
Flight risk: can we take the carbon out of air travel? - elorant
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/31/flight-risk-can-we-take-the-carbon-out-of-air-travel
======
seanwilson
The core problem I feel is people are straining for ingenious tech and
taxation solutions that allow them to keep their exact same current lifestyle
instead of looking for solutions that require lifestyle changes.

Nobody seems to discuss how we collectively work towards being happy with
traveling less and eating more substainably.

Were people not happy before we took flights so often and ate meat for every
meal? What about changes to work and social culture so frequent and global
travel is no longer the norm?

The uncomfortable truth to me is that if everyone is always chasing the new
next best thing, _nothing_ we do is going to make our lifestyles substantial.
We need to adapt to being happy with what we have or less rather than looking
for solutions that feed into an entitlement of always wanting more.

~~~
lagadu
> Nobody seems to discuss how we collectively work towards being happy with
> traveling less and eating more substainably.

Because of pragmatism. Ask someone to make a significant sacrifice and they'll
tell you to piss off. Hell, I'll use myself as an example: try telling my SO
and I that we can no longer fly a few times a year to the alps for winter
sports and I'll just be rude and laugh at you. Sure, people were happy before
they had good meat available, they were also happy before polio was eradicated
but now we're happier and nobody's going to sacrifice that.

It's suggestions like these "oh, people should give up a lot of things that
they enjoy" that makes me look pretty unfavorably towards modern
environmentalism: it's not going to happen, we need pragmatic solutions that
will actually work in the real world. This is where environmental engineering
comes in but God forbid someone suggest us actually making intended changes to
our climate to fix problems to the current breed of environmentalists without
them foaming at the mouth. Thankfully I rest easy in knowing that eventually
this will be an inevitability, as soon as it becomes obvious that the
idealistic path is a dead-end.

~~~
bonaldi
You and your SO might want to look at the state of the glaciers and realise
that you might not get much more skiing if things continue as they are.

And saying “don’t fly, knuckleheads” isn’t the same as saying “don’t ski”.

The snow trains are arguably a better way to do it: you don’t have to get a
stupidly early flight and you don’t face a 2+ hr coach ride to the resort. In
some resorts the train leaves you ten minutes from the slopes.

That’s how we help in small ways with this, not short-sighted stubbornness but
with better solutions.

Fewer skiers flying might change the economics of Nightstar too: a proper
luxury sleeper train from London to the slopes. I’d genuinely prefer that to
ever getting a coach again.

~~~
bronco21016
Ok so you solved getting to the alps from Europe. Now how does the rest of the
world get there?

~~~
bronco21016
Suppose I’m being downvoted by the environmentalists.

The grand parent poster highlighted how pragmatic solutions are more important
than asking people to full stop degrade their quality of life. The parent post
then argues a ‘pragmatic’ solution is taking the train to the alps while
completely ignoring that a large percentage of people visiting that particular
location likely does not have access solely by train.

I believe trains for regional or even continental transportation are an
excellent goal. However, the train as the key to solving transportation
emissions completely misses the point that we are an intercontinental species
at this point. Flying is the only practical method of moving people across the
seas and likely will be for the foreseeable future. Solving emissions for
flying vehicles seems a far more likely scenario than getting the world, and
the people spread all over it, to stop flying. Trains can only solve a portion
of the equation.

------
esotericn
Progressive taxation is generally a thing we accept. I'm happy to pay more tax
than my friends who don't earn as much too.

I think it makes sense to just whack a huge tax on flying. Right, you can't
easily cross continents without flying, but I imagine the percentage of
flights that are being made for super crucial stuff like say, unwell
relatives, is a low percentage of the total.

So whilst we're in this transition period, tax it enough that you can offset
or capture the emissions a few times over. It's a no-brainer. You don't even
encounter the "but what about those in poverty" problem because flying is the
quintessential luxury.

edit: I should be clear, as responders seem to misunderstand me, that the
mechanism I prefer would be to tax according to emissions. I just think that
flying should have a multiplier because it's primarily used for leisure or
non-essential business travel.

