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.
> 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.
(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.
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.
> 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.
Oh yes, I was going to comment on exactly that point.
> The chemistry is complicated
That depends on which type of fuel you are talking about. If you can use Methane (AKA Natural Gas), then you could use the Sabatier reaction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction). You need CO2 (which is what we want to remove) and Hydrogen (which is the energy consuming part). Then you have to compress it (more energy).
The advantage of adding CO2 to the mix(instead of just burning hydrogen) is that it becomes much easier to store and you have decent energy density.
As I understand it, that's what the Navy was struggling against.
But forget about the energy costs, think about human labor costs. Because if you can reduce labor to zero and have these things be self-sufficient, then we really don't care about energy costs. Stick a bunch of these fuel facilities wherever they will fit, power them with whatever renewables are available, wait a bit, then come back to collect.
I think the first large scale application will actually come from SpaceX. They need to figure out fuel manufacturing for a Mars return trip.
Biofuels are certainly a thing - over 100 billion liters were produced last year [0]. For a while, it looked like there were credible avenues to using algae to produce jet fuel, and there were even test flights. Unfortunately, pumping fuel out of the ground is really, really cheap, and most of these companies went under or pivoted [1] (a gallon of algae-produced omega-3 oil or cooking oil is worth far more than a gallon of algae-produced Jet-A).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Definitely tax it, but I actually view a lot of the business travel as unnecessary compared to consumer travel, and that's what I'd want to get rid of first with a tax. I'm far more sympathetic to people trying to see their dying uncles or attend their sister's wedding or visiting their parents once a year than, say, professionals "needing" to attend conferences or whatever.
Heck, come to think of it, if I ever saw a legit use for VR, it might well be substituting for business travel?
Edit: And somewhat relevantly: business class is far less fuel-efficient too, which would suggest maybe we should get rid of first and business class altogether. Heck, forcing businesses to use economy minus for travel might itself be an easy way to get rid of some unnecessary business trips!
Vastly more business travel is done for sales or sales-support purposes than attending conference purposes.
Humans are tribal animals; we respond to communications in person better than over video conference and we tend to trust people with whom we've shared meals and drinks. Arguing that that just shouldn't be isn't likely to change anything about business behavior. I get on airplanes across oceans because it's effective. Believe me, I'd usually rather stay at home with my family and sleep in my own bed.
Well, to be blunt, so what? That sucks for sales stuff, it's not like I said conferences are the only things that need to change. Maybe the practices there need to change there just like for conferences and other stuff. Nobody said it's easy or nice or effective or whatever for humans to do long distance. Just that you need to start sacrificing somewhere and I sure as heck find it more reasonable and humane to start at business sales trips than family visits.
"So what?" Incentives. If subgroup A doesn't travel for sales, subgroup B who travels will likely outcompete them by more than the cost of the travel, or subgroup C who is large enough to have many local offices will outcompete A, making it harder for new entrants to a market to compete and concentrating business activities in select cities (which is great if you're rich enough to live in those prosperous cities).
I'm not making moral value judgments here; I'm making economic value judgments as that drives much more behavior I think.
Whatever you do, either some subgroup will find a way to take advantage of it, or you'll find a way to mess with taxes and incentives and prices enough to mostly compensate for the side effects. That's not a counterargument for a solution, it's already a given in the problem statement. If you find some magical way to avoid any and all collateral economic damage, I'm all for it, but I don't see why people should just wait for others to come up with miracles that may never come just because some businesses will inevitably win and others will inevitably lose.
As someone in sales, I think I would be EXTREMELY supportive of all of my competition deciding to do the eco conscious thing, and declining to fly to clients. It'd be great.
No chance that businesses will stop paying for people to travel. And their budgets are much bigger than individuals visiting family. Take a look at the entire private jet market - basically a very small wedge of HNWs and lots of executives flying for business.
Yeah, it'd be great, until your clients stop viewing it as a noble thing and start seeing it as a disgusting and wasteful thing. Then your competition will be happier than you.
People's expectations are malleable. It's not easy to change them, but it's necessary and it's possible. And once that happens, the game will change, and it will force you to change your tune accordingly.
The opposite side of that bet? So you won't change your tune and you'll happily continue to do this even after your clients find it disgusting? Be my guest I guess...
I agree with you there big time. You can virtually attend a conference. FaceTime with grandma from her deathbed is not an acceptable alternative.
