Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/climate/air-travel-emissions.html

by elorant • 7 years ago

202 288 7 years ago

misiti3780• 7 years ago

"Over all, air travel accounts for about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions — a far smaller share than emissions from passenger cars or power plants."

2.5% means we should focus on reducing somewhere else in the near term.

munk-a2• 7 years ago

Eeeeh, it depends. People in the US are going to go totally librarian poo if someone comes to take away their cars.

mfer• 7 years ago

The people of the US won't if....

1. The alternative's include things they can own and control. This is really important in rural or suburban areas. It's also important for a lot of businesses. 2. The alternative's are handled in a cost effective rollout manner.

Basically, the solutions need to be in the public interest with them in mind. Not sure how that factors into startup and VC thinking these days.

I would imagine that eco friendly public transit systems could cut down on emissions, cut overall costs, and cut congestion in cities. That seems like a good place to target as low hanging fruit.

jjoonathan• 7 years ago

I will happily continue to vote for and fund our over-budget under-delivering mass transit projects, even though I (and the overwhelming majority of people providing said funding) won't be in a position to actually use them for the foreseeable future, because it's the right thing to do.

However, if someone tries to take my car before those alternatives are in place, we're going to have a problem. My problem will be getting to work. The transport authority's problem will be obtaining money from a hostile and/or evaporated tax base.

We build a better world by working together, not by raiding each other and hoping that somehow, in the aftermath, the mass fixes itself.

flatline• 7 years ago

In the US you have a choice between insufficient/unaffordable urban housing, and suburban/rural living. In the former case a few people can take public transit, bike, walk, or work remotely, and yet urban congestion continues to worsen. In the latter case the vast majority need some form of private transportation to live. It's a big country, any solution is going to have a large technological component.

Symmetry2• 7 years ago

It depends on who you are. The median person doesn't fly. But a round trip flight from Shanghai to New York is 3.4 tons of carbon, pretty close to the average global anual per capita emissions of 4.0 tons.

csallen2• 7 years ago

Seems implausible to me that this is a problem that's going to be solved by asking people to make personal sacrifices. The numbers don't add up.

When the op says, "we should focus on…" I assume he's talking about policy, technology, etc., not individual concessions.

The best argument I can imagine for encouraging individual concessions is that, if the campaign to do so is massively successful, it might create a new norm, which will increase public awareness, which will increase public support for new policies and participation in the development of new technologies. But imo that's an unnecessarily roundabout course to chart.

taylortrusty• 7 years ago

You need to divide that 3.4 tons of carbon by the ~270 people on each flight

MuffinFlavored• 7 years ago

Can somebody give a simple to read breakdown of what compromises the majority of the global carbon dioxide emissions picture/pie?

dehrmann4• 7 years ago

Apparently the EPA can do that. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

itcrowd• 7 years ago

Yes: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...

This is global data per sector. The rest of the page is fantastically insightful, too.

weeksie2• 7 years ago

Yeah, this reads very much as the same kind of moral panic we recently endured over plastic straws. Air travel does emit a ton of carbon per person, but on the whole we're better off putting effort into making renewables cheaper and greening up the agriculture industry. Not that we shouldn't put pressure on the airlines to put R&D into lowering emissions but pretending this is something people can fix by "flying a little less" is silly at best, and smacks more of religion than of reasoned responses to climate change.

rubinelli• 7 years ago

There's nothing wrong in picking the low-hanging fruit. Pick enough of these, and you start seeing a difference with minimal cost.

dehrmann4• 7 years ago

At least it got the segment right; ~30% of CO2 emissions are from transportation.

It cracks me up when people talk about plastic and throwaway clothing as ways to cut back on carbon emissions.

TeMPOraL7• 7 years ago

People confuse two separate issues. Plastic straws and throwaway synthetic clothing are about microplastics. CO₂ emissions are about climate change. The former may or may not turn out to be a health hazard (I'm betting not that much), and may or may not affect the ecosystem negatively somehow. The latter is going to kill our civilization for sure. I think we should leave the former problem for another time, and focus on dealing with the latter.

usaar3334• 7 years ago

It's the high growth rate that is the issue, not the existing amount.

goldcd• 7 years ago

And also the difficulty replacing the fuel in the increasing number of flights.

On the ground, we're starting to have "entirely green days" for electricity - and say new cars that use it.

phkahler2• 7 years ago

Air travel is more important because of the water vapor far more than the carbon.

The week following 9/11 was dramatically different. NASA recorded the change in daily temperature range. Less significantly, we had crystal clear skys where I live - for a week!

Water vapor can also seed cloud formation. Air travel causes a daily cycle in this, which might just keep more heat in at night.

You can look at data and see the temperature rise along with energy use (CO2). But to compare it with the rise in air travel is also informative. IIRC there is even an uptick of both during WWII.

But y'all can keep screaming 'bout CO2 till the cows come home. It may be that we really need coal fired airplanes that dont emit water vapor, just more CO2.

Maximus9000• 7 years ago

"The week following 9/11 was dramatically different. NASA recorded the change in daily temperature range. Less significantly, we had crystal clear skys where I live - for a week!"

Do you have links for this?

kaybe4• 7 years ago

At least the water issue goes away as soon as you stop.

rb8082• 7 years ago

Today was a beautiful clear day too though, September tends to do that.

I'd think the vapor trails would also reflect the suns heat so help cool the day time temperatures.

TheGallopedHigh• 7 years ago

Note also that cloud cover increases albedo, namely how much light is reflected back to outer space. Does that mean contrails are good for the environment? Probably not, but this a very complicated system that one can’t make simple statements without sitting down and doing the math.

inamberclad• 7 years ago

How would a coal fired aircraft not emit water vapor, less hydrogen in the fuel?

pera• 7 years ago

If you think 2.5% is too small to care, consider what would your company do for an extra +2.5% of annual net profit.

tonyedgecombe2• 7 years ago

I wonder where that 2.5% figure came from, I was always under the impression it was quite a bit higher than that.

bennofs2• 7 years ago

You need to consider that flying is still somewhat uncommon, if you consider the whole population on earth. From a quick search on google, less than 20 percent of the world's population took a plane in their entire lifetime.

sp3323• 7 years ago

On the other hand, air travel is relatively difficult to de-carbonize due to fuel density requirements. So it's going to need lots of R&D investment now so we have something ready to go once we've addressed the cheaper stuff.

WhompingWindows• 7 years ago

Near term, we should be slamming money into batteries and energy density of said batteries, if we want to decarbonize air-travel. Electric planes have numerous advantages, but jet fuel is just so much more energy dense than a battery at the current juncture. Hopefully by 2050, we will be able to scale up from smaller electric airplanes in the 2020-2030 timeframe, such that jet liners will be decarbonized too.

elihu• 7 years ago

It seems to me that synthetic or plant-based carbon-neutral fuels are more feasible in the near-term, though I don't know what the current state of the art is.

