Thursday, March 05, 2020

Coronavirus might help the environment

I am a very big proponent on reducing greenhouse gas and doing less bad things to the environment.

According to Dr Google:

EPA reports that aircraft contribute 12 percent of U.S. transportation emissions, and account for three percent of the nation's total greenhouse gas production. Globally, aviation produced 2.4 percent of total CO2 emissions in 2018

One side effect of coronavirus I see is people are traveling less.  I have had conferences cancelled.  And I have made decisions to travel less myself.  My air travel is my personal largest greenhouse gas contribution.  

So the net of it - less greenhouse gas from travel.  

One way people will do meetings instead is using video conferencing.  I have an investment in a video conference company - Iotum that has a solution CallBridge.  They may benefit.

2 great links to coronavirus information here and here.  

When you look at the demographics of who dies from it - health is an obvious link.   EG 15% of over 80 people who get coronavirus die, for those 40-49 it drops to 0.4%.  And if someone has no pre-existing health issue, their chance is only 0.9%.

Of course statistics do not take away from the sadness for those who died and lost loved ones.  It does speak to being healthy though. 

I notice that smoking is one thing that contributes to death.  Interestingly, less GHG and less particulate in the air will help people's health.  So less travel could be a double benefit (although small).

I have often noticed "unintended consequences".  I wonder if one unintended consequence might be lower immune systems in people because they use too much hand sanitizer.  Our bodies need a few germs to get good at fending them off.  This said - I am likely one of those who is washing and sanitizing too much.

This could also contribute to super bugs that need to morph to get around sanitizer.

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I am big on habits.  Thought this article might inspire.

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