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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind stricter climate controls wouldn’t even hurt the economy this bad. A harsh carbon tax on all fossil fuels in exchange for COVID-19 to disappear to be gone would be a welcome relief to the economy.

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That's true, but I think the point is: people will witness first-hand how reducing pollution and emissions leads to much better environment in the span of weeks.

I also hope that there will be some dip in relevant global climate measurements, so there will be something to point to and say: "here's direct empirical evidence that climate change is man-made and that reducing emissions helps mitigate it".

This thread seems to be confusing climate change / carbon (dioxide) with local pollution.

climate change / carbon (dioxide) and carbon taxes are about long-term temperature change due to C02 concentration and the effects of that. COVID-19 isn't changing that in 1 year.

Local pollution is caused by burning gasoline and factory smoke.

I was talking both. They're related - local pollution does local damage to the environment; climate change is bad because it does damage to the environment everywhere simultaneously.

I don't expect COVID-19 to show up too strongly in temperature graphs, but I hope some of its effects show up somewhere with large enough effect size that we have a statistically significant dip in the chart to point to as direct evidence that human activity is causing this, and changes are meaningful to fixing it.

Why does global warming damage the environment everywhere?

because environments everywhere have adapted to a rhythm of temperature that will no longer exist due to global warming. a good definition of damage is "harmful change."

Yes, but Cars are the intersection of the two. That's a big intersection.

With ya on this one, but what kinds of problems would this cause for people who don't have another option to get to work? Un-doing this ridiculous culture of driving 40 minutes to work will take a lot time.

Still, I wholeheartedly agree on the concept. I'm curious as to how to fix the followup problems that will occur from fixing the primary problem.

Honestly, a grotesque carbon tax of 300% on a barrel of oil would only put prices back to where they were before the Russia/Saudi dump.

You’ll find that people will adapt quite quickly as the price ramps up (we can smear over a year if we need to). Carpooling, switching to electric, or just getting a closer job will all suddenly seem very feasible when the numbers are concrete.

I'm surprised no one brought up the idea more people will just telecommute and work remotely, as so many are now discovering they can.

I'm sure plumbers, nursing home workers, retail employees, carpenters and skilled trades, factory workers, and more will telecommute.

Do people not get that not everyone is a knowledge worker whose work is always done on a computer?

Do that tax and make a dividend. Amen.

Invert zoning, say housing must be built with businesses, and it must be mixed together.

This helps, but it seems vanishingly unlikely that both spouses will always be able to find good jobs in the same neighborhood for as long as their kids are in school.

Public transportation. They don't need to both be 5 minutes walk away

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