The title of the article should be "1% of people cause 1.25% of the total global CO2 emissions", considering that aviation accounts for 2.5% of CO2 emissions globally.
Given that 1%’s disregard for the climate impact of their outsized air travel consumption, it’s plausible they are generators of much more than average emissions in other parts of the economy too - cars, induced load on delivery trucks, vacation homes, heating oil, lawn care, having many children, etc.
Reminds me of someone I knew in college - uber wealthy rebel kid of the owner of Empire films. Wore an oxford button down with the stenciled words "kill the rich their kids are evil" at Harvard. Not ironic at all, last I heard, he was on the ICAAN board voting against net neutrality.
What about all the other pollutants (nox &co) ? Don't forget they're released at very high altitude too, which generates a whole other set of problems than sea level pollution
The 1% figure sounds insane, but remember that "11% of the world’s population took a flight in 2018". In other words, about 10% of the flyers cause half of aviation emissions.
That sounds implausible to me. Perhaps by dividing the number of flights by the world population. But I can't conceive more than 800,000,000 different people flying last year
Looking for references, this seems realistic. According to Boeing's then CEO Dennis Muilenburg in 2017 "Less than 20 percent of the world’s population has ever taken a single flight" [0]. I couldn't find a clear figure for how many unique people fly at least once a year. So while the specific number would be up for debate, I think the order of magnitude sounds reasonable.
Apparently they're were about 40 million commercial flights per year pre-COVID. If we assume the average flight has 150 seats available (that may be too low?) that's 6 billion seats available for sale each year.
Most flights are return trips, so that 6bn seats corresponds to 3bn potential unique people. Then there's the percentage of multi-leg trips. (For example, on my most recent Athens-Istanbul-Stockholm return trip, I alone took 6 seats total).
Finally, we have to consider the percentage of flights taken by people who fly more than once a year, which probably represents a majority of seats.
All in all, it probably still lines up with 10%. It's shockingly high to me as well…
A neutral-looking source [0] indicates that in 2019, about 4.5 billion passengers boarded in total; 11% of the total world population flying at least once a year seems plausible with that figure.
Right. So one source saying 4.5 billion passengers, and one saying 800 million unique passengers. Those numbers look at least roughly reasonable in comparison with each other.
If the "average" passenger took 5 flights, then that adds up 4 billion passenger-flights. So the fat tail can be caused by the outliers taking dozens of flights.
There are lots of people in the world. Remember that when people talk about "the 1%" they might as well say "the richest hundred million people" (both numbers are round and approximately equal). "The 1%" conjures up a picture of champagne on the yacht in St. Tropez, but there are lots of people in the world.
Middle East countries have millions of workers from India to Philippines. A quick fact from Wikipedia "In 2013, the UAE had the fifth-largest international migrant stock in the world with 7.8 million migrants (out of a total population of 9.2 million)". Most of them visit their native places once or twice a year. A big fraction of Indians work thousands of kilometers away from home and also need intra-country transportation.
I capitalized "Airlines" for a reason, but I would guess it's pretty representative for the country. The reason your number and my number are different is not because AA is an unusual airline, but because the two numbers are about completely different things. There are three groups of Americans: (A) those that don't fly in a given year, (B) those that fly once, and (C) those that fly multiple times. Roughly, your number is A/(A+B+C) while mine is B/(B+C).
It is more clear from the research paper linked in the article. The distribution of emissions is about commercial passengers (71%), freight (17%), military (8%) and private airplanes (4%).
and this break down can only be based on what is accurately reported and military numbers rarely ever will be. Taxing aviation fuel can resolve the issue of the industry properly paying for their pollution but focusing on only a small set of fliers won't fix anything other than accentuate existing class tensions.
China and other countries did not report numbers so any analysis will be pure guesswork. The flat out comparison to miles flown by those on the continent of Africa exposes the nature of these types of studies. They have their observation written before the numbers are assembled.
To be honest the article is relying on the "one percent" theme which has been an all to common politically led class warfare action by which new policies and taxes are to be implemented under the guise of only targeting a limited set of people but in fact will impact many more and expanded at will once in place.
Class warfare is a common method to get a foot in the door. By incessantly portraying all problems as caused by "one percent" it becomes very easy to implement fees and taxes which will naturally have expand to include more than the "one percent" as the revenue will never meet the promised numbers.
This data is a core part of the data we have at work. We are expecting a massive spike way above the previous norm when travel opens up (soon in some places and later in others), followed by levels 50-80% (my finger in the air guesstimate... we haven't tried to model this) pre-covid as more people take video calls instead of flights now that they are used to it.
Surely they aren't all pointless. I think figuring out which flights are and which have a value to the business is a bit trickier to figure out then you suppose.
I flew from Berlin to Australia for a meeting and the person I was supposed to meet never even turned up because he pull an all nighter trying to meet a deadline the night before. Luckily it wasn't the only reason for the trip but it could have easily been. Good times.
We won't progress to a world where flights become a luxurious rarity, rather we will progress to a world where flights cause less emissions. The desire to travel and the mobility expectations we, in developed countries, have grown accustomed to are here to stay.
>We won't progress to a world where flights become a luxurious rarity, rather we will progress to a world where flights cause less emissions.
I wouldn't be too optimistic on that. We've already reached a point of massively diminishing returns on fuel efficiency with commercial airliners. Boeing spent billions of dollars and a decade designing the 787 to achieve a fuel efficiency gain of <10% over the 30 year old 777 [0]. The reality is that airliners are just extremely carbon intensive by their nature. And there is almost zero possibility that jet fuel will be replaced by battery or fuel cell technology for a long long time to come.
Even if net emissions are outlawed, carbon neutral synthetic or bio-fuels will still be available. They will be significantly more expensive, but probably not to the point where flights are any more of a luxurious rarity than they are now (for most people). Tourist based economies will be viable as long as there are wealthy people who want to go there.
> Airlines [...] benefited from a $100bn (£75bn) subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused.
That's a very weird phrasing to use, designed to cause shock and outrage for something that - if I'm deciphering the phrase properly - means "They burnt fuel without paying for the emissions", which as far as I know is something nobody does.
Nobody? Fuel is usually taxed in part to pay for the externalities of burning it (although in some parts of the world taxation is way too low). But aviation fuel is traditionally not.
