
(breakthrough in nuclear fusion, more efficient solar) or massive political
changes (conventional nuclear, carbon taxes). Probably a combination of all 3.

------
H8crilA
Energy usage is a leading indicator of GDP. That chart makes me super uneasy.

~~~
buzzkillington
You should read about the famine projections:
[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-
people...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-
people/hunger-makes-us-forget-disease-famines-threaten-greater-devastation/)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
"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
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.

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

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

------
billars
thank you coronavirus.. I guess?

------
paulcole
This 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.