My preference would be for the taxes to be used on actual carbon capture /
storage / research rather than being redistributed, and in that model you need
to pull more out of the top end because otherwise the poor eat fuel taxes and
get nothing back.

~~~
ddxxdd
If climate change is truly the harbinger of the apocalypse, and if it needs to
be stopped at all costs, then the flight tax would have to be infinite.

On the other hand, if a tree can be planted to capture 1 ton of carbon for 50
cents each, then a flight from NY to Sydney can be offset with $130.[1] That's
about $1 per person on a 100-person flight.

Some environmentalists claim that the social cost of carbon is $40 per ton of
CO2[2]. That comes out to about $10,500 in taxes for a flight from NY to
Sydney. That's basically $100 per person on a 100-person flight, enough to
prevent many people from flying.

[1] 53 lbs of CO2 per mile of flight, multiplied by 9,929 miles from NY to
Sydney, divided by 2000 lbs/ton, times $0.50 of offset costs per ton

[2] [https://www.edf.org/true-cost-carbon-pollution](https://www.edf.org/true-
cost-carbon-pollution)

~~~
nstom
When a tree dies that CO2 will mostly just be released into the air again.
Planting trees is a measure to slow the immediate effects of fossil fuel
usage, but not a long term solution. At some point you’ll run out of space for
new trees.

It’s like fixing a leaky pipe by adding sponges. Sure, they’ll soak up the
water and are cheap, but eventually you will run out of space for new sponges
and have to pay for a plumber.

~~~
ddxxdd
It's more like fixing a leaky pipe by adding a patch that will last for
centuries, that can pollinate itself and produce additional patches in the
future, and that can be removed and used as a building material for a new
house.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's still sponges, not patches. They _absorb_ the water, and you have to
manage them. If you don't actively store them, the water will leak out. If you
do actively store them and then hand off storage to someone else, the water
will leak out when that someone stops paying attention.

The way to sequester carbon with trees is to cut them down when they're grown,
and bury them somewhere where there's no air and no one will touch them for
thousands of years, or otherwise store them in perpetuity while preventing
decay or burning.

~~~
adrianN
Turning them into biochar is a slightly simpler proposal. Biochar is stable
for a pretty long time. But of course the process of unburning all the coal we
burned so far is not very viable.

------
lmilcin
The solution is quite simple. Just require every company and person that emits
co2 to pay for scrubbing it and let the market solve the problem efficiently.
The _only_ issue is getting everybody to agree to clean after themselves which
practically guarantees this doesn't get solved until we are about to
suffocate.

~~~
belorn
There is so many issues to solve in order to have a carbon tax. Just to pick a
few examples:

People do not want their electric bill to jump ten (or more) folds just
because wind production went down and now the gas turbine is burning, and they
definitively do not want brownouts. Industries like steel and other high
energy users is particular allergic to variance in power availability and
price, and without tariffs it is practically impossible to demand it in a
global economy.

Food prices would go up as rural living is directly impacted by carbon taxes.
It used to be that the largest portion of a persons income went to pay for
food. Today it is a rather small portion. Asking people to pay the carbon tax
through increased food prices is a very hard proposition, and without tariffs
it is practically impossible in a global economy.

Then we have urbanization where increased costs to personal transportation
means a population that relies more on mass transit systems. That mean in
order to keep people from moving to cities we need a significant investment
into building out the railway system, which is the opposite what most
countries has done in the last 50-80 years. That investment means raised taxes
on top of the carbon tax. It also mean a increased strain on the
infrastructure inside cities when density will increase while new
infrastructure is being built, which mean more taxes.

Then we have international trade (air and sea transport) which is governed
through international treaties. To be fair this is likely the easiest place to
do a carbon tax as it would only effect all imports and exports and operate as
a equal tariff for everyone, but getting people to agree to it it is a
significant bigger hill than the Paris Agreement.

~~~
lotsofpulp
>There is so many issues to solve in order to have a carbon tax. Just to pick
a few examples:

All of your examples look like one issue to me, which is people unwilling to
change their lifestyle and sacrifice their luxuries.

The only way out of this mess is to use less resources, which means consume
less, travel less, have fewer children, etc. Carbon tax or dictatorial orders,
the root of the problem is people don’t want to consume less, and our children
and their children will pay the price due to us not wanting to pay it now.

~~~
belorn
Getting people to accept increased food prices, higher cost of imported goods
and higher taxes in order to focus on infrastructure is complex. To make a
comparison, universal healthcare is a rather minor governmental change.

To put down some numbers, Americans spend just 6.4% of their household income
on food. Around 1950 they spent about 20%. It not that Americans eat one fifth
as much as they used to (if anything the claim is that people eat more today),
so the life style change is both that people need to pay more and eat less.

Similar if we talk about railway budget, the US government spend today about
0.00156% in proportion to the budget of 1950. It basically stopped investing
into the railway infrastructure. Naturally the proportion of the population
(and industry) that use the railway system has also gone down, through not as
extreme as the budget.

The root of the problem is that people don't want to pay more to get less, and
then also consume less at the same time. They also don't want to pay more
taxes in order to invest heavily in infrastructure that take half a century
before people see the benefits.

