I think the whole debate about air travel boils down to the different people which would be affected by a ban or increased prices/taxes.
A lot of activists see the (often) unnecessary flights taken by business travelers or celebrities, in addition to the entire private jet market. They, (probably) rightfully so, attack this behavior. People who travel maybe once a year or less, say for vacation or to visit their families, feel now attacked as well and fight back. This may be their only bit of luxury which they saved up for. I can totally understand such a reaction.
As is regularly the case this develops into a flame-war and in the end more and more extreme viewpoints are taken, and the nuance gets lost.
I'll just say that my issue with it is that I see people especially politicians and celebrities get on my case about climate change and global warming and then see that they are jetting around all over the world to go to their conferences and appearances emitting more carbon emissions in a year than I will in my entire life and I start to question why I should pay a higher price on gas through taxes and have my energy limited and monitored when it is clear I am a much smaller part of the problem here compared to those that are advocating those ideas.
Presumably they pay those gas taxes too. They're just very rich, so they don't care. Maybe your issue is with wealth inequality rather than with carbon taxes per se?
It would be interesting to see a progressive taxation on flights. First flight of the year is tax free. Subsequent flights incur a charge at an increasing rate each flight taken.
> who travel maybe once a year or less, say for vacation or to visit their families, feel now attacked as well and fight back.
They should. France recently stated that we'd need to go from 11T to 2T of co2 per year per inhabitant by 2050. A classic short distance vacation flight (Paris -> Barcelona for example) is already ~0.5T
> This may be their only bit of luxury which they saved up for. I can totally understand such a reaction.
The thing is people get used to convenience and leisure, no matter the environmental cost. So yeah, if you didn't leave your home town to go work for a mega corp on the other side of the country/world to gain more money to consume more, maybe you wouldn't "need" to take a plane to see your family, &c. We all live like fucking kings, better than kings in fact. It's time to swallow our pride and take our responsibilities. The world won't function with 8B+ people taking the plane once a year to roast on a beach or ski for a week
Of course people don't want to let go what they've been told is their goal in life: "consume and travel", the problem is that it simply doesn't scale
The rebound effect will take care of whatever progress you make in energy efficiency. As they say, it's not about the energy consumption of a single toaster, it's about the combined energy consumption of all the toasters.
Plane engines are more efficient than ever but we also fly waaaaay much more than we used to, same for cars, &c.
There aren't any ways to solve the problem without taking away personal convenience. At the end of the day you're still burning insane amount of non renewable energy for leisure.
The way to solve the problem without taking away convenience is to take yesterday’s atmospheric carbon, turn it into today’s jet fuel, and burn it tomorrow.
Yea, that takes energy today, but is close to carbon neutral and I strongly suspect will happen in the next 50 years on a commercially viable scale.
It sounds cool and all but that's sci fi for now... What we need is solution for now, not some hypothetical magical solution that's "just around the corner" and will save us all. What people thinking like that want is to not give a personal shit and let others figure out how to fix the issue they're part of long after they died. That's the "face responsibilities" part I was talking about.
Direct air capture fuels are not science fiction. They are not economically competitive at the moment with fossil fuels, but lithium ion batteries weren’t economically viable 25 years ago either for electric cars. Now they are.
Do I think there could be an order of magnitude or more improvement in the costs for DAC fuels with research and scale? I do.
I'd say that combustion engines / turbines are so cheap to operate only because the cost of the fuel is the cost of drilling + refining + transportation, and it lacks the cost of exhaust.
Now that the exhaust started to have a very real cost for the environment, it should start passing that cost to the engine operation.
Estimating this cost is, of course, not very easy, but rough estimates can definitely be made. Levy a CO2 tax, and spend it exclusively on measures to fight the consequences of the global warming, like building dams around coastal cities.
The "cost" view is bound to fail. Non renewable energies are free, the only cost you pay is extraction, the real work was done by nature during billions of years and is infinitely more valuable than anything humanity has ever made.
There is no way to pass the cost to airline companies, because the cost is infinite. We're playing a losing game, and we know it, it's just a matter of time until we either run out of renewable energy or until the damage done to the environment is so bad that we physically can't continue. There is no winning combination for us, we have to accept that earth won't be able to sustain 8b+ people living like the average westerner, especially once we phase out non renewable energies
The more I read about these issues the more it seems the only path forward is a market pricing mechanic. We'll never convince people with emotion or logic, but we can convince them with their wallet. Right now we don't realize the costs of the negative externalities of our choices. We need not just a carbon market though, but an environmental market. How much is a flock of wild geese worth? What's their habitat worth? How much should someone pay to destroy a wetlands to build new housing?
I guess one downside to this is then people can just actually pay to destroy these things and so we might wind up with just ultra expensive and rare "natural environments".
> We'll never convince people with emotion or logic, but we can convince them with their wallet.
I'm not trying to attack you in particular here, but is this this actually a big realization to people here? This is a "no shit, sherlock" statement in my eyes. We were never going to control climate change with a "please do the right thing" argument.
It feels wrong to me to group "consume" and "travel" together. Travel is legitimately a positive force for exposing people to new cultures, ideas, and wealth sharing, which in turn strengthens the global community. Of course, to your point, some people just want to go to a private resort with other tourists and sit on a beach.
> if you didn't leave your home town to go work for a mega corp on the other side of the country/world to gain more money to consume more
I don't think it's fair to blame people for moving for better economic opportunities, especially when a lot of that movement is to escape local political inability/poverty/etc.
