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by scottious 91 days ago
It's too bad that countries only consider things like this to address a crisis in fuel costs. Why not enact measures like this to curb the pollution and CO2? I guess it says a lot about what humanity truly values.
5 comments

We saw how much less pollution there was during the pandemic

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/04/8110190...

I worked from home but a few times I needed to go to my parents house during what used to be rush hour. Less than 5% of normal traffic and fuel demand dropped so much that prices were lower.

My job went hybrid in 2022 and then return to office full time last year. Everyone hates it. It's a waste of time and resources.

Less pollution, less traffic means we don't need to use tax revenue to expand roads and less wear and tear means less repairs.

Take it one step further and give tax breaks to businesses that let employees work from home and close physical offices. Then this means less new office construction which can be used for housing to help the housing crisis. It's a win win for everyone except control freak managers.

The visibility in socal was astounding at the time. Like 50 mile days, catalina and the san gabriels both crystal clear.
Some believe that few organizations are actually real-estate businesses masquerading as tech, restaurant or other types.

For those kind of business having full occupancy is more important than worker productivity.

One is an immediate impact in your pocket, the other one has an impact lag that you count in years/decades.
Optimizing performance management and labor cost controls is more important to those making these decisions than climate change. Misaligned incentives.
"Leave the petro-billionaires alone!" Seems to be the driving force

Imagine if the world had aggressively invested in renewables at any time in the past ten years!

Cheap and efficient solar power didn't seem to require any actual breakthroughs or real investment. Maybe better power electronics for inverters and things? Batteries are a real issue but storage could have been totally ignored for a while.

So, maybe when Carter put those (thermal) solar collectors on the White House we should have thrown a hundred billion dollars at solar panel work and had abundant solar power decades ago.

But no, Carter was "weak" so we had to instead elect the guy who ignored AIDS because he hated gay people, pushed absurd drug policy, put us in bed with the middle east, and started the process of removing taxes from any rich person and racking up national debt for stupid reasons.

Why was Carter "weak"? Well you see, Iran was a huge Bad Guy that we needed to stop!

Oh.

Politicians only think of their donors. Every country has an oligarchy who controls oil and gas. So for their wealth, we all have to suffer.

South Asia is suffering like anything right now. There is an cooking gas shortage. In some countries there is a petrol shortage.

But nobody will learn lessons from this crisis and focus to switch to renewables within a decade.

Make that the past 100 years.
You can’t collapse countries and humans down to four sentences and conclude that’s what they value. Do you want to analyze the problem or throw quips at the wall?