And not just that. They're going to be tracking all these kids who are going to miss months of school as a big "natural experiment". Who knows how many other things they'll be able to get data on... Very sad times, but hopefully people can learn a few things while we're at it.
I was just thinking that this pandemic is freaking me out more then 9/11. I lived in California during 9/11, and while the event was certainly jarring, it didn't change my day to day behavior. At the moment I'm in Spain under quarantine, and it's not clear to me what will happen in a week or a month.
For me the most disruptive moment of my life was the 2008 financial crisis. I ended up homeless for a bit, and I was not prepared for that.
The Vietnam War lasted for almost 20 years, killed over a million people, wounded millions more, and involved 7+ countries.
The Cold War lasted 40 years, almost resulted in world-wide nuclear war on multiple occasions, and dictates the US's extremely consequential foreign policy decisions (and the bedrock of US culture) even to this day. It is hard to overstate how influential the Cold War was and is to the US, Russia, China, and many Latin American countries.
HIV killed millions of people per year as recently as 2005, and it started out as a completely unknown infection with no known transmission mechanism that primarily attacked communities at extremely high social risk.
This pandemic will be an economic catastrophe for years that we'll feel a decade from now and it will kill many people until a vaccine is in widespread use, but it sure as hell is not "more stressful" than those events combined.
>They're going to be tracking all these kids who are going to miss months of school as a big "natural experiment".
Honestly I don't know why that would be an issue. Say you go to school for 12 years and you miss 3 months because of this. That's 2% of the total time of going to school. I doubt you will have a measurable impact in performance later in life.
Hell, I slept through most of grades 7-9. I was a teenager, always sleepy and unmotivated. Then I started catching up in grade 10 and graduated at least in the top 5% of my class.
Also you can learn so much outside school, it might even be beneficial to have your parents at home, like it used to be pre-industrialization.
Most schools will offer online courses, and that is an experiment itself.. of course many students will suffer because they don't have access to computer/internet/food/working environment at home.
Absolutely. My mom is a teacher for virtual Virginia full time and it took her at least a couple years to get in the swing of things after 25 in the classroom.
Yup - in Israel they explicitly made exceptions to school closures for children grades 3 and under of essential personnel. (i.e. let's make sure the doctors can be at work and not staying home with their 10-year-olds)
They did that in the Netherlands as well but for all lower schooling, up to about 12years of age, for everyone in 'essential jobs' meaning from healthcare to food distribution center employees to garbage collectors. They closed the schools not for any medical reason (they even said it in the official press conference) but for avoiding mass hysteria, as there was (and still is) no evidence it is required.
I have already begun taking daily sky photos. The week after 911 was exceptionally clear in the Detroit area. This time I'll have my own documentation.
Sure is a hell of an experiment. Can't help seeing the irony of the situation though, 2 months ago it was all climate, "The Green New Deal" and flight shaming. Well, enjoy.
I'll be amazed if things are permitted to return to normal afterwards. Environmentalists will scream the place down to make our vastly diminished lifestyles a permanent fixture.
The general Western game plan right now seems to be: (1) shut down the whole nonessential part of the economy, (2) buy time to not overwhelm medical systems, (3) gradually turn the economy back on where safe.
For part (3) the general idea of "safe" has meant, allow people who are medically low-risk to return to the workplace and retail establishments. But we could see that could be expanded to also factor in carbon impact. In other words, we prioritize turning back on the low-carbon parts of the economy first, and maybe leave some high-carbon parts (international vacations) turned off or reduced for good.
In the minds of people opposed to controlling CO2 emissions, your comment here justifies all of their worst fears of CO2 emission regulation as a means of social control.
Being a part of society implies a social contract and some social control, it’s not black and white. Right now environmental impacts are not priced into many of our products (e.g. meat) and services (e.g. travel).
I agree. But tying the recovery from this pandemic to an attempt to regulate CO2 emission would be an absolutely atrocious way to accomplish either pandemic response or CO2 emissions response.
Disagree. Crises are the best time to make political change. You have the attention of the whole country; rally them into making changes that can affect longer term gains.
I feel somewhat strange writing that as someone who buys into the systems philosophy of "fix whats broken immediately, enhance it later". While that's true in computer systems, it doesn't seem uncommon in the realm of politics that periods of disasters are taken as opportunities to experiment with different ideas.
