
Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions - elorant
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/climate/air-travel-emissions.html
======
blunte
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.

~~~
saalweachter
> ... 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.

~~~
esotericn
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.

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

That's the one thought that gives me comfort around the whole climate crisis
problem. We humans have screwed up the climate through absolute _mountains_ of
labour. It didn't just happen, it happened as an emergent property of all the
various economic activities that humans have been doing for hundreds of years.
We don't lack labour to tackle the problem, we lack direction for the labour,
incentives that makes civilization as a whole change course and move in the
right direction.

~~~
abathur
To be fair, we didn't have to understand the climate to break it.

------
Lramseyer
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
_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.

~~~
djmips
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.

~~~
dhdicbxkcjc
They’re also flown very far away.

------
tombert
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
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.

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

~~~
howinator
"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" is something that needs to be
included in climate conversations a lot more.

You don't have to be a vegan hermit to have an impact. Eating a little less
meat, foregoing one flight, and biking to work once a week is better than not
doing anything and that's great.

------
martamoreno2
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.

~~~
funklute
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?

~~~
quotemstr
These guys seem to have a viable approach to accelerated weathering, a form of
carbon removal: [https://projectvesta.org/](https://projectvesta.org/)

~~~
AstralStorm
There's not enough limestone deposits for this to work - that aren't actually
being currently mined.

You cannot use a an active mine for this technique, you have to let the stone
lie and weather.

~~~
quotemstr
Read their FAQ [1]. They're using olivine, not limestone, and there's a ton of
olivine in the crust.

[1] [https://projectvesta.org/frequently-asked-
questions/](https://projectvesta.org/frequently-asked-questions/)

------
misiti3780
"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.

~~~
phkahler
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
> "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?

~~~
wmf
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160411094048/http://www.atmos....](https://web.archive.org/web/20160411094048/http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~rennert/etc/courses/pcc587/ref/Travis-
etal2002_Nature.pdf)

[https://www.nature.com/news/2008/081231/full/news.2008.1335....](https://www.nature.com/news/2008/081231/full/news.2008.1335.html)

~~~
andreasley
The second link actually states the opposite: "A new analysis now claims that
altered US temperature patterns during the three flight-free days can be
explained by natural variations in cloud cover, rather than the absence of
planes."

~~~
mehrdadn
Just imagine how this will get magnified and drive the world nuts when half
the things we try to do to tackle climate change end up being plausibly
explainable by natural variation. It's already a hard enough problem to solve
without natural variance being thrown into the mix.

------
newnewpdro
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)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_\(travel\))

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

------
dr_dshiv
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...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection)

~~~
tobib
Have you learned nothing from the movie "Snowpiercer"?

~~~
jnwatson
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.

~~~
dr_dshiv
Especially when using techniques like marine cloud brightening.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening)

Imagine if cruise ships and cargo ships had snow machine jets on the back,
lofting prepped salt water into the air, to seed clouds.

The problem is that this is geoengineering which means career suicide for
interested scientists. At the moment.

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

~~~
tomschlick
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.

~~~
glogla
This might be where the hydrogen could be useful (unlike for cars where it
costs too much).

------
bmmayer1
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.

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

~~~
gjasny
For example at atmosfair:
[https://www.atmosfair.de/en/](https://www.atmosfair.de/en/)

Their website lists some CO2 compensation projects.

------
tempsy
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.

~~~
sp332
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-...](http://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/Pages/MEPC-70-2020sulphur.aspx)
That will help with some of the pollution anyway.

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

~~~
sp332
Of all the kinds of pollution, why worry about that? There's way more poop in
the ocean already.

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

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

~~~
gcheong
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.

------
blondie9x
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?

------
finchisko
>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.

------
yread
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

------
nitwit005
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.

------
kylek
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!)

------
blondie9x
Carbon offsets are completely useless.
[https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-
offsets/inconv...](https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-
offsets/inconvenient-truth-carbon-credits-dont-work-deforestation-redd-acre-
cambodia/) there are better ways to protect the environment.

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

------
algaeontoast
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!

------
c0nfused
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](https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P100WUHR.pdf)
page 2

------
Robotbeat
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](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.

------
graeme
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.

------
rolltiide
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 :(

------
AcerbicZero
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.

------
quotemstr
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.

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

