The good thing is that this recession is going to happen anyway, because the supply of fossil fuel is dwindling already.
I've seen people point out that emissions haven't dropped much during lockdown but isn't that because manufacturing, mining, shipping, animal farming etc. and everything else that supports our personal unsustainable lifestyles would have largely been continuing as normal ready for things to restart?
E.g. maybe you're not going to launch a cruise ship during lockdown or go on a cruise, but cruise ships are still getting designed, ordered and built during lockdown.
Productivity gains only come marginally from optimization. Most productivity gains are from bigger machines (that eat more energy than smaller ones).
80% of our energy is from carbon, we have to cut 4% of this every year starting last year to have a chance to barely stay below 2C.
This mean cutting what's feeding our machines by ~3% per year. So productivity losses. By cutting less productive sectors first we might manage that without entering recession for a few year, but even with that, thousands of people will be left over.
> without entering recession for a few year
Isn't the problem we can't keep growing when there's only finite resources?
We need to change our definition of what it means for the country/world to be improving.
Of course, you can in our universe for an estimated 1e38 years.
The point being that if there is a big enough supply of something that doesn't renew to last until the next breakthrough there is no problem. Never in the history of the human race has this failed.
Will oil last until we get fusion figured out? It seems to me pretty likely that's a yes.
Considering that commercial fusion is nowhere near us for the next ~100 years, we're in for a very bad time.
A large part of the world has basically stopped functioning for a few months. People stayed home, industries didn't produce anything, restaurants stopped serving people, and so on. It was a huge stress on everyone and now that we're reopening up the overall sentiment is that never should the world halt like that again. Governments everywhere are mentioning the idea that maybe we should change something, but the real mindset is to start like before, and work even more for lower wages to compensate for the loss.
It is estimated that over the whole year, the emissions of CO2-equivalent will have gone down by 4% in 2020. There are only 2 years in the 20th century when this happened: 1929, the Great Depression, and 1945, because the industrial powerhouses that Germany and Japan were are not producing anything anymore. We've had the same this year.
But the other fun stats is that if we want to achieve the +2C goal of 2100, that is directly correlated to the amount of CO2-equivalent that has been emitted since the beginning of the industrial revolution; the quota we have until 2100 is such that we need to reduce our emissions every year, and this reduction must be 4% compared to the year before.
In other words, we need an additional lockdown every year, until 2100. That's the scale of the change, and when I see what happens after a single one, it is clear to me we will never reach that +2C in 2100.