In the long term, electric planes would be ideal if we can figure out energy storage (or perhaps wireless energy transmission).

bluGill• 7 years ago

My understanding of the laws of physics that govern batteries is we are already close to the limits. There might be a doubling or two of capacity left, but that doesn't get us anywhere near the weight/energy ratio of jet fuel.

There are options to make fuels from other sources - but every time someone brings this up we get the oil shrills screaming about why use food for fuel, or their tired old energy neutral studies that haven't changed their numbers in 20 years.

eisa01• 7 years ago

The thing is, very few things is a large share of global carbon dioxide emissions.

"It doesn't matter what Norway does because we're less than 1% of global emission" "It doesn't matter with air travel because it's only 2.5% of emissions" "It doesn't matter with coal power in Germany, because overall it's not that much"

If the rest of the world has that attitude, it won't matter if China and the US (often cited as the ones that matter) get to zero, as that's still not enough.

CO2 emissions is death by a 1000 papercuts, we need to tackle them all

So yes, let's bring aviation under carbon tax and/or cap and trade schemes, then people can decide how much they're willing to pay for these emissions compared to other sector emissions. I would guess travel is something people value and would be willing to pay for, until there are better solutions available

Note: I say this as someone that travel quite a bit for work and leisure - I would definitely be penalized if I have to pay for my emissions

yongjik• 7 years ago

I don't think so - 2.5% is pretty significant. We only have to divide the total global emission into 40 pieces before each piece fall below 2.5%. Or, considering that total US emission is 14% of the world (2017), you just have to divide the whole nation into six sectors and claim each and every one is not significant enough, so that we have to focus on "something else". There's always some "something else".

Of course we have to be smart about our efforts, but it's time we stopped passing the buck around.

opportune2• 7 years ago

However, if you are a wealthy firstworlder businessman, air travel is likely your single biggest source of carbon emissions, aside from your car.

If you are a management consultant you probably produce more CO2 from air travel in a year than from all other CO2 sources in 5 years

jellicle• 7 years ago

The idea of "focus" is only meaningful if you are resource-constrained - my 3-person team can only do 3 things at once, so they must focus.

However, when talking about world climate actions, we have 7 billion people acting. There's no need to focus. We can cut air travel AND ALSO do everything else. And in fact we need to.

asdfadsfgfdda• 7 years ago

And imagine all of the benefits we get from only 2.5%.

More migration - the smartest researchers in photovoltaics can move to a city where they can make a bigger impact, and still visit their families. Even without migrating, researchers can collaborate across continents.

Increases economic productivity - when production stops at a nuclear plant, you can fly in parts/personnel quickly.

Economic development - if you couldn't fly in technical experts to China, how could you source components from there? Imagine how expensive lithium batteries would be if all components were made in western (expensive) countries. Teslas are fairly expensive, and they already source many parts from China.

The solutions for climate change requires technology and money. Why kill the economy with draconian measures? We need this economy to produce the solutions.

m4rtink3• 7 years ago

Not to mention people learning more about other countries, people and cultures from personal experience.

This can make them more rational and less prone to manipulation & hysteria than if they never left the town or country they were born in.

munificent• 7 years ago

This depends entirely on the distribution of the other categories.

Look at this like optimizing a program. If you do a profile and one function takes up 80% of the profile and everything else is a tiny fraction, sure, focus on that hot spot. But if you have many many slow functions and none is a clear hotspot, they all need attention, even the 2.5% one.

martamoreno2• 7 years ago

2.5% eh? We should all immediately stop flying... This is outrageous. Just imagine, 2.5%!!

But on a more serious note, this article is again wrong, like so many others about climate change. Being a combination of clickbait and false assumptions, it fails to miss the point entirely that first, 2.5% are irrelevant, but also that it makes no sense whatsoever to tackle this now. The technology is just not there yet.

What we urgently NEED to do is invest HUGE amounts of money into two key technologies. One is batteries. Make them as small, lightweight and efficient as possible. Pretty much everything depends on that and there has been no notable breakthrough in like forever... Without "super" batteries, we can kiss "preventing climate change" goodbye.

Another one is sucking the carbon out of the atmosphere. And no, we DON'T need to reduce our carbon emission, one of the key mistakes people make when it comes to climate change. What we need to do is to suck out more than we put in. There is no way in hell that 200 countries in the world agree on being C02 neutral. The leading countries need to suck the shit back out, that is the only way forward.

As for all the people who preach changing the entire world by reducing emissions... I mean, I get you are very naive, but seriously: It's not gonna happen. It is cute to have girl sail through the Atlantic to make so pep talk at congress. But it is also really meaningless. This is not the way the world will change. It never has. Politicians can't agree on the color of shit within their own country, not to mention between them.

The only way to avoid catastrophe is to outpace climate change with innovation. The world is not going to sacrifice living standards until they all drown in their own filth.

mveety• 7 years ago

Also if we suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere we could turn it into petrochemicals and fuel which would help with making existing things carbon neutral.

sokoloff6• 7 years ago

That's the most viable path to sustainable aviation (rather than electrifying the fleet).

funklute3• 7 years ago

Any time someone actually does the math on sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, it seemingly becomes clear that it is simply not scalable to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere. Have you done the math, and if so, why is everyone who comes to the aforementioned conclusion wrong?

nkohari• 7 years ago

There is an argument that it will become cheaper if more investment flows into the technology. For example, when solar power was originally conceived it wasn't cost-effective, but over the years it has seen tremendous gains in efficiency.

That said, I'm not educated on the topic well enough to say whether this argument applies to carbon sequestration.

bluejellybean• 7 years ago

I like the idea of getting to net neutral with carbon capture. I even did some napkin math about a month ago. I tried calculating the energy requirements to break the CO2 bond as to determine the number of solar panels you would need. To get net neutral with CO2 emissions you would need to spend something around $8.5 trillion and obtain around 84,584,490,753.28 of 300 watt, $100 panels! Note I did not calculate the cost of the actual carbon capture machines, just energy requirements. I think my number is perhaps still a bit low but I also think this is reasonably doable with global support.

quotemstr4• 7 years ago

These guys seem to have a viable approach to accelerated weathering, a form of carbon removal: https://projectvesta.org/

ddxxdd• 7 years ago

I have repeatedly heard scientists say that planting 1 trillion trees will singlehandedly set climate change back 10 years. I've done the math on that myself and found that such a plan is about 5000 times more cost-effective than driving Tesla vehicles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19714034

Anytime anybody says anything about the social cost of carbon being greater than $0.50 per ton, I just tune them out.