Kicking the price of this kind of policy down to individual consumers is a great way to just make everyone really mad and get more money from business customers who will still go on not-strictly-necessary trips.
I don't really support arbitrary penalties on certain classes of travelers or banning, e.g., business class. Note that the corresponding inefficiency would be priced in to the carbon offset tax and business and first class travelers would still be paying their larger portion of the carbon externality.
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.
> A world with greatly reduced air travel is a more insular and less understanding world.
I don't think there is an evidence for that. It is more likely that immigration increases cultural understanding rather than travel.
In any case, emissions of travel can be greatly reduced by using other modes of transport and by making the stay in the target country longer. Such a cultural shift could actually even improve the understanding between nations.
U.S. and Canada had huge influx of immigrants from Europe in 19th and 20th century, when air travel didn't exist. It seems to me to be a basis of strong ties of these countries with Europe rather than other countries.
> I don't think there is an evidence for that. It is more likely that immigration increases cultural understanding rather than travel.
Disagree that travel doesn't matter, but even then, do you really think it being much harder to visit their home countries again will have no impact on immigration patterns?
> In any case, emissions of travel can be greatly reduced by using other modes of transport
Would love to hear how you propose to let Chinese and Indian immigrants in the states visit home sans airplanes
> by making the stay in the target country longer.
People would already take longer vacations if they could, dude. Making it harder and slower to get there isn't gonna help anything.
> We know - you already made this point in the parent comment.
...is your point here that points can't reiterated or something?
> You've moved the goalposts from 'greatly reduced air travel' to 'sans airplanes'.
They're the one that talked about using other means of transport. I had already mentioned immigration. If you greatly reduce it by making it harder/more expensive, that impacts immigrants.
> That's dubious and far more benign than the consequences of a world with climate change.
I'd rather have a connected world with climate change than a disconnected world with WW3... (and probably still climate change, because war is great for CO2 emissions)
For that matter, how many people will care about the Great Barrier Reef (etc) if there's no possibility of them ever being able to travel there?
You're worried about CO2 emissions resulting from war? You do realize the role climate change itself can play in migration, refugees, wars, catastrophes..? You need to be worried about climate change resulting in war...
Climate change might also result in war! But I think cutting people off from other countries makes it a lot easier to categorize populations as 'other' and thus ok to go to war with.
The idea "travel == enlightenment and understanding" is sadly far from the reality. It once was true, insomuch as the privilege to travel was correlated with wealth which was correlated with education - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour
It's hard to disambiguate the causality, but it is probably fair to say that prior to the global information economy it took literally seeing the world to learn certain things. Of course, it also was/is fun for many, and projects power, wealth, and status.
But today with globally available information, truly frequent travelers (the ones with the most impact) arguably are really just doing it for status (and/or maybe trying to flee the inexorable inner void of the human psyche via endless novelty and distraction). More occasional travelers often pursue curated tourism experiences, and would gain more understanding from a book or even documentary.
Is there something ineffable about "smelling the Sistine chapel"? Possibly - but no more ineffable than appreciating the beauty right in your neck of the woods. Do you need to experience diversity in culture, race, and history? Absolutely - and it can be done firsthand in plenty of major cities around the world.
At least a bit of travel arguably is still good for education and appreciation. But the frequent travelers (who are oh-so-frequently tech employees), the ones who are constantly hopping on a plane to somewhere, are not really gaining anything intrinsic, and are exercising a huge footprint. And if anything, by devoting so much time and energy to travel, they tend to neglect their actual learning and education in other ways.
Ticking off the number of countries you've visited is hardly a benevolent hobby. You can learn the history, culture, language, traditions, etc. of any country by opening a book, if that's really what you're interested in.
Yeah right, because nobody who travels to a country reads up on the history, culture and traditions. Traveling and reading, after all, are mutually exclusive. /s
Let me tell you of a night in Mardid.
I headed out to see the night Madrid around midnight. Going along a crowded street, I heard someone singing. I was carrying a portable synthesizer, so I played along. Three people, carrying two guitars and a saxophone were walking in the opposite direction; they stopped, and joined in.
Eventually, the girl who was singing left; and the trio asked me if I'd join them to hear a jazz jam. Something is still happening this late, I asked. Yeah, it starts at 2:30AM.
I thought it was an open jam, but it was mostly the house/invited bands playing. Still, I managed to persuade the saxophone player to take the stage with a solo: he played it to me in the corner, where nobody could hear it, and I thought it was really good.