> You have the attention of the whole country; rally them into making changes that can affect longer term gains.
That’s not how politics works. You can’t abuse a crisis to ram something unrelated down the opposing party’s throat. You end up alienating everyone including the moderates.
This never works with even something as simple as a government shutdown over budget considerations.
> That’s not how politics works. You can’t abuse a crisis to ram something unrelated down the opposing party’s throat.
This is exactly how it works in practice in the US because the government is in terminal gridlock.
> You end up alienating everyone including the moderates.
The largest political party in the US is the non-voting party. Again, how it works in practice is that almost half of the population is already alienated.
Air transportation is a major contributor to CO2, if you limit the scope to the people who use it. It is estimated that about 80% of the world's adults have never taken a flight, and 94% of the world's adults have not taken a flight in over a year.
So, the real picture is that this 2.5% of global CO2 emissions are caused by as few as 6% of the population, who also are incidentally the richest and bear a high personal carbon footprint in other domains than transportation.
Also please remember that the aviation sector is growing, and therefore its global contribution to GHG emissions will grow as well in the future. Discounting the carbon footprint of the aviation sector based on today's numbers is a mistake.
If you do not want to impede on your ability to travel, you shouldn't object to it for the 94% of the population that want the same thing as you, and when it becomes available to them the aviation sector's emissions will increase 15-fold.
As we all know the best way to do something about climate change is to mentally divide the economy into 50 small pieces and then declare each of them is so small that it's not worth doing anything about it.
The aviation sector only accounts for a small amount of global emissions because globally almost nobody can afford to fly. For people who can afford to fly, an international flight can easily double their carbon footprint for the year.
"Everything is just a few percent here and there, and everybody shifts the blame saying we should be cutting XYZ instead of ABC.."
Wow - no, totally not.
The value derived from some kinds of emissions and resulting costs for changing them is infinitely differentiable from others.
For example, changing our electricity grid over to a more renewable resource, piece by piece, will maybe be a little bit more expensive, but it won't be disruptive.
'Stopping all flights' because airplanes emit CO2 could be devastating to the world economy, in addition to a massive reduction in the quality of life of people everywhere.
The factory that produces medical drugs needs some kind of Co2 emissions - probably worth it.
The one producing plastic bouncy balls for pets - probably not.
'The Market' has a lot of asymmetries, but it also contains a lot of intelligence, which is why it's always reasonable to be skeptical of arbitrary, system-wide controls.
Using this crisis for a 'massive experiment in what to turn online next as the basis for CO2' is excessively totalitarian, because we wouldn't really know why, how, what we are doing, and the resulting social pain would be great.
If there were a rational, clean path forward and 'good timing' for the introduction of specific measures, then yes, use the opportunity. But I don't see any of that.
Those measures are fuzzy at best but besides the point.
That we are 'happier because we can travel, but sadder because we have Facebook' is another can of worms entirely.
But this 'no improvement in wellbeing' argument is mostly undermined by the fact that given the choice, almost 0 people chose to 'live like 50 years ago'. Everyone today can do that easily. They can go back to not having dishwashers, not wearing seatbelts, smoking a pack a day, black and white TV if they want to, but for some reason, they mostly chose modern convenience.
But the real issue is the fact that economic activity is diverse, and heavy-handed centralized attempts to intervene will have crazy consequences.
If there are 'obvious' ways to use a crises for 'obvious good' then sure, but I don't see any such thing.
We already have heavy handed centralized attempts to intervene, they are what has got us in this mess in the first place. It just happens that they came from big business.
The point GP was trying to make, if I understood it correctly, is that large policy changes have social costs you need to factor in even if you're going to do them anyway.
If a government doesn't keep that in mind it may bite them back somehow (see the beginning - as opposed to the follow-up - of the "gilets jaunes" movement in France).
" is that large policy changes have social costs "
The 'large policy changes' will have completely varying consequences across the economic spectrum, for good and bad, which is the general problem with centralized planning.
So if the government 'shut down all co2 emitting factories' it might have small consequences here, and terrible consequences over there.
But if the government institutes a 'carbon tax' that makes your 'pet toys' and 'medicine' 10% more expensive, then given the inelasticity in demand and surpluses derived from medicine, people will continue to buy it at the same rate, and possibly buy fewer 'pet toys'. If travel rose by 20%, then maybe we'd see less leisure, fewer business trips, but the 'important trips' would still happen.
