barunio

By your logic, a government official saying "you can not kill your neighbor" is inciting violence because there is an implicit threat of the use of force if you do not comply. A government official ever referencing the enforcement of any law would be inciting violence.

Your interpretation of the phrase "inciting violence" is not remotely useful or common. Humans are not machines and language is not the same as computer code. There is social context implicit in the interpretation of the words we use.

You are massively underestimating the environmental impacts. Every form of plastic in widespread use has been found to be a significant endocrine disruptor. The rate of plastic waste has followed an exponential curve similar to emissions. Plastics are likely on the same order of magnitude as climate change and deforestation in terms of the long-term impact on species extinction (and to human health, if that is of greater concern).

Actually, no. You might say this about metals, for example, but nature does not produce the sort of high-energy low-information hydrocarbon chains that comprise nearly all plastics. Inserting massive quantities of manmade endocrine disruptors into the earth is massively disruptive.

This is a dangerously specious argument. Industry manufactures items for consumers. Textiles, specifically, are rarely intermediate materials in or byproducts of manufacturing. If you believe otherwise, in opposition to the EPA, news media, and common experience, please enlighten us all with actual facts regarding not-consumer textile use and what portion of the waste stream this represents. Otherwise this gives the impression of simply trying to absolve oneself of any sense of personal responsibility and claim that everything is someone else's fault.

The best alternatives to plastic cutlery, cups and plates are reusable items. Hopefully the benefit of reusable vs disposable from an environmental perspective is obvious to you. When that is not an option, then bamboo, wood, and numerous other plant based items are much, much better than plastic. Depending on the source, they mostly have lower embodied energy, and more importantly they are able to easily undergo aerobic digestion to create a full carbon cycle. Even in a sealed landfill where oxygen is not present, they can be used in a waste to energy cycle without incineration. All plastics - all of them, including polyethylene and polypropylene which are most commonly used for these items, are endocrine disruptors. They are wreaking havoc on every biological organism on our planet, impacting reproduction in vital ways. Marks my words that plastics will be seen in twenty years as coal and fossil fuels are seen now. This is an existential threat to life as currently evolved to the same order as climate change. If our forbears had been using materials in this way, our world would be unrecognizable compared to what we see now.

What do you think people did before plastic items were so prevalent? It was not so long ago. Ask anyone over 75 to remember their childhood.

In the scenario you describe, you would probably get help planning the celebration and pool items from that group. Shops would likely begin to rent out utensils and such for these sort of situations if there was a need. It's not so hard to imagine alternatives.

No, it's not! If you look at NGOs and charities, you find massively different numbers, even for flights with the same characteristics.

Aside from those two sentences, nothing you've written contradicts anything I'm saying, and it's mostly orthogonal to the point.

It is obviously true that a lot of factors can affect the weight of an airplane, and the CO2e impact of a flight will vary based on that weight. And weight is one of many factors, as you mention at the end. But just because something is complicated and may seem overwhelming does not mean that the academic community engaged in researching the topic doesn't understand it.

It isn't possible to know a priori what the impact of a specific flight will be, and it isn't practical to determine the exact ratio of impact of a first-class to economy passenger on one specific flight. But nobody is making that claim, since that isn't how people think about systems in any large-scale domain like this. Instead, we look at large data sets and examine statistical relationships.

Your comment seems to be imply that because the system is high-variance with many variables, it is impossible to understand it in useful ways. That is clearly not the case. If it were, we wouldn't be unable to make decisions about virtually anything in the world outside of extremely narrow domains, and rational policy-making would be impossible. The number of variables in this domain is nothing compared to public health, for example. We can talk about the effectiveness of condoms in preventing infection even though there are a million variables affecting it with numerous outlier cases. In the same way, we can talk about the impact of flying first-class. (In fact, we can do better re: flying because there we have better analytical modeling in addition to the datasets.)

You claim that one would find massively different numbers among researchers. That hasn't been my experience as I've sought ought out detailed information online. Here are just a few references as a starting point:

  * 2008 Union of Concerned Scientists: https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/legacy/assets/documents/clean_vehicles/greentravel_report.pdf -- Chapter 2 is on air travel and very high-level, but Appendix B provides more detailed numbers across various parameters. It only considers CO2, not CO2e.

  * 2009 academic study, Oxford prof: https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/research/energy/downloads/jardine09-carboninflights.pdf -- finds that on average, there's a 2x difference in per-passenger emissions between the most dense and least dense seating configurations.

  * 2013 World Bank study: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/141851468168853188/pdf/WPS6471.pdf -- outlines analytical models that include the different variables you're mentioning (and many more), and examines variance in the results as those parameters are adjusted.

[Note, I said in my original answer that the impact of radiative forcing is still being understood, so I'm not talking about that. I intentionally said that CO2 impact is well understood at the start and called out CO2e as a distinct notion for that reason.]

I'm going to make a bold claim: the CO2e per passenger kilometer can vary by at least one order of magnitude depending on the flight characteristics (airline, weather, route, direction, location, aircraft, etc) - before you take class into account!

That's not a bold claim at all; it's just irrelevant. A cross-country flight on an old plane with a couple layovers in bad weather that has to refuel unexpectedly and is only half-full will have an order of magnitude worse impact on the climate than the best case non-stop scenario. But if one asks, "what is the impact of flying first-class vs economy?", one is not asking "what is the impact of flying first-class in the best possible case vs flying economy in the worst possible case?".

Carbon credits are the Indulgences of the modern era. Now it's worry about harming the planet instead of worry of going to hell. My ethics happen to align with Martin Luthor on this topic.