When the jam was over, we resumed making music until sunrise, playing at a bus stop (no buses were running that late). Random people joined in at times.
When the night was over, I left carrying with me something that I'd have trouble putting in words, much less so reading from a text written by someone else. It's an impossible task, after all, to convert a person or a memory into a string of characters losslessly.
You can learn many things from books. And then there is so much more that you can't.
That's, no doubt, an amazing experience. And there's likely countless wonderful experiences you have had / could have right in your home city.
The suggestion of the comment I responded to was about learning. Traveling, on its own, doesn't do anything to help people learn anything substantial. It's still ultimately a consumerism-centric activity. The travel industry has done an amazing job of convincing people otherwise.
> And there's likely countless wonderful experiences you have had / could have right in your home city.
Nothing of this sort. Most of the US shuts down at 2AM, people don't walk the streets in most cities which makes bumping into people impossible, and so on. The life and the environment is totally different here.
(I say this as someone who drove through all states West of Iowa, with the exception of North Dakota, lived in NYC, TX, CA each for years, and moved to the US from another country).
Most importantly, interacting with people from another country in their environment gives you a unique perspective both on their culture and your own. It's not about "having and experience", it's that your understanding of the world around you changes substantially.
>doesn't do anything to help people learn anything substantial
You learn how another country works. You learn what a day in life of another person is like in that country. It's the countless little things that are different that you see. It's the everyday lives that shape everyday thinking, and that's what matters the most.
In short, you learn to be in a different way, by observing people who are in a different way.
Textbooks simply won't answer the question "What is it like to be a Parisian, in 2019?".
I mean, you are making a very strong statement, with not much to back it up with. I provided a single counter-example, but I really don't know where to even start.
The logic of your argument applies verbatim to pretty much anything: "There's no point in venturing outdoors. If you really want to learn about nature, hit the library. You're just enjoying yourselves out there."
Well, no. Maybe that's what you do, but perhaps you aren't getting as much out of it.
I'll also make a strong statement: you have no idea what another country is like until you travel there. You won't have a single shared experience that will make it possible for you to relate to someone living there. Until you go there, all your knowledge is just an abstraction that you built up in your head.
To make an analogy again: you can read up on Beethoven all your life, but from hearing his music once you learn more than from reading about it.
Beethoven? You mean the deaf man who couldn’t hear many of his own greatest hits? The man who died in the early 1800’s, before audio recording, and whose music we can listen to because it was written down? Good analogy ;-)
> You can learn the history, culture, language, traditions, etc. of any country by opening a book
Is this a serious assertion? You think I can learn the culture of, say, Japan, from a book as well as by actually living there for a short period and experiencing it?
This strikes me as woefully naive. Learning things from books, from a distance is fine and good, but there's no true substitute for being there, for experiencing a thing in person.
I strongly suspect an average student who studied Japanese in college knows more about Japan than an average tourist who went to Japan for a week or two, yes.
Im Canadian, I’ve read and researched a lot. I thought I knew my country but then I drove across it and realized how little I knew. Experiencing a place, people and culture is imho impossible without being there and present.
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.
> 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.
I don't follow what you're saying. Is it that other emissions than CO2 are more important to fight?
Well, that change is already happening with the ongoing big change towards LNG as the preferred fuel for shipping.
But when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions, outside of improving energy efficiency, it seems nobody has anything even remotely viable today. That goes both for deep sea shipping and for most air travel.
The German company SkySails has been working for years on kites that can reduce fuel use on large ships. I think at some point we'll see alternative (renewable) energy taking over shipping as it is gradually taking over other domains.
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.
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
Mostly the way I've seen conference rooms set up is a large flat panel (or two) high up on the wall showing a remote converence table. Sometimes there's a system for popping up individuals on their laptop usinge side-by-side images, but they are still high up on the wall.
Your video shows people "down with the rest of us", and on the smaller side of things (instead of a 3 foot wide head on the screen). It definitely has a different feel than what is common. It seems more inclusive.
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
"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.
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.
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.
You can't beat the speed of the Concorde either, and it was too expensive commercially. Perhaps if we correctly externalize carbon fuels, people will en-masse choose trains rather than airplanes.
I think the work argument gets pretty weak in modern society, where we have automation and most people could afford significant leisure. Sure, perhaps in capitalist reality it is different but it is still a social choice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Right, and the mpge metric is flawed, because it assumes a (typically bad) energy mix.
5km driven in the UK is equivalent to 100km driven in Sweden.