SketchySeaBeast2• 7 years ago

What if said super batteries and efficient sequestration never develop? Why isn't creating lower emission power supplies on your list? I understand that the batteries save green power for when it can't be produced, but if we could find other, better, low or zero emission power sources, wouldn't that be just as good?

I'm just confused why those are the two must have technologies, which don't yet exist, and not others, which also have yet to exist on the scale we need.

habnds2• 7 years ago

because that would require a change in personal behavior while the carbon sucking option means it's some scientist's problem and they have no personal responsibility

tick_tock_tick2• 7 years ago

Find other low or zero emission power sources is the same as "innovation is required to combat client change" as OP. Technically nuclear would be perfect but practically I fear that ship already sailed nothing else up an coming except maybe fusion has any potential as a real baseload powersource.

Without another breakthrough in battery technology solar and wind will never be more than the token effort they are today.

jcims• 7 years ago

What's the basic energy equation of sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere using state of the art today? In say megawatt hours per gigaton?

umvi2• 7 years ago

What's the basic energy equation of sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere using state of the art today?

Current state-of-the-art has the following equation[1]:

6CO2 + 6H20 + (photons) → C6H12O6 + 6O2

(sorry, I couldn't help myself, the setup was too good) But seriously, I doubt we can beat plants in terms of carbon sequestration efficiency.

[1] https://sciencing.com/photosynthesis-equation-6962557.html

dkural• 7 years ago

On a per dollar basis, sucking carbon out is the most expensive option. Economics dictates that there is lower hanging fruit & best to prevent / reduce CO2 emissions at concentrated sources than to suck out it from an extremely dispersed atmosphere. You're fighting against basic entropy (entropy always wins).

factsaresacred• 7 years ago

In economic terms, it's a classic tragedy of the commons scenario. Self-interest and inertia wins.

There's no way you're getting people to downgrade their present for some stranger's future without good incentives.

127• 7 years ago

It's not gonna happen

Not with that attitude. To elaborate: it's not black & white. You can definitely have a positive impact reducing emissions.

maximente• 7 years ago

yeah, betting on technology to solve immediate existential problems given minimal precedent isn't naive or anything. go ahead and post the projections on increased battery capacity, how we're going to find the rare earth material for constructing them all, and how clean tech will magically materialize that will not spike emissions while we build tons of magical unicorn stuff to save the world.

you're the naive one, not whoever you're calling out here.

usaar3334• 7 years ago

The leading countries need to suck the shit back out, that is the only way forward

Its almost certainly for the leading countries to cut emissions and coerce the noncompliers into compliance.

eanzenberg• 7 years ago

Plant trees

_Microft• 7 years ago

Here's two questions for you which are not hard to answer but, frankly, I do not expect to read the answers here. Why? Because it would show how utterly wrong the suggestion of carbon sequestration for solving this problem was.

First: how much mass (i.e. kg or tons) of C0_2 is emitted per year?

Second: what is the total mass of concrete produced per year worldwide?

(This is only an exercise to give parent poster an idea of the scale btw)

TeMPOraL7• 7 years ago

Re your first question, quick googling suggests some 37 billion tons of CO₂ per year. So sure, that's a lot. But then again, not that lot.

Instead of asking questions, why don't you tell us why we couldn't possibly sequester that much carbon annually? How big is the divide between what we could do and what needs to be done?

(I must say the idea of sequestering carbon seems emotionally appealing to me because it turns the problem into something much more tangible. You're not going to get people to cut their CO₂ emissions enough to matter without pushing for a strong emission taxing (which I'm also a fan of). Lowering your living standards doesn't feel like it's accomplishing much vs. the pain involved. Sequestering CO₂ would turn the problem into a numbers game, "how many tons is our country pulling out of the atmosphere, and where do we throw the money to get that number up?".)

ScottBurson• 7 years ago

I don't know about carbon capture, but I do think we should be researching sulfur aerosols and iron fertilization. See Oliver Morton's excellent book The Planet Remade.

jbattle• 7 years ago

I'm betting on sulfur aerosols. The energy requirements are modest, the impact is apparently relatively reversible, the side effects seem less potentially catastrophic than iron fertilization.

I look at the street outside my office and simply can't picture us deploying enough carbon capture machines to offset how much we're pumping into the air. I hope I'm wrong.

rb8082• 7 years ago

I agree carbon sucking is the only thing that can put the greenhouse effect into reverse.

But imagine if you could have an electricity powered machine that takes out C02 and turns it into solid dense carbon? That is pretty much the opposite of a coal burning power station. With today's technology it would be much simpler to reduce coal burning than taking C02 out of the air.

BTW China alone is building a new coal-burning power station every two weeks. https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2019/03/28/china-new-coal-p...

Aloha• 7 years ago

This is what humanity does best, we innovate our way out of problems (often ones we created in the first place)

tunesmith• 7 years ago

Why are you arguing "A instead of B" when we can do "A and B"?

m4rtink3• 7 years ago

Yeah, this seems to me like the only real no bloody solution of this problem. It basically boils down to energy - we need to have a lot more from sources that don't produce CO2 - likely massive solar or nuclear deployments.

Once you have that, not just CO2 capture but many other similar problmes are quite easy to solve without having to put pressure on people to change the way of their live.

You can even periodically turn part of the captured CO2 into jet fuel, effectively making all planes battery powered (with Earth's atmosphere being the battery).

andrepd• 7 years ago

What about fusion power? It's the dream energy source: the fuel is seawater, the waste is slightly lighter seawater. It seems the perfect target for a Manhattan project/moonshot sort of effort. Giving several teams with competing designs $100B each to develop and test their reactor, in parallel. The potential benefit of near-free clean energy is so absolutely world-changing that it seems worth it to spend on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars to develop it.

dTal2• 7 years ago

It seems the perfect target for a Manhattan project/moonshot sort of effort.

It would be funny, if it weren't tragic, how "manhattan project" and "moonshot" are the bywords for absurdly expensive government projects. Both these things were peanuts compared to the staggering amounts that politicians routinely fart away on practically overnight whims, for dubious and very likely corrupt reasons:

Manhattan project: $23 billion

Trump's wall: $22 billion

Moonshot: $288 billion

2008 bailouts: $700 billion

All US fusion research investment ever: ~$30 billion

Iraq war: $2 trillion

Vomzor• 7 years ago

Some links to prove carbon capture is not just some fairy tale.