For the people who fly it's a much bigger portion of their impact as even in the US more than half of people don't fly in any one year.
When you consider that it makes it much harder to convince the average person to lower their emissions when they can see their boss jetting off to Bali on a whim.
There has to be a middle ground though, and it's ridiculous that the environmental impact of flying isn't factored into the price. Let's say a £30 Ryanair flight can produce as much as half a tonne of CO2 per traveller - how is that ok?
We will know when we finally enable the carbon tax on everything. Just set a total cap per unit area and then set the tax per tonne so total emissions are near that. Then we'll see if it's actually worth more than 2% since we'll be paying.
To elucidate: there are a meaningful number of people - like people in West Virginia who feel Obama was pretty effective at using environmental regulation to essentially stop almost all domestic coal production (true) - that Obama wouldn't have hurt coal if it was found only in deep blue states. It is shockingly hard to hurt your political opponents livelihood and prove it was fair handed (which is almost certainly was) - at some point the politics of, anyone who hurts the field would by opposed by that field, take hold, and it feels like retribution, especially when they aren't given advance warning.
> … implies a social contract and some social control
"Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority (of the ruler, or to the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order"
And of those who refuse to consent, explicitly or tacitly and disagree with others definitions of "social order"? Do people expect them to just roll over without fighting?
Yeah, social contract theory is something form a time when there was actually somewhere else to go. Now every border meets a border of some other domain.
Personally, I would rather fight for making the world a cleaner/healthier place to live without trying to sacrifice socioeconomic well being, especially of those at the margins of our societies who can barely make a living doing the most laborious and strenuous tasks.
Trying to take away/cut things people have come to expect and offer nothing of equivalent in return? Good luck with that.
Honestly what should we learn from people who are opposed to scientific reality? The only thing we need to learn is how we make the opinions of those people irrelevant. (Which is a really hard problem, as decades of inaction about climate show.)
Honestly what should we learn from people who are opposed to scientific reality?
The idea of using CO2 emissions control as a form of social control doesn't sound crazy at all to me. Without knowing anything else, I'd assume it was a valid concern at least worth discussing, and I'd assume that anyone unwilling to at discuss it reasonably is probably a malicious and dishonest person with selfish motives who should not be trusted.
You're just proving my point. You clearly have not had a real discussion with anyone who disagrees with your presumptions about the relative importance of emissions control. Your opponent is not a real person, it's a conservative stereotype (about a completely unrelated topic, no less).
Discussing the dis-appearance of the dinosaurs (let's say some 6'000 years (minus 6 days) ago) could be a cool discussion. Another one is of course the return of that badly dressed hippie. For about 2'000 years, excuses have been/to be made up to explain why he didn't turn up yet, but it can be every day now, make sure to hail the lord. Anyway, if we could ever use a helping hand, then it would be now, but the bugger is not on Facebook it seems. Haile Selassie was a better bet, but alas, not enough likes [like this post won't get many, wdic].
The virus is certain to push the US and many other economies into recession, which becomes self-sustaining. After the health crisis has passed, we will be left with this economic crisis.
Monetary policy is maxed already, so we will need fiscal stimulus. This will be the opportunity to invest in green infrastructure. We will need the government to step up and provide jobs and spending, and it should direct both with wisdom to prepare for the climate challenge.
The economy is pretty easy to restart with cash injections as you mentioned with infrastructure projects - be it trump or biden, one of them will do it.
Many things but most obvious now would be drugs and drug compounds. China being able to refuse to sell us drugs is a national security issue. We didn't learn from the oil embargo of the 70s apparently.
_Anything_ could happen between now and the convention/election. Surprisingly, I haven't seen this mentioned explicitly, but all of the remaining (major) candidates are squarely in the Covid-19 "danger zone". Some are known to have complicating health factors and there's a non-zero possibility that others do (despite what their doctors' notes say), which _doubles_ the risk.
There have been long periods of higher taxes and economic growth. If the private sector can't keep people economically active then the state will step in.
The economy is going to get more broken each day this is affecting us, supply chains are going to break down, demand is going to sink, investment will grind to a halt.
Huge amounts of wealth is going to be destroyed and people are going to suffer.
Development is going to slow down further limiting our ability to respond to those problems.
Meanwhile you are cheering for an emission rate blip and suggest it's worth hurting us even further ? That's going to do what exactly ?