The former sits at an average of approx. 300gCO2e/kWh. The latter at 15gCO2e/kWh.
With electric cars, the ultimate situation is that all of the carbon cost is in the production of the car/roads and maintenance thereof. Which is another issue that can be targeted and mitigated.
By contrast the only ultimate hope for a combustion powered plane or car is carbon capture.
The 'MPGe' of an electric car in a country with 90%+ renewable energy is like, 1000 or something daft like that.
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.
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!
Can't do it. Flammable material is readily available so they won't play the game if it means they'll starve (which is how I'd do it). I can't impose that on these people and it is an outcome that is absurd so I'm sure we can make something work here.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Replacing something that still works and isn’t all that old with a new, more energy-efficient product rarely yields a net reduction in emissions. That new thing need to be produced, and production is often a major component of lifecycle emissions.
I understand the Jevons paradox. However, unlike hybrids, electric cars allow complete elimination of emissions. It's a totally different animal, and it avoids the Jevons paradox while also allowing near-term emissions reduction. It's at least 2.5x better. You're not going to drive 2.5x more.
Low hanging fruit assuming you can afford a decent used car. I bought both of my EVs used for $10k apiece (and will save about half of those amounts in gas and maintenance costs...). I see lots of people driving around very large vehicles which, new or used, they probably don't absolutely require and which have both high upfront costs and high operating costs.
I think you'd have more of a point if most people were driving around subcompact beaters.
And remember the context was about someone who can already afford to fly regularly (potentially even overseas), in which case switching to an electric car--if they even require a car--is almost certainly feasible.
Electric cars come with a number of tradeoffs that make them harder to incorporate than skipping a few flights, IMO. If you're single, you don't have a road-trip car anymore (because you only own one car, and a $10k EV is not great for road trips). If you live in an apartment, there's often nowhere to charge the electric car, or you have to buy a parking spot in your building which is expensive AF and limited. A lot of the cheaper EVs feel cheap, which is another sacrifice.
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.
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.
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?
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.
On what timescale? I.e. trees take time to grow and accumulate carbon. As I understand it, the climate clock is ticking - there's a threshold beyond which some runaway effects kick in.
Harvesting can be good because it provides space for more trees to grow and store yet more carbon. As long the timber is used for long-term purposes such as housing, then the carbon in the timber kept stored. It's not 100% efficient because when felled the roots and leaves rot and return carbon back to the atmosphere, but AFAIK it's better than not harvesting.
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.
Same, I also don't think I'm educated enough... but many people who are educated in this area do conclude that carbon removal is a non-starter, so I feel there is a certain burden of proof to claim that it will work. Solar power is a good example of a technology that did better than I would have thought, but there are many others that have silently fallen by the wayside.
Yes, I really want to see that project grow. There was a HN post recently where they gave a lot of fantastic answers to questions about the project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20403570
Of course, the more we can scale back greenhouse gas emission the less we'll need to extract, so IMO it only makes sense to come at the problem from both sides.
I skimmed their site and I'm yet to read the whitepaper, but I have one question that wasn't so far answered: what about transportation costs? Is this still net carbon negative when you account for the costs of moving all this rock and spreading it on the beaches?
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.
If you have enough green energy to unburn CO2, why not just... use that energy directly? Digging up carbon, burning it, and polluting it, only to spend the effort to capture it, unburn it, and rebury it would be absurd and inefficient.
That being said, I believe carbon capture proposals don't typically involve unburning the carbon - just capturing it and storing it. So the energy situation isn't as bad as your calculations.
I understand your frustration, but using such loaded language makes it seem like you're judging other people for doing what is in their own personal, rational interest.
Doesn't it seem more effective to find ways to align people's self-interest (aka "sloth") with positive outcomes?
When someone questions authority, consensus, it is pretty much obvious to anyone that they are taking on a task which exposes them to ridicule.
People who are willing to take on this task -- which is no more but a simple expression of ideas -- have even gotten themselves killed.
Ideas which can be expressed as I did in above comments with no more than a sarcastic statement of a couple of facts and yet even still be received as being so offensive and "unhinged" by peers -- are always ideas which clearly do not stand on their own. Otherwise, stating a couple of facts would not be so offensive to you that you responded aggressively and irrationally with ad hominen attacks.
When groupthink and authority do this to people like you it is truly terrible but still just normal and part of human nature. The world is not nice to its Thomas Paines and Helmuth Hubeners, even though it would be a much worse place without them. Though I'd rather take any chance that I be in their company than the likes of people who throughout history tolerate abuse, evil, lies and wrongdoing. Or worse, ridicule those who question it.
