People lose their homes, become homeless, that saves a lot of energy.
A home needs to be cooled, warmed, light, tv etc all that regular stuff.
If society is lucky, the person will not be able to own a car either.
Also doesn't waste energy on cooking, doest shower much.
When a person is homeless, he contributes vastly less pollution.
The homeless may be the people contributing the best effort to limit pollution.
We could probably hit our targets for climate change by increasing
the homeless population by several magnitudes.
This is bad faith, by that token dead people also don’t produce any more CO2. This is not what the article says at all though.
By that token, we can’t possibly do anything about climate change because surely that would mean living in caves and never taking a shower again. Or becoming homeless as you put it.
... Do you think maybe it's worth reading the whole article?
> The air becomes cleaner in areas where the economy slumps. The researchers estimate that this cleaner air accounts for more than one-third of the mortality reduction. This may come as a surprise, because we are not accustomed to regarding air pollution as a problem for rich countries — the trope is that industrialising cities in Asia are smog-ridden, but that for America and Europe the only pollutant that need worry us is the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
There’s something oddly beautiful about someone saying they “had to stop reading” in the middle of the sentence that would have rendered their annoyance moot if they’d only had the patience to finish it.
It depends where in China. Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Wuhan, Xi'an, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Dalian, are all doing well. There is more to the country than Beijing and Shanghai (even Shanghai is much improved).
true, but it wasn't any better during the olympics and i think it was much worse before that. i only got there shortly before the olympics so all i can confirm is that it did not get any worse after.
according to this report air quality in beijing continuously improved for the last few decades:
yes, but the olympics were mainly in beijing, so when it comes to the question of what happened with the air quality after the olympics, beijing matters the most.
It depends where in China. Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Wuhan, Xi'an, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Dalian, are all doing well. There is more to the country than Beijing and Shanghai (even Shanghai is much improved).
From "external influences":
We explore three main potential sources of positive external health effects from recessions suggested
by prior literature: reductions in the spread of infectious disease (Adda 2016), increases in the
quality of healthcare (Stevens et al. 2015), and reductions in pollution (Chay and Greenstone 2003;
Heutel and Ruhm 2016). We find little support for a role for the first two classes of external effects,
but evidence consistent with a quantitatively important role for recession-induced reductions in air
pollution in explaining about 40 percent of the recession-induced mortality declines.
They don't cover lower driving (fewer accidents), health care tied to employment (under reported health incidents), or work place accidents (deaths due to statistical risk in higher risk jobs like construction, mining, etc.)
So no, not a particularly insightful study in my opinion.
> By contrast, motor vehicle accidents and liver disease
each account for less than 2 percent of 2006 mortality, and so their contributions to the total
recession-induced mortality decline are only 6.9 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively.
The paper did briefly cover accidents. Didn't check the rest.
I didn't read the entire paper, but I don't see lowered stress and lack of sleep mentioned anywhere. These would be the most obvious answers and should be addressed.
I think the positives of remote work vastly outweigh the negatives, particularly in orgs with established culture and a not-insane amount of turnover. This just adds another positive to the pile, though I think this particular benefit is unique to North America and its extremely car-centric transportation setup.
Even ICE cars now days are so efficient that most of their pollution comes from the tires not the tail pipe. This is doubly true for EVs.
I fully support a transition to EVs, but if we really wish to cut down on air pollution why not strongly encourage remote work and cut out the commute entirely?
Or do what many urban areas do efficiently: make it easy to commute by train. Even a bus commute cuts down the tire pollution per commuter significantly. Building more housing near job centers can help both shorten commutes and make mass transit more desirable.
I'm not sure how to interpret "keep people honest", but you should know that most crime statistics show downturns during economic slowdowns, for similar reasons as the article. People stay home more. Most crime seems to be crimes of convenience, and if you don't see the thing to steal/murder, then you don't steal/murder. I strongly suspect this is partly why premeditated crime tends to be dealt with more harshly.
How likely is it that smokers will smoke so much more during a recession, vs during a non-recession, that the effect shows up in nationwide mortality rates?
I didn't want to be specific since many solutions could be worth exploring and I have no idea which standardized form factor would be best. Something like a drawer or set of drawers. Only the front and the floor would have to be strong. The rest is a concrete shell that stays behind. Not all rooms need to be personalized. The employer can provide some extras as a perk. The drawer doesn't need to be full length. If there is a room between home and work shouldn't bother anyone.
Ehh... I suspect that the cleaner air is more a correlation than a causation. It seems like fewer accidents due to fewer drivers would be a more direct cause. The cleaner air is just a side effect. I didn't see any mention of accident rates in the article.
TLDR: The health benefits are caused by a lack of air pollution, likely by less car traffic. Study only examined the United States, and was from the 2008 recession so the WFH wave hasn't happened yet.
I'm sure the the 2020+ data is messy (people dying of coronavirus, people not getting treatment for chronic diseases because hospitals are scary, etc.), but I'd be curious to see this same hypothesis tested there.
tldr: "The air becomes cleaner in areas where the economy slumps. The researchers estimate that this cleaner air accounts for more than one-third of the mortality reduction."
From the paper: "Recession-induced mortality declines are driven primarily by external effects of reduced aggregate economic activity on mortality, and recession-induced reductions in air pollution appear to be a quantitatively important mechanism" [1]
Not relevant. This is a bad faith line you're taking. Slavery was legal in the US 200 years ago. We don't factor slavery into minimum wage calculations.
PS: Even though they were barred from combat duty, 543 American women employed by the US Armed Forces were killed during WW2 alone. Mostly nurses.
People lose their homes, become homeless, that saves a lot of energy. A home needs to be cooled, warmed, light, tv etc all that regular stuff. If society is lucky, the person will not be able to own a car either. Also doesn't waste energy on cooking, doest shower much.
When a person is homeless, he contributes vastly less pollution.
The homeless may be the people contributing the best effort to limit pollution.
We could probably hit our targets for climate change by increasing the homeless population by several magnitudes.