In the United States (the extent of my experience on the matter), the fuel taxes are normally understood to pay for roads, which is really the opposite of addressing the externalities (since building more lane-miles fuels more demand.)
To make matters worse, they don't really cover even that cost, in most (US American) locales.
Aviation fuel is typically not taxed since the alternative would involve planes loading up in cheaper countries and carrying it around. The end result would defeat the purpose of emissions reductions.
Pigouvian taxes are a thing, and arguably one of the best types of taxes because they aim to correct for negative externalities instead of introducing new market distortions.
There are lots of active emissions schemes for fuel (and even for aviation) around the world.
So much so that there's even a law in the USA designed to prohibit participation in the EU scheme ("European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act of 2011")
Articles like this are almost infuriating, in most cases it's lazy journalism highlighting a problem or grievance from an angle or statistic some journalist finds "interesting" without giving any thought to a reasonable solution.
The only solutions I've seen are "everyone should travel less" basically making the proposition that poor people don't deserve air travel or making grandiose claims about building huge high speed rail networks. The rail networks bit is ironic since building them wouldn't solve any energy production or distribution carbon emissions and would likely just take money that should be spent on research into promising renewable sources.
I don't think this is a 1% problem, the problem is simply that aviation produces a lot of emissions, or put another way, we should expect 1% of people (or some equally small fraction of the population) do 50% of most things.
As for tackling the emissions problem, why can't we introduce an emissions tax on the aviation industry to fund investment into carbon capture technologies to offset emissions? It seems to me the costs of carbon capture could quite easily be passed onto the consumer in this case given I know so many people who buy flights just because they're cheap.
I suspect the 1% are mostly people travelling for business not purely leisure. If you consider the amount of auto emissions say a truck driver in the US emits compared to most of the world where even access to auto mobiles is expensive, I wouldn't be that surprised personally.
That's that's why I included, "(or some equally small fraction of the population)". We should expect a small percentage in any sample like this to be extreme outliers. We call them "power users" in tech, but the same applies to most activities.
This question is actually pretty complex. If the plane is flying it doesn’t matter if people are on it or not.
I might actually argue that frequent flyers are flying to hubs and on flights that haven’t been canceled in 2020.
Regardless, you can’t just make assumptions like the one in the article. Flying frequently is not the same as driving frequently. Your car doesn’t take off whether you’re in the car or not, but a plane does.
For a sufficiently large reduction in people taking flights, the plane actually doesn't take off (either by reducing the amount of flights on a route or cancelling it altogether).
Yes, it's not that every flight you don't take across the Atlantic saves 2 tons of CO2. It's that it has a 99.9% chance of saving almost none and a .1% chance of being the straw that breaks the camel's back in causing a reduction in flights on that route and saving 2000 tons of CO2. But they're the same in expectation.
This isn't surprising and borderline clickbaity. The article is about 1% of the world's population, not 1% of the people who flies. Most people who are in a first-world country and make an average living is in the top %1, when compared to the world's pop. So few people on the internet realized, they are the 1%.
Would be interesting to know how many of those frequent fliers work at large consulting companies. Besides "CEO-types" those are the only people I know that take two flights per week.
I really can't imagine that most of those frequent fliers are people that take a flight every week to go on a vacation "just because it's cheap" like the article says.
I was that kind of consultant for 5 years. At least two flights each week. Sometimes 4 if doing a connecting flight. Sounds crazy now but then main thing i was concerned was how to get more Hilton or frequent flyer points.
Yeah, I know many people who worked in the consulting world and fly to client site Monday morning and back Thursday evening was pretty standard (every week). The only people I've know who flew more were in software sales. They would sometimes take 3 roundtrip flights per week (although it wasn't as consistent)
A lot of remote mining workers are "FIFO" and will average a round trip every 1-3 weeks. These are regular workers, operators, fitters, electricians, project managers etc.
"The global management consulting industry is expected to lose around $30 billion of value in 2020, as clients tend to delay projects, decrease scope or cancel them altogether, according to Beroe Inc, a procurement intelligence firm."
I seem to recall seeing a headline here on HN, within the last week, that said something along the lines of "Climate activists are the most frequent flyers", though I don't remember the exact words. Maybe somebody with better search-fu can find it?
I don't believe that's true, it is a valid point: a lot of us talk a good game about caring for the environment, but when push comes to shove we are unwilling to give up luxuries we've grown accustomed to.
That might be the case for many people^, bit it's a different thing to say than "these are, to a large extent, the same people who..." which imo is a flame if it goes without figures to back it up.
^) Although not for me, many people I know in the climate movement, and some figureheads like Greta Thunberg. There have also been comments from scientists who find having to fly to conferences problematic. But that's all anecdotal.
Hasn't the last 8-9 months proven that the world goes 'round, money is made, innovation happens, vacations are had, with most people flying very little?
I now have close to 100 percent of my meetings online, and for me it has been far more efficient than meeting up physically.
We had a total of 6-7 weeks of summer vacation / work from vacation location. In many ways that was due to covid-19, not despite of it. beforehand, both me and my wife would have to be near our offices. It was mostly to places we could reach by car, so not very far away.
Quite remarkable the impact that even a small percentage of the population has on the environment.
This is why it's so important to prompt cultural changes and encourage people to think about their impact beforehand, rather than in a reactionary sense.
A small number of people produce many of the productivity gains that improve broad quality of life. How do you know that they aren't the ones flying? Economics suggests that few would continually pay for useless business trips.
Including radiative forcing and other effects something on the order of 4%. Not life changing but current carbon budget imbalance is only about 4.5% of anthropogenic CO2, so if we cut it out completely we could slow CO2 growth significantly
It is quite interesting from a completely outside perspective how our species seems to insist on placing short-term individual prosperity above long-term collective survival.
Presumably we evolved brains with the capacity for long term planning because it was an aid to our survival. What's interesting is that we don't use it in this case.
That's a dubious statement considering that human beings engage in long term planning all the time. Indeed, it is doubtful civilization would exist if we couldn't.
But shouldn't it be? There's a problem and you have a limited amount of money to spend fixing it. Every dollar you spend by not flying is a dollar you can't spend on something else.