A Canadian company, called Carbon Engineering, has published peer-reviewed findings, which show the process (carbon capture) can now be done for less than $100 per ton. This is a major improvement on current estimates of $600 per ton.[1]
In 2016, Hollub became the first female CEO of a major international oil company. ... Hollub’s leadership has brought about a change in thinking. She realized that the company’s carbon-capture expertise could be used not just to make profits for shareholders but also to do climate good. That’s why Hollub is confident that Oxy can become carbon neutral, and why she was sitting at a table in Edinburgh, Scotland in November 2018 with Carbon Engineering’s Oldham. As of this year, Carbon Engineering has raised about $100 million, including about $15 million of government funds. Carbon also counts oil major Chevron and mining giant BHP as investors[2]
Crystalline nets harvest water from desert air, turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel ... a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, reported that he and his colleagues have created a solar-powered device that could provide water for millions in water-stressed regions. At its heart is a porous crystalline material, known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), that acts like a sponge: It sucks water vapor out of air, even in the desert, and then releases it as liquid water. ... By mixing and matching the metals and linkers, researchers found they could tailor the pores to capture gas molecules, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide (CO2).[3]
Net Power, a startup that built the world’s first zero-emissions fossil-fuel power plant in Texas. Earlier this year, Net Power fired up a $150-million power plant that burns natural gas but has the ability to capture 100% of its carbon emissions.[4]

[1] http://www.climateaction.org/news/breakthrough-made-in-lower...

[2]https://qz.com/1638096/the-story-behind-the-worlds-first-lar...

[3]https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/crystalline-nets-har...

[4]https://qz.com/1456378/occidental-petroleum-is-now-an-invest...

lutorm• 7 years ago

Given that switching to renewable energy is already becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels, while CCS is a pure cost, what makes you think a major investment in CCS is more likely than reducing emissions in the first place?

perfunctory• 7 years ago

What we need to do is to suck out more than we put in.

Doesn’t it violate the first law of thermodynamics or something like that?

megaremote2• 7 years ago

Your idea is never change what we are doing? Crazy.

rolltiide• 7 years ago

This is sad to read as the budget airlines are really just taking off.

So many people are just getting to obtain some of their travel dreams and now they have to stop :(

bmmayer1• 7 years ago

What's the tradeoff? How many people aren't driving because flying is cheaper? What is the economic efficiency gained by air travel and how does that translate into emissions?

A cost number without a benefit number is completely useless for real analysis.

ahelwer• 7 years ago

It is an interesting exercise to ask people to imagine a world without air travel. Where you can't just appear halfway around the world at the drop of a hat. Travel again becomes the domain of boats & trains.

To almost anyone you talk to, banning air travel sounds completely ridiculous. In reality it wouldn't be enough by itself. It's on the lower end of action that is required.

creaghpatr• 7 years ago

Or we invent solar-powered planes. Not feasible yet, but who knows.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

there's one but it's a single passenger unit

russdill2• 7 years ago

Solar powered planes are a feasible engineering challenge. The engineering challenge is making synthetic aviation fuels from electricity. Once that is solved, it's just a matter of installing production plants in areas were solar is most productive.

tomschlick• 7 years ago

The planes don't have to be solar powered, just electric. Leave the energy generation to the ground. The next problem would definitely be the weight of batteries though.

habnds2• 7 years ago

if prices accurately reflected costs not flying would start to seem a lot more practical

usaar3334• 7 years ago

Like most things with climate change, it's not about banning X action. It's about discouraging it.

The more accurate question is how does everyone respond if the cost of flying doubles?

How many business trips can be handled by VC? How many personal trips provide similar value being taken closer to home?

TeMPOraL7• 7 years ago

Business clients wouldn't mind that much. But it would kill a good chunk of tourism industry (and good riddance). Tickets for leisure flights are ridiculously cheap nowadays.

saalweachter2• 7 years ago

This is kind of only true if you're the sort of person who flies a lot.

If you're someone who never flies, or flies once every year or two, it's not really a big deal at all. On the rare occasion I travel transcontinental I would need to set aside 3 days each way for travel instead of one, which would be inconvenient but not really a huge problem. Even if my transoceanic freight exclusively went by boat, it wouldn't be a big difference in my life. I already don't care about having the latest electronic gadgets as soon as they can be delivered from their factories.

Even two weeks to cruise across the Atlantic and a month across the Pacific (if you ignore the emissions of cruise ships for a moment) isn't really a deal-breaker on your once-in-a-lifetime vacation to another continent, either as part of your elaborate honeymoon or as part of your retirement.

claytoneast• 7 years ago

That is absolutely 100% a dealbreaker when you have 2-4 weeks of paid vacation a year.

frakkingcylons2• 7 years ago

There are probably millions of people in the US alone with family overseas. Set aside a month just to travel there? Be real.

tonyedgecombe2• 7 years ago

If you want to know what a world with a lot less air travel is like ask your grandparents.

christophilus• 7 years ago

I’d prefer that world, hands down.

alexhutcheson• 7 years ago

Substituting to travel by boat would almost definitely increase carbon output, unless you mean sailboats. Carbon output is the integral of emissions/hour over time, and a comparable boat trip could take weeks.

High speed rail is also not as great as people think - true HSR uses a pretty huge amount of electricity, which has to come from somewhere. Conventional (aka medium-speed) rail on electrified tracks is probably the sweet spot for efficiency, but the travel times aren't going to make most people happy.

More realistically, the solution in a world where carbon is "properly" priced would be that people travel a lot less overall.

graeme• 7 years ago

Can't read due to paywall, but does the 2.5% figure include the worse effect high altitude emissions have? I believe the best estimate is a doubling.

jonsen• 7 years ago

It’s a rich world which can afford constantly having several million of its people sitting in a chair elevated six miles.

dehrmann4• 7 years ago

No, it's a world with cheap energy.

gcheong• 7 years ago

Deregulation of the airlines put air travel within reach of regular people to the point where it is now a commodity and nobody cares about anything but getting the cheapest flight. Growing up it was unusual for my parents to take a flight anywhere for vacation. Even by themselves. Nowadays it seems unusual for people not to take the entire family even overseas for a jaunt. Which certainly makes our lives richer. Time will tell if we can find a balance to the costs incurred.

yread• 7 years ago

Grounding of MAX could have an effect as lots of airlines kept old gas guzzlers flying longer than they planned - or they contracted some shady companies with 30 year old 733s and 734s

quotemstr4• 7 years ago

There's a cavernous gap between the apocalyptic rhetoric from climate activists and the brittle, ineffective policy they actually promote. If climate activists really believed that climate change were a near-term catastrophic threat, they'd jump on the change to reduce emissions using whatever techniques and technology worked. "Geoengineering? Great! Nuclear power? Great!" --- that's what someone genuinely concerned about the climate would say.