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.
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.
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
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.
I'm not laying that out as the better option, just that if we're going to create arbitrary lists of things that was solve climate change, I don't understand what the criteria was to make the cut or not, outside of one's own personal preference.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
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)
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?".)
In principle, with extreme heroic effort, we could sequester 37 billion tons of CO2 per year, but we should be clear on just how extreme “extreme” is. Remember, every single part of the logistical supply chain would need to be scalable a million-fold the same way that the actual sequestration plant would need to be. There are two big practical engineering problems that have to be solved first, that have not been realistically addressed.
First, we would need to double global electricity generation to a first approximation. The laws of thermodynamics make this non-negotiable. Very few power generation technologies not based on fossil fuels can scale like that. Nuclear power plants, realistically, and thousands of them in very short order.
Second, the chemicals used in industrial sequestration produce hazardous byproducts on a scale similar to the CO2 being sequestered, byproducts like hydrochloric acid. Today, this is easy to handle because we produce truly trivial quantities of the chemicals required for sequestration. Not only is there no industrial capacity to produce the required chemicals, nor an obvious way to scale them, there is also no plan for disposing of the billions of tons of caustic chemicals that would be thrown off as a side-effect of their manufacture. It doesn’t do us any good to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere if we end up turning the planet into a superfund site. Nobody accounts for hazardous byproducts of the proposed technology supply chains, which will be produced on similar scales.
As I’ve noted previously, we can reduce this to a much simpler sub-problem that is easy to reason about: what would be required to produce enough potassium hydroxide to sequester 37 billion tons of CO2 per year? All the required facts and figures are public knowledge and relatively basic science. The amount of electricity required per ton is widely documented, as are the chemical inputs and byproducts. And then, once you’ve realized the extent to which that asymptotically approaches impossible, do the same kinds of calculations on the upstream supply chain for the inputs to that process, which is also public information. It falls apart very, very quickly.
It seems to me like we need to do both: tax carbon (ideally globally, but even if half the developed countries do it, it's huge) AND use that tax money to work on research and deployment of carbon sequestration or carbon to fuel conversion.
But maybe we could beat the plants in efficiency per square meter. There's nothing saying we couldn't improve on density of matter that photosynthesizes, by e.g. packing the plant matter more tightly in artificial conditions. Nature tries to produce organisms that survive and reproduce. We now have a different set of constraints: we need something that can pull out carbon as efficiently as possible. If it can't self-reproduce, we can reproduce it in labs or factories. I feel (hope) there's plausible biology and engineering work to be done here.
- Stop destroying forests (such as Amazon) which are a huge carbon sink for cows which are a carbon source.
- Build more buildings out of wood (wood buildings are carbon sinks) instead of concrete (carbon source)
- All building lumber should be self-sustaining (i.e. replant trees you used to build)
- Stop over fishing and allow oceans to grow unchecked (all living things sequester carbon while they are alive... the ocean is potentially the biggest carbon sink of all and could have several magnitudes more fish and plankton life sequestering billions of tons of carbon)
- Supplement all of the above with man-made carbon sequestration tech
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?
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]
"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.
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
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.
> "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!"
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."
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.
The research by Hong and his colleagues, published in Geophysical Research Letters, follows other studies arguing that the September 2001 temperature variations can be explained by the clear, dry weather on the crucial days4, and that climate-modelling results do not support the contrail effects claimed by Travis's group5.
I contend the clear dry weather was a consequence of the lack of planes. It sounds the one of the original authors does too.
All I know is the weather here was beautiful. And very uncharacteristically so. Unfortunately nobody is going to repeat the experiment by grounding the entire fleet for 3 days just to test it.
Minnis, Patrick, J. Kirk Ayers, Rabindra Palikonda, and Dung Phan, 2004. "Contrails, Cirrus Trends, and Climate". Journal of Climate Vol. 17, No 8, pp. 1671-1685, April 15, 2004
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.
Edit: Discussion with a colleague lead to an estimation of a residual time of ~10-30 years of the heat caught in the system, so 'soon' should be understood like that.
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.
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.
On the other hand, it also seems implausible to me that the problem can be solved if everyone on the world would produce a few tones of carbon emissions each year by flying. So either flights need to become so expensive that they remain a privilege for the rich or they need to be limited in some other way.