~~~
sokoloff
> Similar if we talk about railway budget, the US government spend today about
> 0.00156% in proportion to the budget of 1950.

Confirm that it's 1/640th of the 1950 budget?! That seems insane. (Is it
perhaps 1/6.4 [0.156% or 0.00156x] instead?)

The Federal Railroad Administration alone has a budget over $1.5BB. Does that
mean we were spending the equivalent of almost a trillion of today's dollars a
year (~25% of receipts) on rail in 1950? That seems several orders of
magnitude wrong.

~~~
belorn
Yes, a 1000x error there :).

The numbers I read was that since 1950 the railway infrastructure budget has
only increased by 30%. US budget in 1950 was around 70 billions, while 2018 it
is 7 trillions.
([https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/fed_spending_1950USbn](https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/fed_spending_1950USbn))

The proportional funding should thus have went down by basically the same
amount as the government spending went up. I might very well be wrong, and The
Federal Railroad Administration was created in 1966 so I am not sure exactly
which part of the government paid for railway before that point, and the 30%
claim could of course be wrong. Department of Transportation has had a
increase in funding by about 10x from 1970 to 2008, but I could not find exact
numbers for the Federal Railroad Administration.

------
danenania
We really need bullet trains in the US. With fast wifi, comfortable sleeper
cars, good food, and great scenery, I would happily spend a day or two on a
train for long trips instead of flying, without even considering pollution.
You end up basically losing a day when flying anyway, even for short trips,
and it's infinitely more stressful.

~~~
closeparen
You can already get from San Francisco to Chicago in 2.5 days, and from
Chicago to New York in 1 day. The scenery is great, the sleepers are
comfortable, and the food is decent.

Assuming two week-long vacations, though, you'd easily spend more than half
the time in transit.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Every time I check the prices for Amtrak it costs much more than flying, which
is frankly absurd. Which is sad because I have a station within walking
distance of my house. I should be able to explore the whole US from my house
but it isn’t even remotely possible due to cost. How is it possible to fly
through the air for cheaper than trundling along on a rail?

~~~
dagw
_I should be able to explore the whole US from my house but it isn’t even
remotely possible due to cost_

Doesn't the US still have pretty cheap long distance bus services? Certainly
~15-20 years ago when I was bumming around North America I could get almost
anywhere for less than $100 if I wasn't too much in a hurry.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
When I check the bus fares they aren’t that cheap either. Certainly higher
than just paying for the gas in your own car and driving there, so that’s what
we do.

------
Pxtl
Raise carbon prices until HSR is economically viable. Climate change is a
problem today, so solve it with today's technology instead of waiting for the
tech fairy to fix it for you.

~~~
_delirium
Is economic viability the problem with HSR? California voters approved a huge
bond package for one _eleven years ago_. Over a decade later and there's still
no rail line close to done. The issue doesn't seem to be that its fares can't
compete with plane tickets, but that the state is just totally incapable of
actually building it.

Even when the money's there, you still have: NIMBYs, corruption/incompetence
among officials and contractors, and (ironically) vague environmental laws
with loose standing rules that cause any infrastructure project to end up in
court. Among other things.

~~~
dredmorbius
Polititical opposition is also clearly a part of the issue, and much of that
may be entrenched interests, including airlines.

I'd like to see the full breakdown, I suspect the story may be interesting.

------
mkagenius
Aren't we over-travelling, whenever a technology becomes available people tend
to over use it - example is cars in India - no infrastructure to support such
density of cars in cities like Bangalore, yet everyone has one.

This will continue till a new superior technology replaces it. Why do we over-
use every new thing, this is clear failure of policies. Carbon won't come down
unless we have policies in place.

------
jstsch
I think synthetic fuel from renewable energy (electricity + water + co2 from
the air) is a better way to go. Much less complexity in the plane.

~~~
dredmorbius
That's an interesting option. It's been proposed and on the table for nearly
60 years -- M. King Hubbert first made the suggestion in the early 1960s.

All the research I'm aware of, up to and including Google's synfuel startup,
struggle with cost-effectiveness though.

CO2 from seawater may be more energy-efficient than from air, but either way,
scaling cost-effectively hasn't happened.

------
enqk
Electronics and the internet are 4% of the world's total CO2 emissions. That's
more than plane travel and growing at 9% each year.