Instead, climate activists promote a very narrow Utopian vision and work against everything that falls outside this vision. These activists don't really care about the environment: they're using climate activism as a pretext for advancing some Utopian project and putting themselves in charge of how we all live. These people are discrediting all climate science in the eyes of regular people.

russdill2• 7 years ago

"them"

asokoloski• 7 years ago

I'm a climate activist, and I can't control how others act, but I'm in favor of, like you say, anything that works.

The Citizens' Climate Lobby is focusing on a carbon fee and dividend. I'm new to the movement (so take what I say with a grain of salt) but I like what I see so far. We're very focused on one particular legislative approach, not because other things won't help, but because it's hard enough getting legislation like H.R. 763 through congress already, and distractions dilute our precious time and energy. So the CCL is pushing on just this one bill, which we think is the most effective approach for us.

But I'd love to see people work on everything and everything. I just think it's probably most effective for most organizations to focus on a relatively narrow area.

rhinoceraptor• 7 years ago

The environmental movement has a lot to answer for, for setting back progress of nuclear power by decades.

algaeontoast• 7 years ago

Why would people stop flying...?

What, the "solution" is going to be blimp travel, boat travel, undersea super train travel...

Maybe we should make air travel so expensive that only the rich can use it!

tombert2• 7 years ago

I fly fairly frequently to California from NY for work, lately after reading a few articles like this, I wonder if I should put my foot down to my manager and tell them that I'm not going to anymore until flying is less terrible for the atmosphere.

I don't think I'll be fired for that, and even if I were I'd probably be able to find another job without too much trouble at this point, but I feel a bit bad for people don't have this option.

NOTE: I realize I'm hardly a beacon of "how to save the world from climate change", but I do try and do a bit where I can; I take public transit almost exclusively and do not own a car, and I have stopped eating beef and pork. I still order a lot of stuff from China online, which is probably the next habit I should break.

bjelkeman-again• 7 years ago

I did change. I dropped from 35-40 flights in 12 months (really not good, in more ways than one) to 3-4. Still too many. But getting there.

tombert2• 7 years ago

I think people are too quick to dismiss incremental progress; you dropped by 90%, that sounds pretty excellent to me!

Accacin• 7 years ago

I try to be concious, I cycle to work or use tram if I can't cycle. I'm vegan and I also use Project Wren to try an offset what I can.

However, my wife is Chinese so of course she wants to see her family once a year. That means at least four flights. However we usually take the opportunity to travel whilst we're in China which adds another two flights each.

To balance this, we usually try to holiday in the UK when we can, which of course means we don't need to fly.

kaybe4• 7 years ago

If you can't stop completely that easily reducing would also be a good start and maybe easier to achieve.

edit: Another parameter you have control over is the amount of luggage you bring. A 30kg luggage allowance is a considerable fraction of most people's weight. Sure, they will fill the plane up with other things, but at least that's not on you.

toomuchtodo• 7 years ago

Another option would be to obtain approval for expensing carbon offsets for unavoidable flights.

TheSpiceIsLife3• 7 years ago

I’d probably start with raising the corner with the manager.

There could be a cost saving in reducing flights as well, so the issue could be framed a way the presents multiple benefits.

smt88• 7 years ago

Put your foot down if you can without any consequences.

Otherwise, keep your (presumably) high-paying job and use your money on political donations.

The invisible hand is not going to solve climate change.

noonespecial• 7 years ago

Well, it will, but the way it does so is to wait a long time and then deliver the solution all at once as a giant slap to humanity's face.

tylerpachal• 7 years ago

It would be great if more people did this. In my opinion, air travel is pretty low hanging fruit when it comes reducing personal carbon footprints. I'll spend some time closer to home rather than hopping across the ocean/continent for every vacation.

Robotbeat8• 7 years ago

I think getting an electric car is even lower hanging. No change in lifestyle, a similar total cost of ownership, but a factor of 2.5-3x lower emissions with even the current grid (and effectively zero emissions in the future grid we'll need anyway).

(Plus now you can go on emissions-free road trips.)

esotericn4• 7 years ago

Do it. I'm happy to be your accountability partner if that means anything.

I am planning to limit flying to absolute emergencies (think: my parents die and I need to get to the funeral).

I live in a country which has an almost renewable grid. Long journeys can be made by electric car, public transport (which can be electrified), trains, etc.

The highest carbon output from my lifestyle is heating the home, and the embodied emissions of products that are difficult for me to control (I think embedded CO2 on labels, or carbon pricing, etc would be a great idea).

I already fund offsetting efforts, I posted earlier[1] to crowdfund ideas on how I should spend more.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21024358

Why should we do this? Because we can. Because limitless consumption does not make a happy life.

I think that wealthy, or moderately well off, or whatever you want to call it - we people have an obligation to do this. Call it the modern noblesse oblige.

triceratops2• 7 years ago

Ask if your manager if you can expense carbon offsets for all your business flying.

tempsy3• 7 years ago

Can we start by banning the cruise ship industry first? I cannot think of a mode of transportation and form of leisure that is as useless and ecologically damaging.

sp3323• 7 years ago

Well there's a new low-sulphur fuel regulation coming into effect in a few months. http://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/Pages/MEPC-... That will help with some of the pollution anyway.

tempsy3• 7 years ago

That doesn't exactly solve the problem of cruise ships dumping raw waste into the ocean.

blondie9x2• 7 years ago

I work remote and can pretty much be anywhere anytime working. But I try to be content and focus on where I chose to live. To build relationships and deeper connections to the local community. I try to do one trip a year max by plane and when I go its usually for longer periods of time. We should travel less and focus more on the place we call home.

When people tell me they love to travel. I reply why? It's usually I want to get away or I'm sick of where I am now in my life. Try to understand this feeling deeper and think about how you can better structure your life to appreciate the moment and where you choose to build yourself and your community. People also sometimes describe travel as a sort of escape. It's important to try and understand that feeling deeper. Why do you need to escape from your life as it is now?

j-pb• 7 years ago

If I take the train, which is the most green transport (CO2 neutral) from one edge of europe to the other (e.g. Berlin to Sicily), the amount I pay is 500 euros and it takes me 35 hours.

If I fly the same distance it takes me 3 hours, and I pay 100 euros.

Heres the kicker, it costs me 100 euro to buy CO2 compensation and make the flight CO2 neutral, and whenever me and my spouse fly we always pay twice that so that we are actually carbon negative.

So everytime we fly we reduce the earths CO2 by one flight and still have 200 euros more in our bank account.

egdod• 7 years ago

Where do you buy your carbon offsets? What actually happens to the money that you spend on them?

gjasny• 7 years ago

For example at atmosfair: https://www.atmosfair.de/en/

Their website lists some CO2 compensation projects.

frakkingcylons2• 7 years ago

I've used COTAP in the past: https://cotap.org/

alex_young• 7 years ago

That sounds great, but how do you manage to offset 2 flights? I don't really understand how money can undo putting a bunch of carbon in the atmosphere.