I agree that flights are perhaps not the most urgent issue. But encouraging people to fly more is still wrong. When possible, we should avoid flights.
Totally, and this is the perspective I'm responding to. I don't think it's necessarily invalid.
But I do think it's very easy to get sucked into a mindset of, "Let's shame individuals into making sacrifices," without actually doing the math on whether or not that's an effective approach.
Roughly half the takeoff weight of an airliner is fuel.
The fuel burned on a continental-distance (3000+ km / 2000+ mile) flight is roughly equal to the passenger's weight. CO2 emissions by mass exceed the mass of the fuel by a factor of three, as you're adding the mass of the oxygen that's added, far more than the hydrogen that's split off.
For a 747, roughly, takeoff, climb and descent require a fixed share of fuel, 7840 kg, and take about 250km (30.1 kg/km), cruise, another 10.1 kg/km. Shorter flights are comparatively worse, but what gets you in long-haul flights is simply the total distance: about 12,000 km for each leg of that Shanghai-NYC trip. And that's allocated across about 420 passengers.
Back-of-the-envelope estimates: At Shanghai-NYC distances, that's 34,300 kg of fuel vs. about 420 * 100 kg/passenger total allowance (rough numbers), or roughly 3x the fuel mass per passenger, per leg, or 9x the CO2 emissions mass. That works out to about 1.8 tonnes based on my figures and maths, which is lower than your parent, but probably assumes too large a plane and too many passengers for a long-distance flight.
But yes: tonnes of CO2 emissions per passenger for round-trip international travel is about right.
I've updated my comment to make clear that's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and not based on actual performance data. Generally, if you're within a few powers of two with the approach, it's a good start, and empirical data trump rough estimates any day.
The "carbon" vs. "fuel" vs. "CO2 emissions" terminology is legitimate -- these are all different real aspects of the phenomenon. Playing fast and loose between these, or simply confusing the terms (see also kW vs. kWh confusion in energy discussions) is far too common. I specifically called which of these I was using and how they're related.
Much of this would benefit by more use of tables and graphs and sensible comparisons, so that people are at least familiar with appearances. Understanding might or might not follow, but the journalistic practice of "tell a story around numbers without using numbers or pictures" seems to me actively harmful.
It might be slightly better if there's cargo. Or worse if there's a lot of first class passengers.
Someone I know got denied boarding a flight on employee standby (~free ticket, family member works for the airline) because they needed the weight for cargo.
I'd expect the time delay in weighing every passenger and dealing with any who are above weight would be enough to sink the idea, quite apart from PR concerns.
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.
Precisely why you go for the largest polluters, like agriculture and ground transport. Air travel is the opposite of low hanging fruit because it's difficult to make jets more fuel efficient—the air travel industry is already incentivized to do this to cut costs, so most of the low hanging fruit has been picked. You end up striving for incremental improvement on 2.5% of the problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
This is ideal - if you use a C02 neutral power source & use atmospheric CO2 (either directly or via plants) you are effectively making planes flow battery powered.
With the flow battery using synthetic fuel you produce & atmospheric oxygen to produce energy & CO2. Which will then get captured again by your synthetic fuel factory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An argument I've heard for also dealing with the former is that for some people it might be easier to approach because it is more obvious and less scary (more actionable). Once you have them onboard, you can start with the harder things. I'm not sure whether I believe that, but it's not totally implausible.
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.
I absolutely agree, taking away private transit just isn't a workable solution with how people live and commute right now - and I wasn't advocating for anything of the kind, just pointing out that considering reducing private transit is absolutely off the table right now socially.
I use and love public transit and would love to see downtown car free zones that help encourage transit usage and phase out the need to have a car - I wouldn't love to see everyone's car instantly impounded.
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.
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.
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.
Not that I was serious in any way. But since we're talking about it, I am not convinced that our societies are able to coordinate an effort like that on a scale that would make a difference to the global climate.
Maybe I'm unaware of relevant history, maybe I'm being too cynical.
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.
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.
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.
I'm taking the train for my next holiday and it is significantly more expensive. Flying is unreasonably cheap. Aviation fuel needs to be taxed but this has to be done everywhere to avoid refuelling in havens. Or maybe tax stands at airports if that can't be done.
Jets are not going to tanker fuel in significant quantities over anything approaching a reasonable level of taxation differences. It would be extremely rare for a medium-haul jet to even be able to tanker fuel for a round trip and impossible for any of the long-haul routes.
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.
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.
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.
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.