"Climate crisis: the unsustainable use of online video”: Our new report on the
environmental impact of ICT"

[https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-
onl...](https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-
video/)

~~~
KptMarchewa
It's easier (or maybe: more feasible) to deal with emissions regarding
electronics. We know how to produce renewable energy.

~~~
enqk
Do we know how to make enough of it? Do we have a mechanism to cap the
increase in energy usage, considering the low price of energy?

~~~
sokoloff
Do we _need_ (or even _want_ ) a cap if the energy source is non-emitting? If
there's no significant externality, let the supply/demand price balance
provide the back-pressure.

~~~
enqk
Worlwide the large majority of electricity is produced with coal.

Price of energy is not a thing. We pay for the conversion and its transport
but not itself. So it does not provide the adequate signal for the management
of the supply or its side effects

------
algaeontoast
This kind of approach is tone death and idiotic. This is why we shouldn't
elicit policy recommendations from an unhinged 16 year old child from a
privileged background who's severely lacking in life experience of any kind.

The developed world is only part of the problem and a majority of the
developed world is too poor to prioritize issues of climate and the impact of
transportation.

A more important question is if and when the masses will either bend to
authoritarian calls for drastic cultural and political change, or retain their
individual rights and count on existing political and scientific structures.

------
MayeulC
I came across these petitions today. If EU citizens are interested, they can
sign them

[https://back-on-track.eu/ending-the-tax-exemption-on-
aviatio...](https://back-on-track.eu/ending-the-tax-exemption-on-aviation-
fuel-in-europe/)

Maybe they would warrant a HN submission of their own, since it is something
interesting to discuss.

The proposals are well-written, and concerns an EU-wide fuel tax on kerosene,
and a carbon tax.

------
winslett
Shameless plug, Cloverly has a air travel offset endpoint:

curl
[https://api.cloverly.com/2019-03-beta/estimates/flight](https://api.cloverly.com/2019-03-beta/estimates/flight)
-X POST -d '{"airports": ["bhm", "atl", "sfo"]}' -H "Content-type:
application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer public_key:47800ea0ee541b4c"

------
Nasrudith
The emphasis on flight's CO2 emissions confuses me and has me wondering if I
am missing something. While fully loaded trains and buses are better it is
still better in per person miles than single occupant car road trips or even
some loaded carpools.

It strikes me as a "symbolically motivated" meme as opposed to a practical
issue since air traffic is seen more as a luxury.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
It could be low-hanging fruit. Thousands of airships to change, vs hundreds of
millions of cars.

------
stillbourne
I'd like to see zeppelins make a come back.

~~~
dredmorbius
Safety, intrinsic in voluminous ultra-lightweight structures particularly in
heavy winds and storms, seems to be an intractable problem.

The US airship programme, based on helium, not hydrogen, still saw both the
_Macon_ and _Ohio_ lost in high winds and/or storms. Britain's _Airship One_
fared poorly as well, though it relied on hydrogen.

Stuff that flies through the air has intrinsic issues with mass, and lifting
bodies require tremendous volumes.

------
nmeofthestate
"Greta Thunberg’s zero-carbon Atlantic crossing is not an option for most"

Lucky, because it uses more carbon to be accompanied by a yacht crew who then
take flights home when you finally get to America. I was all set to travel
everywhere by yacht until I discovered that downside.

------
pwarner
Wouldn't we focus on taking it out of most other things first? Solve
electricity and land based transport first and figure out sea and air later? I
not read the article so down vote they explain why we should focus on this
when we are so far from solving other easier problems.

~~~
journalctl
We can solve multiple problems at a time. This just reads as really defensive.
Like it or not, air travel DOES have a big carbon footprint, and arguably most
of it is unnecessary (we fly people across the country to help manage
PowerPoint presentations). We’re going to have to solve it at some point, so
why not now?

~~~
closeparen
When leisure travelers don't fly, they drive. Having clean, efficient ground
transportation is required to reap the benefit of reducing air travel. (If you
cut off all avenues to seeing Grandma at Christmas besides FaceTime, you'll
get voted out of office).

~~~
journalctl
Let’s solve both of these problems then, which it seems like people are doing.
Plus, we already know how to solve ground transport, we just refuse to
actually do it (renewables, public transit, dense development, etc). Air
travel is more challenging given the massive amount of energy required.

~~~
closeparen
Public transit and dense development can reduce the necessity of renting a car
or hiring a cab when you arrive in another city, but that's not where the
energy goes in long distance travel.

Without high speed rail, reducing air travel just puts more cars on the
interstates.

------
pfdietz
Air travel may be one of the last major users of carbon-containing fuels.
Perhaps there will be sufficiently little of it that the fuels can all be
sourced from biomass (upgraded with hydrogen from non-biomass renewable
sources).

