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Comment by kohanz | Hacker News Reader

I doubt it. If and when the virus passes, people will revert to their previous patterns. This is seen as a temporary inconvenience by the general population. Why change their behaviour moving forward?

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I think there's a large chunk of many populations that predicts future conditions based on intuitive experience with the immediate past. "There won't be a real catastrophe in the future because there hasn't been one in recent memory," seems to be a real thought pattern that's driving a lot of behavior in the West. This is happening with the coronavirus even now that the writing seems to be on the wall.

These complacency patterns (and their counterpart) may go deeper than one specific event, like the coming epidemic. For example, the survivors of WWII seem to have been an unusually serious bunch: they put a lot of effort into building global infrastructure to protect against all kinds of disasters.

I don't know if this epidemic we're about to have will change things here. But I'm hopeful. Maybe some folks will wake up and start to adjust their perception of risk more broadly.

Well, if the world moves to a global recession for some period, then one would expect reusing and recycling to increase, and useless crap production and recreational travel to decrease. That could reduce emissions for a period of time.

It's not something to be gleeful about, but could be a silver lining in case of a recession.

That's something to hope for. But it will not come automatically, we have to push for political change to make this happening.

The 2008 crisis saw no significant decline in human CO2 emissions. A global recession would alter some aspects of consumer spending, but all in all I would expect CO2 output to remain problematic.

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