I'm surprised at how regressive the popular opinion is around here - I wouldn't expect it from people who are in the filed of problem solving with technology.
The consequences of not responding proactively to the environmental crisis is orders of magnitude more serious than the pandemic. I can't think of anything more regressive than willfully destroying the planet.
What does that mean ? Are you saying that the climate change issue is going to be fixed if we slow down emission rampup over the next year ? Mind sharing that analysis ?
I don't think you realise how bad things are going to get as this panic drags on, think unemployment and poverty waves 2008 levels.
I'm not saying climate change is irrelevant - I'm saying proposing to slow down economic activity to reduce emissions has no quantifiable or tangible benefit - it's basically wishful thinking - and the downsides are going to be very harsh
I think you're measuring how bad things are relative to what is considered normal. Relative to normal, absolutely, the pandemic is terrible.
I'm measuring how bad things are relative to how rightly fucked things can be, and climate change offers up a whole wenu of awesome things. Widespread crop failures, Ecosystem collapse, Food supply shortages, violent uprisings, Mass human migrations, Famines, the collapse of the global supply chain and upheavals in the global balance of power. How bad can it get, and when? I don't know exactly but 2020 is off to a very exciting start.
2 months ago The pandemic felt unreal to North America, even though the warnings were easy to read. Now it's real, and hopefully it's waking us up, as people, as governments, and as businesses as to how quickly, suddenly, and shockingly the unreal can become real.
And I agree with you, the economic fallout is going to be terrible. There are many things to worry about, and one of the things I worry about is that thousands of small businesses are going to go under, and their employees, who are often young and living paycheck to paycheck won't have a job to go back to after this blows over.
If this pandemic causes an economic heart attack, I'll see it like a middle aged guy keeling over trying to climb 2 flights of stairs. As in: hopefully that heart attack will scare you into a greater appreciation for taking care of yourself, and it is in fact a blessing in disguise. Or maybe all those businesses will go under and Gen-Z will have to work at the Amazon warehouses until they're 30. Difficult choices need to be made.
>Widespread crop failures, Ecosystem collapse, Food supply shortages, violent uprisings, Mass human migrations, Famines, the collapse of the global supply chain and upheavals in the global balance of power.
The reason I see the above solutions as regressive is because I believe these things have a high probability of occurring irregardless of emission control at this point.
But the timeframe is longer - we're better off trying to prepare for the outcome of those scenarios - and technology is going to be a key component. If technological development collapses as a result of an economic collapse we are going to be majorly screwed emissions or not.
Also I think the "reduce emissions" crowd is sucking all the air out in the discussion about handling climate change. Climate change is just one of the risk factor our society faces in this new era - viral infection spread, nuclear disasters, etc. society right now is very fragile and humans have a huge influence on our environment for the first time in history - the society must adapt and hoping things will go back to the good old days if we just stop doing things is very narrow-minded
There's a good argument, I think, for allowing the low risk to get infected. They have a low chance of needing hospital care, so best to get them through this (and not propagating the disease) as quickly as possible.
Yes, but that isn't a good optic for domestic propaganda. Instead, the COVID-19 virus is being branded as a US Army bioweapon by Chinese state media. They've even published a book about it, already.
This is not an official position of the Chinese government, is just a tweet by someone. And the tweet doesn't say that the coronavirus is a US biological weapon, only that patient 0 might have come from the US- and specifically in the army, and have brought the virus to China during some internal military athletic competition.
"Hundreds of athletes from the US military were in Wuhan for the Military World Games in October 2019."
No one is dying from global warming. It's still much cooler than it was in the early Holocene (the Neolithic, or stone age era of humanity) and this was a time of abundance and expansion for farming and agriculture. Even the Sahara was richly farmed at the time. Plants not only thrive under warm temperatures, they also thrive with high levels of CO2. The world is greening:
There is an asymmetric risk, though. Due to feedback loops like methane release, we don't know at what temperature the warming will stop, or how fast it will go. The upper-range estimates are well beyond any temperature from the last 10 million years.
Doesn't it bother you that the temperature rised first, the CO2 levela just followed it. To me if A happened after B, A could not be made responsible for B, i.e. rising CO2 levels for rising temperature levels.
A lot of methane is coming from deep sea hydrothermal sources. You cannot stop that. But methane itself is unstable in the atmosphere and only accounts for less than 2 parts per million.