Robotbeat8• 7 years ago

You're paying for pulling the carbon back out. The cheapest way to do this is to pay someone to plant trees for you.

dr_dshiv3• 7 years ago

Can't we put some chemicals in the fuel to mitigate the warming effects? Just do it secretly, so the chemtrails people don't freak.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_inject...

tobib2• 7 years ago

Have you learned nothing from the movie "Snowpiercer"?

jnwatson• 7 years ago

The silly dystopian arguments against climate engineering are facile.

Do you think the first attempt will be done at global scale? No, it will be done first at small scale, and then larger and larger.

There is no reasonable scenario in which we would be surprised by the impact of climate engineering.

blondie9x2• 7 years ago

Carbon offsets are completely useless. https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-offsets/inconv... there are better ways to protect the environment.

dr_dshiv3• 7 years ago

Just carbon tax it as an externality, so we can get on with life.

kylek• 7 years ago

Any ideas how much of a contributor (domestic) air freight is compared to shipping via train/truck? (Is the volume of goods currently shipped through either method even comparable? This is way out of my realm!)

blunte7• 7 years ago

If you need to travel long distances, there's little substitute for an airplane.

If air travel accounts for less emissions than passenger cars, and if the top 15 polluting large container ships produce as much (noxious oxides of nitrogen and sulphur) pollution as all cars, then we need to fix shipping first.

And if you look at a lot of the crap that is being shipped, it's stuff we just don't need. A lot of things are replaced frequently with cheap and short-lived new things, so there's plenty of room to reduce the amount of shipping.

We should also focus on trains and electric buses to reduce the amount of car use. Some parts of the world already do. And after spending many years commuting in heavy Texas road traffic, I much prefer European train/metro/tram (and even bus) travel. Oh, and bikes and feet for the last 1-2km.

mehrdadn9• 7 years ago

If you need to travel long distances, there's little substitute for an airplane.

The emphasis here isn't on substitute, it's on "need". Not many people need to travel long distances on a regular basis; they're just made to believe they need do.

loeg3• 7 years ago

Price in the carbon and let consumers decide if they still need the travel. I expect a carbon offset tax wouldn't actually decrease air travel that much -- there's so much business travel that needs doing -- but it probably would slow down growth.

TulliusCicero4• 7 years ago

People traveling, the tourism that is so often bemoaned, is a huge part of the connections between countries, a huge part of diversity and understanding.

A world with greatly reduced air travel is a more insular and less understanding world.

loeg3• 7 years ago

(And little substitute for burning hydrocarbons as airplane propellant. Energy density and stuff like fire safety really really matters in aviation.)

Totally agree that air travel is one of the last places to look for carbon savings. That said, carbon offset taxes should be applied where they are not already. The market can price this cost in and judge whether the value is there, if the incentives are structured correctly.

snowwrestler• 7 years ago

An area of research that I don't hear much about is creating hydrocarbon fuels for applications that really need them, like airplanes. Essentially, using hydrocarbons as a chemical battery instead of an out-of-the-ground energy source.

As with any contributor to climate change, the issue is not burning the fuel, the issue is that the fuel is bringing new carbon out of the ground into today's carbon cycle. Hydrocarbons generated in real time from carbon currently in the environment, using carbon-free energy[1], would not contribute to global warming.

The chemistry is complicated and presumably it would take a tremendous amount of energy to do so. I think I read that the Navy was exploring it for aircraft carriers--which have plenty of energy thanks to redundant nuclear power plants onboard, and obviously would benefit from being able to generate more jet fuel whenever they need it.

[1] I know there is not really such a thing yet; nuclear, wind, even solar panels take fossil fuel to make today. But in theory man-made jet fuel would decouple the end use from the generation, allowing planes to keep flying the same way they always have, while cleaner fuel generation could incrementally supplant new oil in the supply chain.

opportune2• 7 years ago

All of these can be fixed with carbon taxes going towards a carbon offset program. At the end of the day we still need cheap plastic shit so just fully price in the externalities

triceratops2• 7 years ago

At the end of the day we still need cheap plastic shit

Do we though? Especially in the quantities that we currently consume?

tempsy3• 7 years ago

Surprised I haven't seen anyone mention Hyperloop yet. I think if any of the major Hyperloop companies are able to realize their vision then traveling city center to city center by Hyperloop would be a much preferable substitute to air travel for most intercontinental travel.

bt8483• 7 years ago

Even if Hypeloop worked, which hasn't been demonstrated, its nameplate capacity is close to zero. It can optimistically replace one highway lane. It cannot possibly displace air travel unless you have dozens of tubes. Each of the Bay Area's three airports averages about 3-4x the passengers that a hypeloop might be capable of moving, and that's averaged over the whole year. Peak day/hour air travel can never be replaced with hypeloop.

Ordinary steel-wheel high-speed rail can do it, though. There are many stations in the world that can move 100k pax/hour.

bt8483• 7 years ago

You seem to have conflated CO2 with other pollutants. All the world's shipping taken together amounts to only 3% of the carbon emission inventory. It certainly is not the case that 15 ships emit more carbon than all cars.

jdc• 7 years ago

Where does the 3% figure come from? It's not clear to me that we have or are even trying to get accurate sea-based emissions inventory.

Supermancho• 7 years ago

It certainly is not the case that 15 ships emit more carbon than all cars.

That is correct. However, the pollutants that the referenced ships produce are far more hazardous (immediately) and in greater volumes than many countries produce (in aggregate) per year. To put it in perspective...warning: this is an analogy that mixes metaphors:

Talking about CO2 emissions while Nuclear Waste is constantly being pumped into the ocean is shuffling the deck chairs.

saalweachter2• 7 years ago

... then we need to fix shipping first.

The problem with this logic is that we aren't one person looking at a bug tracker queue deciding one to tackle next. We are a civilization.

We need to fix everything all at once, as quickly as possible.

If shipping is a problem, fix it now.

If air travel is a problem, fix it now.

If grid electric is a problem, fix it now.

If automotive emissions are a problem, fix it now.

We are many; we can do much.

blunte7• 7 years ago

Fair enough, but unless are organized, we often feel like individuals with little power.

esotericn4• 7 years ago

Right. 7 billion people is an unfathomable amount.

You don't understand what it means. I don't understand what it means.

A person can tackle a bug in a tracker.

A company can tackle a bug tracker.

A few cities' worth can tackle manufacturing the computer.

The world? We got this. All in.