I understand the appeal of "We have to do something and this is something so let's do it" but that never works in practice.
what if flying people around in produces 10 Trillion dollars a year in value. That money can be used to build a 1,000 solar farms that will will reduce the amount of CO2 twice as much as just stopping all those flights?
Or what if the politics of stopping people from flying are mind mindbogglingly toxic. They'll vote for and support people who will happily build coal plant upon coal plant just so that they can keep flying. But for that they'd happily pay the taxes and/or pay the capital to build a million wind turbines.
Look, I realize this is just a dumb thread. It won't change a mind one jot but maybe someone here will make an argument that - pro or con - will make the end result come about or not come about a bit faster.
Or international if you're in a small country ;). My wife and I take several multiday trips to places in Europe by train instead of flying to a faraway place once (or twice). Better for the environment and it's not like there's not enough to see and do nearby (ish) for several lifetimes.
Not having to deal with the security theater is also a big plus.
When you take in account all the time it takes getting from your place to the airport and back to the hotel there's usually not much of a difference in time in taking the train anyway.
I fell in love with train travel in eastern europe. Get on a train at night, curl up in your bunk to get gently rocked to sleep by the movement of the car, wake up in the morning in another city refreshed and ready to go. It's the closest thing to time travel that I've ever experienced.
>High speed trains are a good alternative (for domestic travel)
This is the only real answer. There's a hard limitation to how emissions friendly aviation can ever be. The energy density requirements given current technology can only be met with hydrocarbon fuels. High speed trains are infinitely more efficient, and actually would have an outsized effect on emissions given that the type of short haul flights it would replace are the least efficient per mile travelled, since takeoff/climb uses far more fuel than cruise. We'll never be able to replace carbon intensive long haul international flights, but focusing on what can be replaced could go a long way.
Passenger aircraft also carry freight, and there are also various freight airlines, but it's strange that there is no mention of that in the article.
In truth, we may be also responsible for aviation emissions even if we are not flying; simply by clicking the "Order" buttom on some faraway e-commerce site, or posting something via airmail...
Tax carbon, and you’ll influence all industries broadly and fairly, rather than taking on the venal task of searching out who doesn’t deserve or make good use of their emissions, according to us.
https://citizensclimatelobby.org/
And you'll create a business model for all sorts of more efficient technologies. And you'll make green energy pay for itself so quickly everyone will be installing it.
> And you'll create a business model for all sorts of more efficient technologies. And you'll make green energy pay for itself so quickly everyone will be installing it.
History doesn't agree with your view, if anything it creates a perverse market wherein people who benefit from the status quo pay people who don't in order to skirt their supposed environmental responsibilities and commitments as they continue as they did before. Just look at the Carbon Credit model and the relationship Tesla had with the big auto manufactures [0].
> As a spokesman for Fiat Chrysler said: “Until demand catches up with regulatory requirements, and there is regulatory relief, we will use credits as appropriate.”
I worked for VW during Diesel gate, and I can tell you that this is standard operational procedure for the Industry and what made me quit in utter disgust. It will not change course unless dire, existential consequences are imminent. And it has to be more severe than what Diesel-gate cost VW.
You could argue this gave Tesla a lifeline that it otherwise wouldn't have had during its early years after the original Roadster was released and they were working on the Model S, but those are tertiary effects at best and consequential more than anything.
In short, no, nothing seems to indicate that is what occurs when you allow the State to create such a system as it will always allow for exemptions if their is profit to be made.
Making individual people at these corps responsible for things like Ecocide and have the dire consequences (actual prison time) for the infractions multi national corps currently get out of with political bribes (campaign contributions and fundraising) and lobbying would be a much better start.
Some VW execs got thrown in jail and VAG lost ~$12 billion from diesel gate, and yet the brand gained Market share in certain emerging markets that offset those losses. Incidentally, many other manufactures (Ford, Subaru, Mazda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Mitsubishi, Nissan-Renault, Harley Davidson) were all caught cheating emissions as well and weren't nearly as punished in the US. In fact Nissan was able to purchase Mitsubishi Motors US outright in the midst of the VW fall out with no scandal.
Well, yes, if you make all sorts of exemptions then businesses will pursue those. That's the state of carbon trading today.
I'm advocating for a clear, non-negotiable tax on fossil fuels. If carbon leaves the ground (therefore entering the ecosystem), a fee is paid. It needs to be relatively high, otherwise it won't drive change.
It changes how people make decisions through the entire economy. If you're deciding whether to build renewables + a battery or build a gas power plant, the economics look very different when your fuel comes with a large carbon fee.
If you're deciding whether to buy in internal combustion engine car or an electric one, the economics are very different when the cost of gas is high because of the carbon fee. You look at the other options, or drive less. Less carbon enters the ecosystem.
Ultimately corporations sell people what they want. People buy SUVs because they're comfortable, and because the extra cost of gas is marginal. If that gas cost 2x or 3x as much, those purchasing decisions would be different. We know they would, because they have been in the past. Both the 1970s and 2008 oil price shocks saw changing consumer behaviour - a move towards more efficient cars and less miles driven.
If we're going to get a grip on carbon emissions, we need to price fossil fuels to represent their true cost.
> those are tertiary effects at best and consequential more than anything
Those tertiary effects are the entire point of using the market to transmit policy. They work; the market works.
> Making individual people at these corps responsible [...] would be a much better start. Some VW execs got thrown in jail [...] yet the brand gained Market share in certain emerging markets that offset those losses.
It sounds like putting people in jail doesn't work?
> Those tertiary effects are the entire point of using the market to transmit policy. They work; the market works.
You do realize Tesla was on the brink of death long before the the first Carbon Credit was sold in 2012? There was a real possibility that Tesla would have never made it to get to that point were it not for the external investments, Elon's own money and the DOE's loan that made it possible to make that possible for them to survive long enough to be able to be in that position to do so.
Markets may work for many aspects as a medium to achieve desirable ends, and are definitely better than State involvement, but despite being a self professed Anarcho-Capitalist with a massive Agorist and Environmentalist bend I'm not convinced that Market forces alone are able to address the damage we have collectively inflicted as Species to the Environment. Actions have to have consequences for something so dire and if prison and fund seizure is widely accepted and used as a deterrent for the most heinous of crimes in Society for the Private Citizen then it must also apply to the State, Hedge-fund and Corporate class. These immunity decrees need to be abolished, and their actions are not something we should allow to be settled out of court.