If the climate were so sensitive to CO2 levels, where we've seen it go from 250 to over 400 ppm...we would see much more dramatic warming than we have. It was not that much cooler 100 years ago. So far, we have yet to have a year significantly warmer than 1998. It's been 22 years and the CO2 has been rising all that time. In spite of billions of people coming out of poverty. Minimal difference in maximum temps. Antarctica had record sea ice extent in 2014. Antarctica has been trending positive for sea ice over the past 30 years: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/sea_ice_so...
There's never ever been a geologic extinction event associated with high levels of CO2. In fact quite the opposite: the abundant and biodiverse periods in Earth's history are associated with high CO2.
Plants literally suffocate at 150ppm. We are near historical lows for the planet Earth.
There has been a geological extinction event associated with high levels of atmospheric carbon - it was the biggest one of all time, and it nearly wiped out all life on Earth. Look up the Permian Extinction. (Yes there are multiple theories of cause, but one of which - and perhaps the most likely - is run away global warming.)
First of all, I sourced from NASA. You provided no such sources despite making an extraordinary claim about the Permian extinction. The theories for that event include meteors, volcanoes, microbes, underwater methane release (from geothermal sources) and there is tons and tons of uncertainty about that event. You are oversimplifying by even attempting to attribute blame to CO2, which was already much lower in the Permian than in other eras like the Cambrian and Carboniferous [1], furthermore, temps aren't correlated with CO2 in Pre-Quarternary eras.
Best indications are that a series of super-volcanic events triggered massive drought, which probably led to drying conditions and decreased sunlight for photosynthesis, which triggered massive fires which burnt up tons of oxygen and caused hypoxic conditions for tens of thousands of years. This whole episode is also associated with geomagnetic instability [2]. Now, the two are related, because geomagnetism is caused by movement of the inner and outer core of the Earth. If the earth sees periodic disruptions in the normal movement of the cores, I can easily imagine that to trigger massive volcanic activity.
Now, in that case, a release of CO2 occurred from all the plant matter dying off as a result of drought, fire, flood, and volcanism. The CO2 itself didn't cause the extinction. The volcanism caused the extinction.
Sea level is rising at an unalarming 2-3mm per year. About a foot a century. Believe me, we can adapt to that. Even if you could control the sea level, by the way, due to tectonics, a lot of land is moving at millimeters per year as well. Some landmasses move up, some move down. Change is constant on this planet. Adaptation is the only way.
It actually may drop around Greenland and Antarctica, as well. The reduced mass of ice causes the water level to drop despite the overall sea level rise. This of course means higher rises elsewhere. Surprisingly, this didn't occur to anyone until just a few years ago.
Also, the problem is not that humans in general are incapable to withstand the increased temperatures, but that the extreme changes in climatic patterns and the changes weather patterns will wreak havoc with infrastructure and agriculture. Any species whose lifecycle is tied to the seasons will face decline and possible extinction. With every species removed from the ecosystem, this ecosystem becomes more weak and fragile.
Changes to seasonal weather patterns will make living in some areas untenable, causing local and global migration. And we all know how well established societies are dealing with migration (hit; not good at all).
Oh, I'm a very smart cookie, but surely I'm often wrong, as is everyone. However, if I were to present you with Ph.Ds that agree with me, what would you say? Who is right? Would your instinct be to fall back on consensus...or to fall back on the scientific method?
Or you could also dig into the science yourself, with a skeptical, rational mind and care for the scientific method, and come to your own conclusions. I would recommend learning about everything from thermodynamics to geology to atmospheric science. It's fascinating stuff. We live in an era where it's easy to do that.
Never outsource your thinking to someone else. We live in an age where you can do your own research quite easily.
With any other hard physical science, the math is derivable. I can look at the equations for special relativity, I can read about the aether-related theories that preceded it (which were consensus at the time), I can see where they fell short and how they failed to measure up, I can read about Einstein's thought experiments that the led to the theory, I can read about the fundamental experiments that validated the theory. I can see how it evolved since then and led to developments in quantum physics. I can do all this. And I submit to you that if quantum physics is accessible then certainly climate science and geology are accessible. We have Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, numerous sources for contemporary publications and you can absolutely follow it and you can play a part in it. And then you will know the topic.