~~~
dredmorbius
I've run the numbers on that using one a biofuel crop heralded as "the biggest
breakthrough that there is out there".

The numbers don't add up.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings_biofuel_breakthrough_less_than/)

We use mind-boggling amounts of fuels, and although aviation is a small
fraction of the total, a small fraction of a very large number remains a very
large number.

~~~
pfdietz
The US burns about 60 million tons of jet fuel per year.

The US produces about 300 million tons of municipal solid waste per year, 360
million tons of corn, 130 million tons of hay. These are only some of the
biomass streams in the US economy.

It's not at all out of the question that the entire US jet fuel consumption
could be produced with biomass-derived carbonaceous materials. The energy
yield could be increased with extra hydrogen input, so carbohydrates could
undergo hydrodeoxygenation (as in the Virent process, which can produce a
drop-in replacement for current jet fuel).

[https://www.virent.com/technology/](https://www.virent.com/technology/)

~~~
dredmorbius
Raw biomass != fuel equivalent. There's collection and unification costs as
well, and conversion to something suitable for fuels. Aircraft run poorly on
cotton fibres.

In 1900, the US ran a largely biofuel-powered transportation network,
especially for local "last-mile" deliveries, utilising horses, which can eat
minimally processed feeds. About a quarter of all grain production went to
horse feed, and in fact a segment of opposition to adoption of automobiles
were farmers who feared grain demand would fall.

Henry Ford looked at an agriculturally-based fuel supply, based on methanol.
That might have worked at the time, for a population of roughly 100 million,
and widely scattered automobile ownership. It simply doesn't scale now.

The Boeing study claimed to be among the biggest breakthroughs in aviation
biofuel in years, but fails to pencil out. I ran numbers on numerous other
biofuel crops. None, save algael biofuels (which present phenomenal practical
issues) pass the basic quantity checks, _even for just aviation fuel._

Your supplemental hydrogen has to come from somewhere, that's not free.

Producing kerosene-equivalent fuels isn't all that much of a problem
chemically, the processes are understood. It's _scaling_ the processes.

~~~
pfdietz
OF course they are not equivalent. But the mass flow through biomass in our
economy is so much larger than the mass flow of jet fuel that the objections
that it can't scale, and that the numbers don't add up, are spurious. The
economy is already handling these large mass flows. All that jet fuel is
produced in refineries, for example.

Yes, the hydrogen has to come from somewhere. This does not violate any laws
of physics or economics.

------
nstom
While this is a good development, hydrogen based planes would not be climate
neutral. Unfortunately a large and often overlooked part of planes’ climate
impact stems not from their carbon emissions but from the water vapor they
produce [1]. Contrails reflect heat and thereby contribute to global warming.
If we want planes to actually be harmless to the climate, we should probably
be looking at electric planes.

[1]
[https://www.transportenvironment.org/news/aviation-2-3-times...](https://www.transportenvironment.org/news/aviation-2-3-times-
more-damaging-climate-industry-claims)

~~~
mrfusion
Shouldn’t they reflect the suns heat away from earth?

~~~
mdorazio
Seems there's some debate about that and the article didn't actually cite any
resources to back it up. According to the end of this National Science
Foundation article [1], it depends on the type of cloud. Contrails are maybe
analogous to cirrus clouds, which block more thermal energy from the ground
than they reflect back into space.

[1]
[https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/clouds/question.jsp](https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/clouds/question.jsp)

------
nateburke
Tech is one solution. So is taxation. There is a third solution, too:
recession.

Widespread flying for vacation or business is a luxury that people quickly
abandon when they can't pay their mortgage or payroll.

Recession is capitalism's solution for reducing CO2 emissions.

------
Bud
tl;dr: no, we are nowhere close to taking the carbon out of anything even
roughly approximating modern passenger air travel.

------
Scoundreller
Dunno if we can ever take it out, but more efficient routing, reduced seat
pitch and more fuel efficient planes has definitely lead to big improvements.

~~~
DocTomoe
> reduced seat pitch

Calm down, Satan. Reduced seat pitch was the major reason that prompted me to
start flying Business Class on short hauls and First Class on long hauls,
producing considerably _more_ CO2 than an Economy Class passenger.

Also: Seat pitch already has been shrunken considerably in the last years.