Selling the affluent class Teslas isn't going to undo the damage to the polluted and depleted Oceans, or arable farm land and aquifers being used as chemical dump sites by State subsidized Corps. It has to be more extensive than that and punishing Politicians, Banks, Corporations and People with jail time and fund seizures used solely to reverse these issues will be what had any chance to curtail this.
> It sounds like putting people in jail doesn't work?
No, as I mentioned it was the selective application of the Law that is the issue; by making it clear that everyone involved was going to prison and have their assets clawed back from their entire careers in those Industries will there be any chance for it make any significant impact.
I cannot divulge the specifics but if you just heard the way the Reps from Bosch I dealt with on daily basis spoke about this knowing all they had to do was pay out a small amount in refunds in relation to VW you'd understand why I hold these views.
The carbon credit corruption (every carbon credit system is corrupt by design) and the WV fraud are exactly the kind of things a carbon tax is designed to avoid.
What a carbon tax fails at is in avoiding that companies move their production to tax heavens and export from there. Luckily, this is an action that doesn't make many local friends, so it's much easier to combat politically.
>Luckily, this is an action that doesn't make many local friends, so it's much easier to combat politically.
I'm totally in favor of a carbon tax (even as a leftist it's a no-brainer market solution) but to claim that the corporations won't outsource to tax havens because of the "political" cost is totally laughable and just doesn't bear out in reality.
> I'm totally in favor of a carbon tax (even as a leftist it's a no-brainer market solution) but to claim that the corporations won't outsource to tax havens because of the "political" cost is totally laughable and just doesn't bear out in reality.
I'm conflicted by this for several reasons as I want to believe it but I have enough Life experience to know its a farce.
I have lived and worked in the 2 states with the most expensive gas in the US (Hawaii and California) and I can tell you right now the expense is a minor deterrent at best. I grew up in SoCal's motorsports culture most of my Life and when I was deepest in it in my youn adult life we certainly didn't care about MPG or the costs associated it.
Daily driving track cars on the street with open waste gate and massive turbo cars with 500+hp were childhood aspirations, and +$4 dollar gas was just the cost of entry. We all knew it and accepted it and perversely wore it as a badge of honor. The traffic is famously abysmal and we spent way more money just sitting in the freeway than I care to think about back then, and yet it never stopped us. Not once.
I was mainly forced to drive my track on the street when it $5/gallon after my cheap daily car (1980s Honda Prelude) was taken away from the State. And I finished my junior and most of my senior year with a car that got at best ~17mpg commuting 110 mile to school and and extra 45 when I had to go to work.
This was out of necessity and not really choice, as I would have never done it it were up to me. But the money I would have other spent on books or food (subsequently I ate once a day, or every other day at work as a cook). The money deterrent doesn't actually work if you think the investment will pay off in the long term, eg Graduation and Career.
Hawaii was the same but for different reasons and depends on which Island you're on, but no one is going to care about gas prices when you spent $1000s for rent or plane tickets and hotel costs how much gas price (well over $5) I never once saw locals stop to think maybe they should ride a bike and continued to drive their lifted trucks with mud tires in traffic.
But then I lived in Switzerland, in several cantons including Zurich, and I can tell you right now that it has a deterrent on the youth only.
Older rich people who work in finance or mega corps are driving Maybach/Brabus/AMG S class Mercedes and Alpina BMWs to their homes in town back and forth and take them to the Alps on the weekends, all while the youth (who may or may not see value in the supposed status those cars have) take public transport every where despite having VERY expensive driving licenses as they cannot afford cars let alone gas or the fees on a small VW/Renault/Fiat.
I still remember laughing to myself when I saw a long row of Lamborghinis and Ferraris during the gumball with Swiss plates headed to Monaco on the bahnhofstrass at the Zurich SBB as they were all stuck in traffic and you could visually see the heat dissipation ripples at the SBB entrance for several minutes as they waited for the foot traffic to clear out for the daily commute.
The joke being that they collectively probably wasted more in gas in those 8 minutes, which is very EXPENSIVE in Switzerland, than I earned in the previous 2 weeks at the time during my apprenticeship. Not to mention how many of these loopholes on taxes, and fees are used by registering Supercars or Super Saloon German exec cars or massive G Wagons as a company car that makes it exempt from many of the fees you're describing.
I think he's arguing from a very naive position and they think that the Law applies to everyone equally when it never has.
I'm not advocating this from an an 'eat the rich' perspective, as I have no problem with wealthy people who earned their money honestly by servicing the Market and saved their entire lives but rather from the obvious selective application of Law and that until that is made clear that t...
That's completely sufficient. If the tax is high enough then the "status quo" will change in months, because it'll be trivial for new or existing market participants to offer cheaper alternatives.
And this gives the equation for calculating the minimum carbon tax rate. It has to be high enough that it covers the in/efficiency premium and the overhead costs (R&D, marketing, approval, implementation/construction, distribution, upkeep).
We already see this in case of coal plants. Coal was cheaper, but as the natural gas infrastructure expanded, gas turbines became more efficient, oil/gas price have fallen a lot and emission standards became stricter, and now it just doesn't make sense to even keep existing coal plants online. Because upkeep is high and they are so dirty.
Now the next step is to push out oil/gas plants, but first put carbon capture on the smokestacks.
Since carbon capture basically "doubles" the cost of electricity it makes sense to have a tax that is higher than that so power plants will opt to install carbon capture.
And so similarly we can calculate for transportation, space heating.
I'm a skeptic of this approach. How do you begin to measure CO2 emissions for the entire lifecycle of a product? I have a hard time believing it wont just benefit whoever has the best carbon-accountants.
Tax some carbon, tax some consumption, harsh penalties for countries that pollute a lot. I think there are many ingredients needed here.
If you manage to instate a global carbon tax. In the more realistic approach of only having a carbon tax in a couple of countries at first, you need some way to estimate tariffs and rebates for trade purposes.
>How do you begin to measure CO2 emissions for the entire lifecycle of a product?