I have a PhD and did some research. It would be ridiculous to suggest that people can do research in my field without first investing years of training. I assume it's equally ridiculous to assume that I can do research in climate science without years of training.
I outsource thinking to other people all the time. That's essentially what it means to live in a modern society.
Another consideration is that when things get back to normal there will be a lot of people that won't go back to commuting as much, less long term energy usage. If the SA vs RU fight doesn't end soon, this will not benefit renewables, but if it does it will be a golden opportunity since oil will cost more and be used less.
> If oil is used less, it will cost less. Supply and demand.
Indeed. I was able to put a bit over 15 gallons of premium in my car tonight for ~$45. I was shocked, pleasantly so. I had gotten used to paying nearly $70 to fill my 18 gallon tank.
Yeah, I don't drive the most fuel efficient car, but I've also only put on a little of 50k miles over the 8 years I've owned it. That's 6250 miles per year. Far less than most (US) Americans with a car.
Every supplier in a marketplace has the ability to lower marginal prices in a price war.
Only effective cartels can raise prices at will. And OPEC’s power to do this is pretty clearly diminished, if not destroyed, by expanded US and Russian capacity.
Not really, it will cost whatever opec and pals say it will cost. In my opinion,less has to be magnitudes lesser (>10%?) for it to affect prices at the upstream end of things.
The construction of green infrastructure is also going to have to be put on hold too, and in the meantime CO2 levels are just going to keep on rising...
Good reliable rail is good. High speed rail is the only replacement for air travel though. If you have two large cities 3h by car apart, you can just barely beat that by flying (depending on how big the airport is and whether it's reasonable secureity e.g. come to airport 30min before departure or TSA style 2 hours before). A train is often longe than the highway.
You don't even necessarily need special high speed rail, just more rail makes it more high speed because you can mix slow and fast traffic (e.g. no-stop direct trains can run side by side with freight and services that makes 10 stops).
Speed doesn't have to come up so much to at least beat road traffic.
China relies on rail, and a lot of high speed rail, to move their massive and increasingly mobile population. We no longer need to speculate on whether high speed passenger rail can substitute for a lot of air travel.
"...let the market figure it out" would work in a market that isn't already so strongly shaped by subsidies, regulations, and nationalist protectionism.
Autonomous vehicles will have a very large and currently underestimated impact on all kinds of other modes of transportation, but there is a wide range of expert views on when that will happen.
Even slow trains are a good means of transport. I much prefer a train to buses and cars.
I think high speed rail could be potentially a game changer for the job market. In the UK if you could easily commute in from Birmingham or Newcastle then London salaries would be more accessible outside London.
I’d assume you could keep installing utility scale solar and wind while practicing social distancing, at least in my experience of installing ground racking, panels, wiring, inverters, etc.
It's currently very difficult to move equipment and expertise from where it is to where you need it for the project. So far the biggest problem for us has been getting panels and inverters from China to site, but it's now shifting to being more of an issue around continuing operations here as the virus escalates. It's highly likely this will delay solar and wind projects in the construction and planning phases.
The other interesting angle is what will happen to electricity emissions as demand drops, it should increase the market share of renewables as the highest cost generators drop out first.
I don't disagree logistical challenges will present themselves, although if China can't move those products out of country, they will likely deploy locally to keep their economy running. I think we'll all agree, a metric ton of CO2 emissions avoided is a metric ton avoided.
Also, my hope is that low oil prices drive US frackers out of business (US shale needs ~$40-90/barrel to break even, current WTI price as of this comment is a bit below $30/barrel); this will cause the price of natural gas to spike, causing utility scale battery storage combined with renewables to become immediately cost effective against quite a bit of current natural gas fired generation. Battery storage is already replacing the most expensive "once through" peaking plants (these are essentially jet engines bolted to the ground), and as the economics become more marginal for more efficient combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT), battery uptake will increase. That firm capacity is permanently clean moving forward.
These are "one way ratchets" we need to find every opportunity to pull. I will concede that low oil prices do not help with efforts to electrify transportation; the fight continues for a carbon tax and outlawing combustion whenever possible.
https://pvbuzz.com/renewables-capacity-overwhelms-coal-gas-o... (United States: Over the next three years, renewables will add nearly 50,000-MW of new capacity and be more than a quarter of total, while gas, coal, oil, and nuclear will drop by 4,200-MW)
> my hope is that low oil prices drive US frackers out of business
I dont understand this if the $30 price is driven by the saudis and russians. There was immediate talk of furloughs/layoffs and striking rigs. The rigs (and crews) can go up and down in a matter of weeks. The wells and equipment will persist and be mothballed, or acquired in a fire sale. Why wouldnt production start up as soon as the price goes back to $60?