If we're enough to fuck it up, we're enough to sort it out.

js84• 7 years ago

Actually, there are substitutes. People who need to travel (and most of them don't) can just use trains or ships, and make the overall stay longer (decreasing overall number of trips). It was already possible more than 100 years ago, and it would be much less of a problem in today's digital economy.

wongarsu• 7 years ago

Trains are an option, but ships seem equally bad or worse than planes for transporting people

jalgos_eminator• 7 years ago

There's only so much time each day, and a plane gets you to your destination so much faster. Trains? Maybe for shorter trips like NYC to Philadelphia or DC, but NYC to Seattle? A train going 150mph would take 19 hours for that trip not counting stops. It would probably be more than 30 hours with stops, and significantly longer if the train can't average 150 mph. The flight is 6 hours gate to gate. You can't beat the speed of modern air travel, its just so much better than any other alternative.

And no, most people can't just work from literally anywhere on a ship or train. That probably isn't even workable for a remote programmer let alone a marketing manager, welder, electrician, office assistant, salesperson, etc.

einpoklum• 7 years ago

Oh, and bikes and feet for the last 1-2km.

1. Bikes work for the last 0-5km easily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands

2. Don't forget lightweight electric micro-cars for the disabled. i.e. like this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canta_(vehicle)

but electric.

marcosdumay• 7 years ago

noxious oxides of nitrogen and sulphur

People keep repeating that. Nobody cares about nitrogen and sulfur oxides on deep sea. Good luck trying to even find evidence it's locally harmful to organisms (most likely, it isn't). At the extent that people are against ship emissions, it's about what they emit at the coast, and that is a very small share of that total you cite.

Ships are quite clean of the pollutants that matter. They beat planes on CO2 emission by a huge margin.

blunte7• 7 years ago

There's a great number of humans that live in coastal areas affected by shipping pollution. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1440801/

From that publication, "About 98% of the particles emitted from diesel engines are less than 10 microns in diameter (PM10)" -> that gets into your lungs and potentially into your bloodstream.

arcticbull2• 7 years ago

Shipping is the single most efficient way to move anything, followed by trains.

blunte7• 7 years ago

That entirely depends on how you define efficient. In pure immediate financial cost, yes - because the negative consequences of shipping are not borne by the shipping companies or their immediate customers.

And of course, there is also the question of whether it is necessary to ship all the goods that we ship. For example, the Netherlands is the second largest agricultural exporter in the world. Beyond the standard farming fields, there are immense plots of greenhouses - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...

Yet, if you go to the grocery stores here, you'll find a lot of produce from Brazil and other overseas sources. That's because it's more cost effective, when total costs are not considered, to grow high quality produce here and export it, then import cheaper produce (not necessarily low quality, but just lower cost) from overseas.

m4632• 7 years ago

I remember reading years and years ago that teleconferencing would really change once we put a panel at the end of a conference table with life size images of the participants.

Teleconferencing now isn't what it could be. I think if it were a little bit higher-end it might eliminate a number of physical trips.

I mean, it IS doing that now on laptops all over the world, but I mean make it Telepresence instead of Teleconferencing.

martyvis• 7 years ago

We actually had these in our office at HP. https://youtu.be/TC4sNztp8dk They were quite well used by execs, but those of us at the bottom end probably only a couple of times for virtual team meetings. They were very expensive, to get the high end video (think 2008). As soon as you have one or two remote attendees though the point of it goes away. After the demerger, building shuffles, they were decommissioned

frereubu• 7 years ago

"If air travel accounts for less emissions than passenger cars..."

I presume you're talking absolutes, but ICE cars (particularly the more fuel efficient ones in Europe) produce less CO2 emissions per passenger mile that planes as far as I understand it, particularly cars with multiple occupancy. I live with my Spanish wife in the UK, and our family goes to see her parents in northern Spain once a year. Having done the calculations it's way better for the three of us to drive than fly.

I also don't agree with the idea that you need to fix one thing before the others - why not try to fix all of them? I don't think it's beyond our ability to tackle more than one thing at a time. The issue here is that emissions from air travel are accelerating - if we do nothing now that will just get worse.

megaremote2• 7 years ago

when we need to fix shipping first.

Yes, lets only focus on one problem at a time, right? We are only one person after all.

c0nfused• 7 years ago

I haven't gotten around the paywall to read the article but the last stats from the US government I can find, 2017 show that aviation has reduced emissions 7.5 percent compared to 1990.

Medium and heavy truck emissions are UP 89.5 percent in the same period but aviation is the crisis. Passenger cars up 20%.

Let's look at Tg emissions in 2017 Aviation: 174.8 On road vehicles 1,558.6

Source: https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P100WUHR.pdf page 2

Lramseyer• 7 years ago

One thing that's very important to keep in mind when looking at air travel emissions is how fuel efficient planes actually are. The math works out to around 100 miles per gallon per passenger. And at an underwhelming 2.5% of global emissions, I can't really put it in the category of "low hanging fruit."

That's not to say that we shouldn't invest in things like high speed rail, (because we absolutely will see quality of life improvements for North America) but I'm more excited about improvements in vehicle transportation and energy production.

reaperducer• 7 years ago

The math works out to around 100 miles per gallon per passenger.

That assumes maximum passenger load, I assume.

At maximum passenger load, my car gets 170 miles per gallon per passenger.

A giant, gas-guzzling Chevy Suburban gets 198 miles per gallon per passenger.

I don't think "per gallon per passenger" is a useful measure.

ojagodzinski• 7 years ago

your car is full probably 5% of a time, airlines have profits from full planes, you don't.

"per gallon per passenger" is a useful measure for planes.

sokoloff6• 7 years ago

I think it is.

Freight is typically measured in cargo-ton-miles per gallon. I can't think of a reason to measure airline travel in other than passenger-miles per gallon. (You have to do it "as flown" and "as driven" for the comparison to be meaningful, but it's pretty rare for me to see anything under a 90% full flight lately with the economy booming.)

djmips• 7 years ago

Just feel like pointing out that airplanes are flown maximum passenger load or close to it as much as possible whereas you can see just by looking around in traffic that passenger cars are mainly driven with one person inside.

marsokod• 7 years ago

That is the value with something close to capacity, but most importantly assuming worse case for weight. And weight has a bigger effect on the consumption on a plane than on a car. So if your plane has less passengers, the MPG of the plane increases, though the MPG/passenger decreases. And it is also mainly for cruise - the longer the travel, the better the efficiency. Taking off and climbing is not that efficient so short haul trip are quite bad.