You don't, the entire point is that it naturally gets dealt with (or at least, sufficiently) if you simply internalize the emission cost of inputs. You set the price of emitting a ton of CO2 equivalent during energy or material production at the present bid price of industrial scale rapid removal of a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere with some attractive margin (10% maybe, but that could be set by experts), and then the market can figure it out from there. All energy then becomes net neutral, as well as the vast majority of materials, and it's more straight forward to police (though still real work) since law enforcement just need to focus on a smaller number of central points.
"CO2 emissions" don't just materialize by magic, they're a result of energy/material inputs to a product. Take care of those and there isn't any need at all to care what people do with the product or for how long. There is no stupid, counter productive moralizing required either about what people do with their luxury energy budget. The goal is that the net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere stays static (or at this point, is lowered back to our optimal standard, then kept steady state). That goal is what should be legislated, not how to reach it.
Ok so what if my foobar is manufactured in a foreign country and shipped to the United States by a foreign company?
CO2 removal will cost the same no matter which country emits it. Who is going to foot the bill for CO2 manufactured in developing nations?
When the farmer says "you have to account for the CO2 removed by my crops to offset my expenses" and then the multinational conglomerate says "you have to account for the CO2 removed by the trees that I am planting" who wins?
>Ok so what if my foobar is manufactured in a foreign country and shipped to the United States by a foreign company?
It'll have to be dealt with the same way any other existing cross border standards is? Countries will be able to exert leverage to the extent another country wants access to their markets in all the typical ways. Best would be adopting equivalent or even the same standards for a more efficient multinational effort, but they can also require it for all imports and present an either/or: countries can comply with the rules, including independent inspections and such, and get priced that way. Or alternatively they can get shoved into a very conservative blanket worst case estimate and tariffs imposed accordingly.
Ongoing energy usage could of course be handled entirely unilaterally, though countries might choose to pursue tariffs against countries that don't comply.
Fairly geographically precise CO2 emissions can be monitored via satellite by any country that wishes to, so everyone can have a clear enough idea of what other countries are emitting.
>CO2 removal will cost the same no matter which country emits it. Who is going to foot the bill for CO2 manufactured in developing nations?
What do you mean? The market will figure it out on anything imported, that's the point of pricing it in. Precisely because capture can happen anywhere equivalently, it's fine to just handle it with money. The current subsidy by externality goes away. Developing nations will still have other cost advantages, and will be on a level playing field with developed world manufacturers when targeting the markets of implementing nations. Some developing nations may even find it extremely profitable to specialize in CO2 capture capacity.
As far as who foots the bill if other countries decide to impose it in other ways worldwide, that'd no doubt come up during the process of such a decision. But it will be much cheaper to do so when capture infrastructure is already well developed.
>When the farmer says "you have to account for the CO2 removed by my crops to offset my expenses" and then the multinational conglomerate says "you have to account for the CO2 removed by the trees that I am planting" who wins?
Neither, because there is no need to account for that. I said industrial-scale rapid removal (and planting crops doesn't have any significant net effect anyway duh). If countries want to simply outright subsidize farmers for national-security reasons or the, they can do that directly.
Tax carbon, and 1% of people will cause 55% of global aviation emissions. Why? Because those who can afford frequent airlines tickets can afford the tax as well. It won't change their behavior much. The family that can barely scrape together the money to fly to Disneyland? They're the ones whose behavior you'll change.
This saves you the task of deciding who's deserving, but it produces outcomes that sure feel unfair...
Meta: Not sure if the photo of the KLM planes was retouched. The way the colors are in it, I initially thought it was one of those photos that's regressed to black and white with just a few elements in color.
I’m probably in the top 2%, averaging 2 US-EU flights and 6 domestic US flights per year.
I hated every minute of it, and in some ways I feel like the pandemic saved me from the gluttony of in person meetings.
The pandemic offered many of us an opportunity to use the technology we have and avoid unnecessary travel. Is zoom/g-meet a replacement for in person meetings? No. But is it good enough and worth the savings on time and damage to the environment? Hell yes.
I'm sorry, but I think you are in the 1% of world population. From the article, 11% of world population took at least 1 flight, so when it talks about 1% of the population, they are talking about the 10% most frequent flyers.
With 6 continental and 2 inter-continental flights a year, I think you're probably in that top 10% most frequent flyers.
Aviation accounts for 1.9% of global greenhouse gas emissions [0]. If we're going to take a sober look at where to focus our efforts, this:
"Global aviation’s contribution to the climate crisis was growing fast before the Covid-19 pandemic, with emissions jumping by 32% from 2013-18"
Should be:
"Global aviation’s contribution to the climate crisis was growing fast before the Covid-19 pandemic. Aviation's contribution to global CO2 emissions rose from 1.3% to 1.9% from 2013-18"
But the latter doesn't attract clicks so much. Transportation overall accounts for 28% of greenhouse gas emissions [1]. That's the story that matters.
There's certainly a point here about wealthy nations and wealthy people being responsible for a lion's share of the problem, but really, everyone knows that. This article, and indeed the linked paper [2] gloss over the relative size of the aviation problem.
If you restrict yourself to the part of the world that can actually afford to fly, aviation looks quite a bit worse. Taking a trip from Europe to California is a good way to basically double my carbon footprint for the year.
Aviation is also fairly unique in that we don't know how to make it climate neutral. Even burning synfuel made from renewables won't be enough, because adding emissions higher in the atmosphere has a stronger warming effect. And we just don't know how to make all-electric long distance planes yet.
> Even burning synfuel made from renewables won't be enough, because adding emissions higher in the atmosphere has a stronger warming effect.
It has a temporary strong effect, that falls back into the normal one in a couple of decades. What means that synfuel based aviation would have a constant impact on the global temperature, like painting your ceiling black. We can live quite well with that.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadWhat about all the other pollutants (nox &co) ? Don't forget they're released at very high altitude too, which generates a whole other set of problems than sea level pollution
That sounds implausible to me. Perhaps by dividing the number of flights by the world population. But I can't conceive more than 800,000,000 different people flying last year
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/07/boeing-ceo-80-percent-of-peo...
Finally, we have to consider the percentage of flights taken by people who fly more than once a year, which probably represents a majority of seats.
All in all, it probably still lines up with 10%. It's shockingly high to me as well…
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-...
https://thepointsguy.com/2017/09/american-airlines-amazing-s...