I have some experience with this topic. I _did_ start a clean energy company that has had notable and measurable impact over the past ten years or so. And I have flown cross-country for work more often than I would like. It's justifiable to the extent the travel leads to benefits generated from the work. But the truth is that an honest personal accounting of this is difficult. In some cases, the travel is really valuable and in other cases we just want to imagine it is for ego-centric or other reasons. Regardless, flying first-class vs economy is really never needed for work purposes; it's purely a matter of luxury.

Causing harm for the purposes of luxury, attempting to buy your way out of it, and then claiming righteousness is, in my view, hypocritical.

I should mention that I am a fan of well-structured carbon offsets, but only when avoidance is really infeasible. But offsets do not justify waste in the same way that recycling does not justify greater consumption.

Ultimately I'm just not satisfied with any estimate of CO2 emitted by flying in general. Has anyone here seen a decent model of CO2 output caused by flying?

The CO2 impact of flying, and of flying first-class, is understood incredibly well and quite simple to follow for first-order effects.

First, to calculate the emissions associated with the sector as a whole, you don't need any modeling. If you know how much of what fuel the sector as a whole consumes, you can determine co2 emissions directly from that fact. That's how those broader statistics are determined.

Second, losing one passenger impacts the fuel economy per person in a very negative way. Consider an Airbus A321, which is one of the more efficient commercial airplanes. Wikipedia states that its max takeoff weight is 93,000kg. Suppose it's configured to seat 220 people. That means 422kg of weight being transported per person. A typical airline seat weighs 11kg and an average adult is over 70kg. If you assume an average of 50kg per person for luggage, each person's marginal contribution to the weight being transported is 131kg. The rest is coming from moving the plane itself. So, if you replace two small seats with one big one, that one seat now goes from having a share of 422kg to (422 * 2 - 131) = 713kg. That's an increase of 69%.

Edit: I realized I'm looking at max capacity for total weight but not max weights per passenger, which means my guess of the plane weight is overstated. But I also didn't account for the fact that first class also requires more flight attendants on the flight. These two things counter each other. The net increase is likely something other than 69%, but that's not too far off.

Yes, there are other market impacts from using first class, but there's no basis for thinking those are anywhere close to the impact described above. (E.g., you can do the calculations for offsetting 50kg of cargo from another plane.)

What's a little less certain is the impact of radiative forcing. CO2 emissions are a dangerously _understated_ way to think about climate impacts of flying. CO2e (co2 equivalent) is more relevant. When you release water vapor, NOx, etc. into the atmosphere at higher elevations, there are all sorts of other impacts that occur at different timescales. The IPCC recommends multiplying by a factor of 2.7x to account for that. Other studies are a bit lower, maybe 1.9x, but there's general agreement that it's very bad. The specifics still need to be understood a bit better.

People have incredible wishful thinking when it comes to flying because it's so convenient. It is impossible to act responsibly towards the environment and engage in air travel with any form of technology that exists today or that we know of. It's hard to imagine many things more hypocritical than first-class passengers who also claim environmental concern.

This seems very interesting. At my company (WegoWise) we've been working for the last 4 years to help solve some of the fundamental information problems that result in inefficient buildings. Most folks aren't aware of how drastically energy efficiency can save money for building owners and improve the built environment. It isn't unusual, for example, for one apartment building in a development to consume 4x in utilities per square foot as the other similar buildings around it, without the owner of the buildings even realizing it (despite the fact that they're paying the bills).

We've made excellent progress in this space, but better financing mechanisms for energy efficiency are still required as a next step. Even though the returns can be huge, building owners still need to get money to invest, and utility programs can't keep pace with the level of demand.

I'm excited to see how this effort progresses. Solar has been taking off in the US largely because of better financing mechanisms, and I think there's ample opportunity for the same thing to happen in the efficiency sector.

I'd love to chat with you about what you're doing at Spark, as I suspect there could be some areas for collaboration. (My contact info is in my profile.)

WegoWise.com - Remote devs welcome (located in Boston, MA)

Hiring: Ruby developers (Mid to Senior-level) & UX designer

We are a leading utility analytics company that helps our users (property owners, utility companies, auditors, and more) reduce energy and water usage, run conservation programs, and save money.

WegoWise is the perfect environment for passionate developers to do their best work, learn something new every day, and have fun while building something that serves a socially-conscious purpose.

Full details here:

http://wegowise.com/careers/developer

Contact: devjobs@wegowise.com

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We are also actively looking for UI/UX designers!

Design is a critically important part of how we build our application, and we're looking to bring someone on to the team to focus on UX and front-end development.

Boston, MA - WegoWise.com

WegoWise is an energy analytics company with funding, an enthusiastic and growing user base, an environmentally-conscious mission, a solid business plan, and a motivated team. We're looking for a Ruby on Rails developer to join our team. The work environment is fun and flexible, and the product provides ample opportunities to tackle technical challenges, work with the latest and greatest technologies, and stay at the top of your game.

http://wegowise.com/careers/developer

Contact: devjobs@wegowise.com

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

We are looking for mid-level and senior-level developers with web development experience (ideally 1+ years with Ruby). You should be comfortable working with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Understanding UI concepts is helpful as well.

We treat coding as an art, take pride in our work, and think good code should be both functional and elegant. We are Agile, and follow TDD and BDD practices.

We listen to our developers, respect them, and give them room to get things done. The work schedule is flexible, and features are thoughtfully planned so we don't rush things out the door.

Location is excellent (downtown Boston, near all public transport) and you get 10% open source time.

Competitive salaries, health and dental, training and professional development, 401k, etc.

If this sounds like a place you'd like to work, get in touch!

http://wegowise.com/careers/developer devjobs@wegowise.com