I think all we're arguing is the latency between teardown and starting back up. Variables are going to be how long the Sauds and Russian can engage in a price war, how long until insolvency for producers and developers, and what it looks like when they arrive at insolvency, go through bankruptcy, what happens to the equipment, etc.
I argue this is going to go on for more than a few weeks. Saudi Arabia and Russia can hold out longer than most over leveraged US fracking orgs, especially with the US credit markets in turmoil. No one is going to be racing to extend further credit to frackers already in financial distress. Production won't start back up immediately because it'll take time to start back up.
Ok, Id buy that hypothesis. $30 persist for many months, over exposed outfits fold, better capitalized outfits (majors & secondary?) acquire assets, price recovers, it takes months to recover instead of weeks due to organizational/legal/logistic lag. The volatility is whats extending the time scale. But on a medium time horizon we still have lots of US production at $60 a barrel.
I agree with what both of you are saying, and if someone is willing to extend credit at ~$60 to the frackers again, it will happen. The question is who… banks aren't doing so well right now (else why the need for JPM at the discount window, more pomo, more frbny broker-dealer repo, and equity on major us banks testing 5 year lows, whos ficc revenue growth at ZLB will be pretty much non existent or even contracting more than it already has).
>this will cause the price of natural gas to spike
If you drive US frackers out of business, you'll also spike oil prices. Fracking has added so much supply to the world that it's turned the US into an oil exporter on occasion[0]. Removing that much supply from the markets would cause it to tighten, and by doing so would make fracking viable again.
The lag time is all that's needed (spike, price plateau, drop in price). Utilities need stable prices due to rate setting policy between them and the PUC (although some jurisdictions are more friendly to floating fuel prices passed through to consumers than others), so you take advantage of the price volatility while the domestic O&G market is in turmoil, and producers and well developers are going bankrupt or otherwise having their operations disrupted by the macro environment. Doesn't matter if the price of nat gas declines again if you've already built the batteries and renewables.
Korea has tested extensively and didn't resort to general lockdown. There was plenty of forewarning but the time was squandered. The inability to act on a foreseeable menace with a two months time horizon doesn't bode well for the response to climate change. Unless we use this moment for a wakeup call.
Yep. Every "steepest annual contraction" has been followed by eventual greater oil use because consumption/production is just shifted to the future. The buildings not being built today, the movies not seen this week, the vacation not taken this month, etc are just moved to sometime in the future. In other words, consumption/production isn't being ended, it's simply being delayed.
The tone of the article is a little contradictory. It quotes someone as saying we haven't seen a situation like this in history. It also says prices could be in the single digits for the first time since the '97-'99 price war. Which doesn't seem that long ago to me. I remember filling up for less than a dollar a gallon around then, for the first and only time in my life. It's not that cheap yet, is it?
I remember in that time frame visiting family in Montana and wondering how they could afford to drive since gas was like $1.30 / gallon there. (I was also like ten at the time and didn't really understand grown up amounts of money)
It's been dropping like a rock for the last week in a lot of places. A friend of mine in the midwest says the price at the station near his house just hit $1.49.
I've never been to California. The fill-up around '99 was in fact in Arizona, although I haven't been there in a long time. Also the only time I filled a nearly empty tank for under $10, as my car got almost 40 mpg and the usable capacity was probably under 10 gallons.
Is there a chance that this will push e-mobility since low oil prices for a sustained period of time will make extraction unprofitable for oil companies? Or could it have the opposite effect and make us use more cheaper fuel for individual transport?
It seems to me that public transport / ride sharing could take quite a hit (at least in the next few months).
> Is there a chance that this will push e-mobility since low oil prices for a sustained period of time will make extraction unprofitable for oil companies?
Probably not. Different areas have different costs of extraction.
Shale oil/tar sands = expensive
Saudi Arabia proven reserves = low cost
This might put some of the North American oil companies out of business, but those assets will be bought in bankruptcy, so they'll eventually come back online when the price of oil gets high enough again.