See Fig. 7 in the research paper linked in this article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
It seems about 87%-53% = 34% of Americans fly once a year.
See Fig. 1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
China and other countries did not report numbers so any analysis will be pure guesswork. The flat out comparison to miles flown by those on the continent of Africa exposes the nature of these types of studies. They have their observation written before the numbers are assembled.
To be honest the article is relying on the "one percent" theme which has been an all to common politically led class warfare action by which new policies and taxes are to be implemented under the guise of only targeting a limited set of people but in fact will impact many more and expanded at will once in place.
Class warfare is a common method to get a foot in the door. By incessantly portraying all problems as caused by "one percent" it becomes very easy to implement fees and taxes which will naturally have expand to include more than the "one percent" as the revenue will never meet the promised numbers.
I wouldn't be too optimistic on that. We've already reached a point of massively diminishing returns on fuel efficiency with commercial airliners. Boeing spent billions of dollars and a decade designing the 787 to achieve a fuel efficiency gain of <10% over the 30 year old 777 [0]. The reality is that airliners are just extremely carbon intensive by their nature. And there is almost zero possibility that jet fuel will be replaced by battery or fuel cell technology for a long long time to come.
[0] https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/Transat...
That's a very weird phrasing to use, designed to cause shock and outrage for something that - if I'm deciphering the phrase properly - means "They burnt fuel without paying for the emissions", which as far as I know is something nobody does.
To make matters worse, they don't really cover even that cost, in most (US American) locales.
So much so that there's even a law in the USA designed to prohibit participation in the EU scheme ("European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act of 2011")
The only solutions I've seen are "everyone should travel less" basically making the proposition that poor people don't deserve air travel or making grandiose claims about building huge high speed rail networks. The rail networks bit is ironic since building them wouldn't solve any energy production or distribution carbon emissions and would likely just take money that should be spent on research into promising renewable sources.
Glad to hear you support progressive approaches to addressing climate change.
besides, they already pay too much tax for flying and for no good reason.
i'd say "1% of flyers pay 50% of global airplane CO2 tax". it's insane and not that different from income tax.
As for tackling the emissions problem, why can't we introduce an emissions tax on the aviation industry to fund investment into carbon capture technologies to offset emissions? It seems to me the costs of carbon capture could quite easily be passed onto the consumer in this case given I know so many people who buy flights just because they're cheap.
I wouldn't expect 1% of people to produce half of auto emissions. I wouldn't expect 1% of people to consume half of the electricity.
That's that's why I included, "(or some equally small fraction of the population)". We should expect a small percentage in any sample like this to be extreme outliers. We call them "power users" in tech, but the same applies to most activities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
I might actually argue that frequent flyers are flying to hubs and on flights that haven’t been canceled in 2020.
Regardless, you can’t just make assumptions like the one in the article. Flying frequently is not the same as driving frequently. Your car doesn’t take off whether you’re in the car or not, but a plane does.
My main point is that I doubt frequent flyers are the ones pushing flight patterns.
I really can't imagine that most of those frequent fliers are people that take a flight every week to go on a vacation "just because it's cheap" like the article says.
Apparently enough such that flight avoidance due to covid has had a large impact on the management consulting industry:
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/coronavirus-causes-....
"The global management consulting industry is expected to lose around $30 billion of value in 2020, as clients tend to delay projects, decrease scope or cancel them altogether, according to Beroe Inc, a procurement intelligence firm."
^) Although not for me, many people I know in the climate movement, and some figureheads like Greta Thunberg. There have also been comments from scientists who find having to fly to conferences problematic. But that's all anecdotal.
I now have close to 100 percent of my meetings online, and for me it has been far more efficient than meeting up physically.
This is why it's so important to prompt cultural changes and encourage people to think about their impact beforehand, rather than in a reactionary sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle#/media/File:Anthr...
It is merely a bogyman for a tribal train of thought
I understand the appeal of "We have to do something and this is something so let's do it" but that never works in practice.
what if flying people around in produces 10 Trillion dollars a year in value. That money can be used to build a 1,000 solar farms that will will reduce the amount of CO2 twice as much as just stopping all those flights?
Or what if the politics of stopping people from flying are mind mindbogglingly toxic. They'll vote for and support people who will happily build coal plant upon coal plant just so that they can keep flying. But for that they'd happily pay the taxes and/or pay the capital to build a million wind turbines.
Look, I realize this is just a dumb thread. It won't change a mind one jot but maybe someone here will make an argument that - pro or con - will make the end result come about or not come about a bit faster.
When you take in account all the time it takes getting from your place to the airport and back to the hotel there's usually not much of a difference in time in taking the train anyway.
This is the only real answer. There's a hard limitation to how emissions friendly aviation can ever be. The energy density requirements given current technology can only be met with hydrocarbon fuels. High speed trains are infinitely more efficient, and actually would have an outsized effect on emissions given that the type of short haul flights it would replace are the least efficient per mile travelled, since takeoff/climb uses far more fuel than cruise. We'll never be able to replace carbon intensive long haul international flights, but focusing on what can be replaced could go a long way.
In truth, we may be also responsible for aviation emissions even if we are not flying; simply by clicking the "Order" buttom on some faraway e-commerce site, or posting something via airmail...
This is the obvious solution. Tax carbon heavily and the economy will reward efficiency and non-carbon-generating technologies. Hands off! https://concretecuts.xyz/articles/green-tech-market/
History doesn't agree with your view, if anything it creates a perverse market wherein people who benefit from the status quo pay people who don't in order to skirt their supposed environmental responsibilities and commitments as they continue as they did before. Just look at the Carbon Credit model and the relationship Tesla had with the big auto manufactures [0].
> As a spokesman for Fiat Chrysler said: “Until demand catches up with regulatory requirements, and there is regulatory relief, we will use credits as appropriate.”
I worked for VW during Diesel gate, and I can tell you that this is standard operational procedure for the Industry and what made me quit in utter disgust. It will not change course unless dire, existential consequences are imminent. And it has to be more severe than what Diesel-gate cost VW.
You could argue this gave Tesla a lifeline that it otherwise wouldn't have had during its early years after the original Roadster was released and they were working on the Model S, but those are tertiary effects at best and consequential more than anything.
In short, no, nothing seems to indicate that is what occurs when you allow the State to create such a system as it will always allow for exemptions if their is profit to be made.