To me the point is that an airplane MPG/passenger is of the same magnitude as the MPG/passenger for an individual car. What is bad is not necessarily the plane itself, but the fact we do very long distance trips. Trains and buses can be more efficient, carbone-wise, but requires a traffic big enough to offset the carbone cost of the infrastructure needed.

nateburke• 7 years ago

Yes, while 100 mpg per passenger is roughly 2x the best hybrid car, the presence of air travel as an option, especially in a business context allows individuals to accrue many orders of magnitude _more miles_.

MPG per passenger is the wrong unit.

Gallons per person per hour of active transport seems like a better unit to measure.

For example, say your non-hybrid car gets 30 mpg, and you average 30 miles per hour between city/highway, you're at 1 gallon per hour per passenger, assuming 1 person per car.

For air travel averaging out at 500 mph, the 100 miles per gallon per passenger equates to 5 gallons per hour per passenger.

So you would need to pack a plane with 5x the number of people that the 100 mpg number was measured at to even COME CLOSE to hitting the miles/passenger-hour of a non-hybrid car driven by a single driver.

That's a crowded plane.

Robotbeat8• 7 years ago

Passenger-hour is not an appropriate metric here. passenger-miles is.

But I should point out here that electric cars usually get 100mpge or better. And it's already feasible to do road trips in a Tesla. I'll be doing a (short) road trip with my first-gen Leaf.

For domestic trips, we can replace air travel with regional electric buses in the near term and electric airplanes in the mid-term. In the far-term, we can do even long-haul air travel using lithium-air batteries or very high performance lithium/sulfur or lithium metal anode batteries and extremely efficient airframes and multiple hops. That'd be faster and cheaper (at least in the US with high infrastructure costs) than high speed rail.

IanCal• 7 years ago

That's a very odd measure. That would put driving the car at 15mph getting 20mpg as better than 30mph getting 30mpg.

scarejunba2• 7 years ago

The manual choice of what is low-hanging fruit is a path to failure. Instead, we should just tax the emission of the dangerous substance. So today, we'll do CO2. After a while, we'll include CH4. Then with a total cap on carbon, we allow the market to trade the right to carbon.

This will allow money to flow to the right places.

petermcneeley• 7 years ago

If your implementation means that a person in the third world cannot afford a fire to cook meals but a person in the first world can afford a huge fire pit for cooking marshmallows I would say you are well on your way to creating a dystopia. But hey perhaps they could pay for their emissions using those digital microloans!

robocat• 7 years ago

There’s a simple metric: how much you spend on petrol versus paying for flights.

dhdicbxkcjc3• 7 years ago

Big deal; it’s a bus with wings. My seven seat SUV gets 210 passenger mpg.

But if I vacation with my SUV, I’ll go 600 mi. away as an absolute maximum or about a days worth of driving. That’s 7.5 gal per person for my family of four

If I take a plane, I’ll stick to a 24 hr travel limit. Which will get me a third the way across the world, or 83 gal for every member of my family.

In scenario 1, I’m a redneck with a family in Virginia Beach.

In scenario 2 I’m an enlightened cosmopolitan in Machu Pichu

AcerbicZero• 7 years ago

I can no longer take any of these articles seriously. The hysteria around climate change precludes the possibility of reasoned rational discourse on the topic, and as such political solutions are all but impossible.

newnewpdro• 7 years ago

When interpreting statements like "Over all, air travel accounts for about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions", keep in mind that air travel emissions are higher impact due to occurring in the upper atmosphere. The commonly established multiplier is 2.7X [0].

So while the claim is 2.5% of global co2 emissions, in terms of impact it's more like ~6.7%.

And growing, largely just so people can take selfies in different places, which are then used to promote more travel via social media.

We need to tax fuel used for international air travel. The Chicago Convention [1] may have made sense in establishing the industry but we're well past that point now. Make this high-speed, high-impact transportation method high-cost so it's used less frivolously.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_(travel)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Convention_on_Internat...

Robotbeat8• 7 years ago

I'm convinced we need zero emissions aircraft. Efficiency improvements alone are going to suffer from the Jevons Paradox. In fact, that "paradox" could help explain why air travel emissions have increased so much even as aircraft have gotten much more efficient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

So to avoid the Jevons Paradox, we need actually zero emissions aircraft. Battery-electric or possibly hydrogen are the main contenders, here.

Battery-electric in the near term is limited to about 1000km, maybe 2000km range. That's technically enough to do transatlantic crossings if you stop by Greenland and Iceland or possibly the Azores. And you could do transpacific by following the Aleutians. Pretty much the hardest place to visit is actually Hawaii. But for domestic flights, battery-electric is actually a superior option to high speed rail in the US. Typical HSR routes in the US are only about 300 miles or so, well within range of existing electric battery tech that could be adapted to airplanes, and even a fully subsonic, Mach 0.5 propeller-drive electric airplane would be much faster than even the fastest practical HSR. And operating at high altitude (with far lower air density) would mean that the electric aircraft would be more efficient than a hypothetical Mach 0.5 high speed train. But all of this will require probably non-traditional aircraft makers. The duopoly is culturally unprepared for the kind of radical engineering necessary to make a 1000km battery electric aircraft feasible (almost sailplane-like efficiency, combined with very high battery mass fraction, combined with extremely efficient battery packaging, state of the art structural mass, and transition to higher performance chemistry where possible).

Liquid hydrogen is also a possibility for electric air travel. Compressed room temperature hydrogen is hardly more energy-dense than battery-electric, though, so you're going to have to go at least cryogenic, if not liquid, for hydrogen storage. Liquid hydrogen wouldn't be too bad in this application since the time of storage wouldn't be too long, and the scale would be large enough (if used in a widebody aircraft) that boil-off may not be too much of a problem (besides, you need a constant feed of hydrogen anyway). But a big problem is the fact that anthropogenic high altitude water vapor is maybe even worse (by a factor of 2) for climate change than CO2, so you'd probably want to condense the output. That means using fuel cells and then storing the condensed water on board and doing occasional low altitude dumps (it may even be feasible to store the water for the entire trip, dumping only right before you land) or perhaps freezing the condensate into pellets (small enough to not pose a lethal hazard but large enough to not evaporate on the way down) and then dropping them along the way. So long-haul air is a major challenge.

finchisko• 7 years ago

If you need to travel long distances, there's little substitute for an airplane.

the question if the distance you travel doesn't have substitute. like many business people travel just to meet, which has zero carbon alternative - video call.

nitwit005• 7 years ago

More efficient aircraft generally means cheaper flights, which unfortunately also means more flights. The efficiency may well make things worse.

I'd actually prefer if air travel was more expensive. It's become expected that you fly groups of people across the continent to business meetings, and some people make regular flights.

cma• 7 years ago

Is it more from leisure (maybe due to Instagram vacation sharing, etc.), or business use?

Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

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