This Model was developed from the SEIR Model (Susceptible, Exposed, Infected, Recovered) and it predicts the COVID-19 outbreak in Burnie, Tasmania. This pandemic outbreak contributes to diverse rates including infection rate, death rates and recovery rate, government policies and its economic impacts.    

Assumptions:

 This model is driven by its determined rates, e.g., incubation rate, morality rate, test rate and immunity loss rate and its recovery rate.

Government policies are involved in fully vaccination rate, social distance, national border closure, travel, and business restriction which effect Burnie’s economy.

There are three economic entities dimensions in Burnie Island, we can tell that the pandemic has negative impact on Brick-and-Mortar enterprises and tourism business to some extent, whereas, e commercial business plays a crucial role to stimulate the regional economic activities during the COVID-19 period.

Interesting Insights:

 The figure of susceptible changes significantly during the initial 3 weeks because of low recovery rate and high infection rate. On the other hand, the implementation and interventions of government policies is effective, because the number of patients who tested negative is increased and the majority of them release and go back home after medical follow-up. 

The recent moratorium on deep-sea drilling will reduce the supply of oil. But the world-wide trend is an ever increasing demand for it. This simple CLD  tries to illustrate the dampening effect on demand and on economic activity of diminishing oil supplies and of rising prices: oil prices  affect virtually all products and especially agricultural production. As it becomes more and more difficult to extract oil, prices must rise. At the moment the global recession counteracts this effect, but the recession will not last forever. Is it too early to speak of Peak Oil?

From Neil WIlson and Steve Keen's double entry accounting view of the money circuit model

I propose we grow this sim model (or similar) over time to help ourselves better understand the opposing investment and austerity strategies now being advocated for the U.S. government. The hope is to build as simple a model as possible that subsumes the major underlying feedback loops that probably exist in the mental models of proponents of each of these positions. Starting this model was inspired by this Investment vs. Austerity discussion http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Investment-vs-Austerity-How-can-4582801.S.157876413

In 2012, the City of Vancouver created a sustainability strategy for staying on the leading edge of urban development called the “Greenest City: 2020 Action Plan (GCAP)” [1—Open in Pop-up]. In the report, the GCAP noted that its highest priority action was to encourage the use of electric vehicle transport in both public and private sectors. Since then, programs such as the Clean Energy Vehicle (CEV) program have been revamped to encourage consumers to choose the greener choice, often rewarding owners with up to $5000 in incentives for battery-powered vehicles and plug-in hybrids. However, the benefits of choosing electric cars are not all clear as several reports have found that hybrid electric vehicles (HEV), plug-in electric hybrid vehicles (PHEV), and battery electric cars (BEV) generate more carbon emissions during their production than current conventional vehicles [2]. I thought it would be interesting to study this sustainability issue through a systems model to determine how much impact it has on the environment compared to conventional vehicles. 

https://insightmaker.com/insight/159243/CO2-Emissions-by-Vehicle-Type-Gasoline-vs-Electric

Our model explores both carbon emissions of standard gasoline vehicles and electric vehicles from production to distribution in Canada specifically. Unfortunately, we were unable to find any statistics regarding the number of electric vehicles in production in Canada, so we have used the sales number as our production number estimate. For CO2 emission statistics, we made sure to carefully separate different types of electric vehicles as the production of the battery in battery electric vehicles have significantly more carbon emissions during production.

As expected, the carbon emissions from electric vehicles are much lower than those of gasoline vehicles after taking into account the lifecycle emissions from an average lifespan of 8 years on the road (which is the standard warranty length offered from most car companies). Some interesting things to note are that with our current rise in electric vehicle adoption, electric vehicles will dominate the roads in about 100 years. This transformation may be further accelerated by the large-scale initiatives offered by governmental organizations and increased awareness for sustainable practices. Furthermore, it was very surprising to find that electric vehicle carbon emissions will exceed that of gasoline vehicles after nearly 1000 years, but after further analysis, this makes sense as by then electric vehicles will greatly outnumber gasoline vehicles. This means that electric vehicles are not only the greener choice -- electric vehicles are by far the greenest choice as it will take nearly a thousand years before its emissions will be equal to that of its gasoline counterpart. In fact, it may even take longer than 1000 years for electric vehicles to emit more carbon emissions than gasoline vehicles if we continue looking for more sustainable methods for producing electricity and proactively choose renewable energy over fossil fuels.

Sources:

[1] https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/Greenest-city-action-plan.pdf—Open in Pop-up

[2] http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jsd/article/view/64183

Statistics for number of gasoline and electric vehicle sales:

Gasoline Vehicles: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=2010000201