Making individual people at these corps responsible for things like Ecocide and have the dire consequences (actual prison time) for the infractions multi national corps currently get out of with political bribes (campaign contributions and fundraising) and lobbying would be a much better start.
Some VW execs got thrown in jail and VAG lost ~$12 billion from diesel gate, and yet the brand gained Market share in certain emerging markets that offset those losses. Incidentally, many other manufactures (Ford, Subaru, Mazda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Mitsubishi, Nissan-Renault, Harley Davidson) were all caught cheating emissions as well and weren't nearly as punished in the US. In fact Nissan was able to purchase Mitsubishi Motors US outright in the midst of the VW fall out with no scandal.
0: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/14/why-greenho...
I'm advocating for a clear, non-negotiable tax on fossil fuels. If carbon leaves the ground (therefore entering the ecosystem), a fee is paid. It needs to be relatively high, otherwise it won't drive change.
It changes how people make decisions through the entire economy. If you're deciding whether to build renewables + a battery or build a gas power plant, the economics look very different when your fuel comes with a large carbon fee.
If you're deciding whether to buy in internal combustion engine car or an electric one, the economics are very different when the cost of gas is high because of the carbon fee. You look at the other options, or drive less. Less carbon enters the ecosystem.
Ultimately corporations sell people what they want. People buy SUVs because they're comfortable, and because the extra cost of gas is marginal. If that gas cost 2x or 3x as much, those purchasing decisions would be different. We know they would, because they have been in the past. Both the 1970s and 2008 oil price shocks saw changing consumer behaviour - a move towards more efficient cars and less miles driven.
If we're going to get a grip on carbon emissions, we need to price fossil fuels to represent their true cost.
Those tertiary effects are the entire point of using the market to transmit policy. They work; the market works.
> Making individual people at these corps responsible [...] would be a much better start. Some VW execs got thrown in jail [...] yet the brand gained Market share in certain emerging markets that offset those losses.
It sounds like putting people in jail doesn't work?
You do realize Tesla was on the brink of death long before the the first Carbon Credit was sold in 2012? There was a real possibility that Tesla would have never made it to get to that point were it not for the external investments, Elon's own money and the DOE's loan that made it possible to make that possible for them to survive long enough to be able to be in that position to do so.
Markets may work for many aspects as a medium to achieve desirable ends, and are definitely better than State involvement, but despite being a self professed Anarcho-Capitalist with a massive Agorist and Environmentalist bend I'm not convinced that Market forces alone are able to address the damage we have collectively inflicted as Species to the Environment. Actions have to have consequences for something so dire and if prison and fund seizure is widely accepted and used as a deterrent for the most heinous of crimes in Society for the Private Citizen then it must also apply to the State, Hedge-fund and Corporate class. These immunity decrees need to be abolished, and their actions are not something we should allow to be settled out of court.
Selling the affluent class Teslas isn't going to undo the damage to the polluted and depleted Oceans, or arable farm land and aquifers being used as chemical dump sites by State subsidized Corps. It has to be more extensive than that and punishing Politicians, Banks, Corporations and People with jail time and fund seizures used solely to reverse these issues will be what had any chance to curtail this.
> It sounds like putting people in jail doesn't work?
No, as I mentioned it was the selective application of the Law that is the issue; by making it clear that everyone involved was going to prison and have their assets clawed back from their entire careers in those Industries will there be any chance for it make any significant impact.
I cannot divulge the specifics but if you just heard the way the Reps from Bosch I dealt with on daily basis spoke about this knowing all they had to do was pay out a small amount in refunds in relation to VW you'd understand why I hold these views.
What a carbon tax fails at is in avoiding that companies move their production to tax heavens and export from there. Luckily, this is an action that doesn't make many local friends, so it's much easier to combat politically.
I'm totally in favor of a carbon tax (even as a leftist it's a no-brainer market solution) but to claim that the corporations won't outsource to tax havens because of the "political" cost is totally laughable and just doesn't bear out in reality.
I'm conflicted by this for several reasons as I want to believe it but I have enough Life experience to know its a farce.
I have lived and worked in the 2 states with the most expensive gas in the US (Hawaii and California) and I can tell you right now the expense is a minor deterrent at best. I grew up in SoCal's motorsports culture most of my Life and when I was deepest in it in my youn adult life we certainly didn't care about MPG or the costs associated it.
Daily driving track cars on the street with open waste gate and massive turbo cars with 500+hp were childhood aspirations, and +$4 dollar gas was just the cost of entry. We all knew it and accepted it and perversely wore it as a badge of honor. The traffic is famously abysmal and we spent way more money just sitting in the freeway than I care to think about back then, and yet it never stopped us. Not once.
I was mainly forced to drive my track on the street when it $5/gallon after my cheap daily car (1980s Honda Prelude) was taken away from the State. And I finished my junior and most of my senior year with a car that got at best ~17mpg commuting 110 mile to school and and extra 45 when I had to go to work.
This was out of necessity and not really choice, as I would have never done it it were up to me. But the money I would have other spent on books or food (subsequently I ate once a day, or every other day at work as a cook). The money deterrent doesn't actually work if you think the investment will pay off in the long term, eg Graduation and Career.
Hawaii was the same but for different reasons and depends on which Island you're on, but no one is going to care about gas prices when you spent $1000s for rent or plane tickets and hotel costs how much gas price (well over $5) I never once saw locals stop to think maybe they should ride a bike and continued to drive their lifted trucks with mud tires in traffic.
But then I lived in Switzerland, in several cantons including Zurich, and I can tell you right now that it has a deterrent on the youth only.
Older rich people who work in finance or mega corps are driving Maybach/Brabus/AMG S class Mercedes and Alpina BMWs to their homes in town back and forth and take them to the Alps on the weekends, all while the youth (who may or may not see value in the supposed status those cars have) take public transport every where despite having VERY expensive driving licenses as they cannot afford cars let alone gas or the fees on a small VW/Renault/Fiat.
I still remember laughing to myself when I saw a long row of Lamborghinis and Ferraris during the gumball with Swiss plates headed to Monaco on the bahnhofstrass at the Zurich SBB as they were all stuck in traffic and you could visually see the heat dissipation ripples at the SBB entrance for several minutes as they waited for the foot traffic to clear out for the daily commute.