> Or could it have the opposite effect and make us use more cheaper fuel for individual transport?
This seems more likely. Oil is primarily used for transportation. Cheap oil means less reason to go electric.
How much of an effect is the questions. I, personally, have no idea. Electric cars are improving at a very rapid rate. However, there doesn't seem to be a good solution for people who don't own a garage. There is some condo/apartment charging sprinkled here and there, but it's not very common.
> It seems to me that public transport / ride sharing could take quite a hit (at least in the next few months).
Typically, public transport is mostly funded through taxes, so it's not really in much danger.
Ride sharing will probably take a beating - especially since flying and night life are getting hammered.
Presumably companies that supply carbon free energy still get paid only when they actually supply energy. Even though they may not have to purchase fuel they would still make no money and have all of their operating costs. I don’t see why the effect of reduced demand on those generation companies wouldn’t be the same as the price or electrical energy went to zero - unless rate payers have taken on all the risk and pay whether or not any energy is generated.
the unit price per mile of use is much lower and will have a lower magnitude of impact on the economy, similarly the impacts on the producers will be smaller and buffered by home electric use (which probably goes up in a case like this)
Ah I didn't understand that a "no carbon grid" meant using electricity for transportation and was just thinking in terms of reduced demand for electricity regardless of whether the source was renewable or not.
I guess we'll have to take your word for it. It's the same old trope from the "experts" for the past 20 years. Putin is about to lose power. China is about to collapse.
> Last time oil dropped too steeply the Soviet Union disintegrated.
The oil price isn't why the soviet union disintegrated. It was their weak leadership.
It's not the oil prices. It's called the reign of gorbachev and yeltsin.
> You don't even need to superimpose anything.
Sure you could cherrypick any data set to superimpose whatever you want to believe. Here's another one for you to try. The time frame from perestroika's beginning and Russia's 1998 default correlates to the NFC's 13 year superbowl domination over the AFC. Are you saying that we are about to enter another era of NFC's domination?
Also, you conveniently ignore the fact that since 1998, we've had 3 oil prices collapses and putin is still around and russia hasn't collapsed. I wonder why?
Nations don't collapse due to oil prices. It collapses due to weak leaders. Economic strain can expose weak leaders, but ultimately, it is the weak leaders who lead to national collapse. Strong leadership helps weather the storm.
Not comparable, at the time the USSR had an unsustainable economic policy of price control and other socialist goodies. Today's Russia has a market economy similar to the rest of the Western world and these economies are way more resilient to crisis like this.
Except oil and gas makes up over 70% of their exports meaning they are highly susceptible to getting their exchange rates (and thus international trade) wiped out by a drop in value of their primary export. They basically suffer Dutch disease like most other oil exporters
Saying anything remotely positive about Russia is a no-no on HN. Even if you're not even technically praising them (I wasn't and neither are you). Just saying they may not be going down soon is enough to be downvoted apparently.
If anything the USSR economic policy was far more sustainable than what they have now. They had _manufacturing capacity_ and were almost entirely self sufficient. That is not the case today. And the stuff they import, they have to pay Euros and Dollars for. Ruble has been pretty much in free fall for more than a week now. Their population today (unlike back then) is not ready for a drastically reduced quality of life.
Source: Russian-American, lived through perestroika and the "wild 90s", still have family there.
Oh dear. An unstable Russia, a confident and resurgent China with something to prove, a United States distracted with its own internal problems... are we going to see World War III?
Not really, no. You can thank MAD for that. There's nothing to gain and everything to lose. Other countries understand the threat of proliferation and will swoop in at the last minute to make sure the weapons stay in the hands of someone sane, just like they did in the 90s.
Something very interesting about this current situation is that I think we're on the verge of a bunch of Democratic talking points getting put in place by a Republican administration.
Such as...UBI? The Clintons were famous for 'borrowing' the ideas of their opponents during elections, stealing that thunder. What's good for the goose....
Fundamental to the Green New Deal is a program to create new jobs in the green sector, so we can get off fossil fuels without creating massive unemployment and hardship. This is what makes it reminiscent of the new deal. This is essential to making a politically and economically viable proposal and makes it a climate justice proposal rather than just a climate proposal.
What we have so far, is cutting fossil fuels without any of the support to prevent this from hurting those who are already struggling. It does give the earth a break, at least, but we need the other stuff to help people and make the change stick.