The joke being that they collectively probably wasted more in gas in those 8 minutes, which is very EXPENSIVE in Switzerland, than I earned in the previous 2 weeks at the time during my apprenticeship. Not to mention how many of these loopholes on taxes, and fees are used by registering Supercars or Super Saloon German exec cars or massive G Wagons as a company car that makes it exempt from many of the fees you're describing.
I think he's arguing from a very naive position and they think that the Law applies to everyone equally when it never has.
I'm not advocating this from an an 'eat the rich' perspective, as I have no problem with wealthy people who earned their money honestly by servicing the Market and saved their entire lives but rather from the obvious selective application of Law and that until that is made clear that t...
That's completely sufficient. If the tax is high enough then the "status quo" will change in months, because it'll be trivial for new or existing market participants to offer cheaper alternatives.
And this gives the equation for calculating the minimum carbon tax rate. It has to be high enough that it covers the in/efficiency premium and the overhead costs (R&D, marketing, approval, implementation/construction, distribution, upkeep).
We already see this in case of coal plants. Coal was cheaper, but as the natural gas infrastructure expanded, gas turbines became more efficient, oil/gas price have fallen a lot and emission standards became stricter, and now it just doesn't make sense to even keep existing coal plants online. Because upkeep is high and they are so dirty.
Now the next step is to push out oil/gas plants, but first put carbon capture on the smokestacks.
Since carbon capture basically "doubles" the cost of electricity it makes sense to have a tax that is higher than that so power plants will opt to install carbon capture.
And so similarly we can calculate for transportation, space heating.
Tax some carbon, tax some consumption, harsh penalties for countries that pollute a lot. I think there are many ingredients needed here.
You don't, the entire point is that it naturally gets dealt with (or at least, sufficiently) if you simply internalize the emission cost of inputs. You set the price of emitting a ton of CO2 equivalent during energy or material production at the present bid price of industrial scale rapid removal of a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere with some attractive margin (10% maybe, but that could be set by experts), and then the market can figure it out from there. All energy then becomes net neutral, as well as the vast majority of materials, and it's more straight forward to police (though still real work) since law enforcement just need to focus on a smaller number of central points.
"CO2 emissions" don't just materialize by magic, they're a result of energy/material inputs to a product. Take care of those and there isn't any need at all to care what people do with the product or for how long. There is no stupid, counter productive moralizing required either about what people do with their luxury energy budget. The goal is that the net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere stays static (or at this point, is lowered back to our optimal standard, then kept steady state). That goal is what should be legislated, not how to reach it.
CO2 removal will cost the same no matter which country emits it. Who is going to foot the bill for CO2 manufactured in developing nations?
When the farmer says "you have to account for the CO2 removed by my crops to offset my expenses" and then the multinational conglomerate says "you have to account for the CO2 removed by the trees that I am planting" who wins?
It'll have to be dealt with the same way any other existing cross border standards is? Countries will be able to exert leverage to the extent another country wants access to their markets in all the typical ways. Best would be adopting equivalent or even the same standards for a more efficient multinational effort, but they can also require it for all imports and present an either/or: countries can comply with the rules, including independent inspections and such, and get priced that way. Or alternatively they can get shoved into a very conservative blanket worst case estimate and tariffs imposed accordingly.
Ongoing energy usage could of course be handled entirely unilaterally, though countries might choose to pursue tariffs against countries that don't comply.
Fairly geographically precise CO2 emissions can be monitored via satellite by any country that wishes to, so everyone can have a clear enough idea of what other countries are emitting.
>CO2 removal will cost the same no matter which country emits it. Who is going to foot the bill for CO2 manufactured in developing nations?
What do you mean? The market will figure it out on anything imported, that's the point of pricing it in. Precisely because capture can happen anywhere equivalently, it's fine to just handle it with money. The current subsidy by externality goes away. Developing nations will still have other cost advantages, and will be on a level playing field with developed world manufacturers when targeting the markets of implementing nations. Some developing nations may even find it extremely profitable to specialize in CO2 capture capacity.
As far as who foots the bill if other countries decide to impose it in other ways worldwide, that'd no doubt come up during the process of such a decision. But it will be much cheaper to do so when capture infrastructure is already well developed.
>When the farmer says "you have to account for the CO2 removed by my crops to offset my expenses" and then the multinational conglomerate says "you have to account for the CO2 removed by the trees that I am planting" who wins?
Neither, because there is no need to account for that. I said industrial-scale rapid removal (and planting crops doesn't have any significant net effect anyway duh). If countries want to simply outright subsidize farmers for national-security reasons or the, they can do that directly.
This saves you the task of deciding who's deserving, but it produces outcomes that sure feel unfair...
Looks really cool, IMO.
I hated every minute of it, and in some ways I feel like the pandemic saved me from the gluttony of in person meetings.
The pandemic offered many of us an opportunity to use the technology we have and avoid unnecessary travel. Is zoom/g-meet a replacement for in person meetings? No. But is it good enough and worth the savings on time and damage to the environment? Hell yes.
With 6 continental and 2 inter-continental flights a year, I think you're probably in that top 10% most frequent flyers.
"Global aviation’s contribution to the climate crisis was growing fast before the Covid-19 pandemic, with emissions jumping by 32% from 2013-18"
Should be:
"Global aviation’s contribution to the climate crisis was growing fast before the Covid-19 pandemic. Aviation's contribution to global CO2 emissions rose from 1.3% to 1.9% from 2013-18"
But the latter doesn't attract clicks so much. Transportation overall accounts for 28% of greenhouse gas emissions [1]. That's the story that matters.
There's certainly a point here about wealthy nations and wealthy people being responsible for a lion's share of the problem, but really, everyone knows that. This article, and indeed the linked paper [2] gloss over the relative size of the aviation problem.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
Aviation is also fairly unique in that we don't know how to make it climate neutral. Even burning synfuel made from renewables won't be enough, because adding emissions higher in the atmosphere has a stronger warming effect. And we just don't know how to make all-electric long distance planes yet.
It has a temporary strong effect, that falls back into the normal one in a couple of decades. What means that synfuel based aviation would have a constant impact on the global temperature, like painting your ceiling black. We can live quite well with that.