I agree largely with your point, particularly about "consumption" and that we get used to convenience and leisure, but I think travel is a totally different beast and should be treated with more nuance.
> Travel is legitimately a positive force for exposing people to new cultures, ideas, and wealth sharing
I live in Berlin, I see the people coming here, it's not about sharing and culture, it's about consuming, same in virtually every other tourism hotspot I can think of in Europe. Globalisation took care of levelling off everything and making every city some kind of disneyland for lost souls. I'll give you that travel isn't inherently bad, tourism and especially the kind of mass tourism we mostly see these days is though
> I don't think it's fair to blame people for moving for better economic opportunities
Yeah I guess I should blame the game and not the players.
All the „dirty“ pleasures have advantageous side to them. To at least some people, depending on one's preferences.
Sweet dirtiness tax on literally everything is the only way. A flight to the other side of the world vs 100kg of beef vs driving a car daily... Your choice.
This sort of "logic" attempts to rationalize what would rapidly become a catastrophic Tragedy of the Commons. The world cannot sustain itself if everyone were to become a self-absorbed narcissist who feels entitled to "Me first. F everyone else."
It is hard for me to understand the demonisation of air travel.
Every time I want to buy a ticket, I get carbon emission metrics in all the sites I visit. Sometimes, the ticket itself comes with these. I have never taken a train, or a bus, or a ship, where these are showed so prominently. Cars are rarely advertised as "less contaminant", and I would say that most people buying an electric car nowadays don't care that much about emissions, as they do about efficiency or simply the "cool factor".
I also feel that most of the criticism is directed to those traveling for pleasure, but decreasing air travel and/or increasing rates would penalise those who live far away from their families, and they are many.
Wouldn't it make more sense to focus on cars with diesel engines?
Air travel is, in many cases, essential. There are no viable alternatives for certain routes, e.g. transcontinental in the US, international in many countries, but there are perfectly reasonable alternatives to car travel.
> Are we fighting pollution or looking for emotional excuses to pollute?
No, we are looking for the most efficient way of cutting carbon emissions with the solutions available right now.
Sadly, electric planes are a lifetime away, still. But cars are not, neither are buses or trains, or even freighters it seems. Air travel makes for an insignificant chunk of the emissions, compared to any other mode of transportation.
Any pollution should be taxed in an objective way. If some mode of transport is too dirty.. Well, raise the prices to increase viability of other options (maybe US can finally get coast-to-coast passenger rail?). R&D of better solutions suddenly becomes more economically viable.
Currently our government is planning to drop diesel-for-agriculture subsidies. Because apparently farmers should switch to electrical tractors right away :) But reducing air travel? It's a human right to go on holiday to the other side of the globe twice a year :)
> Cars are rarely advertised as "less contaminant", and I would say that most people buying an electric car nowadays don't care that much about emissions, as they do about efficiency or simply the "cool factor".
In Europe they list the emissions along with the mpg.
> and I would say that most people buying an electric car nowadays don't care
Many care.
> but decreasing air travel and/or increasing rates would penalise those who live far away from their families, and they are many.
I live across the country from my family, we know the environmental cost of visits and minimize as a result. I wish this cost was just explicit instead so everyone could recognize it.
The largest possible carbon footprint would in be something like a cross country flight in an ICE flying car like a (vaporware) Moller.
Trains run 6-60 g/km whereas single-passenger vehicles are 90+.
The smallest might be in a solar-powered glider or solar-powered "car", effectively 0.
Also, if you can personally offset your footprint by actively participating in carbon capture and sequestration permanently, then some luxuries are okay in small quantities.
> According to that link, total domestic air travel carbon footprint in the UK would be negligible, compared to diesel engines.
Should we not look at every source of emissions? Domestic air travel is something like 1% of global emissions and international is ~1.2% and both are growing significantly.
> I would need to take several trains, buses, and board a ship, to see my family. Mine is not an exceptional case.
Okay? I can take a 54 hour bus ride, I could drive, or I could fly. I just don't go. I'm not saying everyone should do this, but I also don't think we should continue looking at air travel the way we did prior to COVID. As I mentioned in another comment, how many consultants were flying twice a week to and from clients? How many flights were for handshakes and quick flights home?
Those things being minimized gives us more margin for flights that "matter" - seeing family, etc.
> Should we not look at every source of emissions?
Absolutely. But right now, the solutions for land travel aren't available for air travel, and air travel is negligible, compared to land travel.
My point here is that air travel is receiving a lot of hate, when it is not the main pollutant when it comes to modes of transportation, not by a long shot.
> As I mentioned in another comment, how many consultants were flying twice a week to and from clients? How many flights were for handshakes and quick flights home?
I agree with this position. Work travel has been pushed by the belief that face to face meetings are mostly indispensable, and COVID-19 proved that they are not.
I also think that there is a component pushed and exacerbated by patronage networks.
This post makes a long case for why air travel isn't _so_ bad, but totally fails to establish why it's 'good and we should want more of it'.
In any case, in a world with free and non-greenhouse-emitting energy it won't be particularly hard to decarbonize air travel. You can manufacture hydrocarbons from CO2 in the air and energy if you have enough of it.
I bet either they're a shill for the airlines, Boeing, or big oil or feel so cocksure about how entitled they feel to their consumptive lifestyle that they had to share.
Fair point that as a society there may be more urgent things to focus on.
However, counterpoints:
1. The carbon footprint of flying is expected to triple by 2050. It will still not be the worst sector, but it is getting worse quickly, and it makes sense to avoid that.
2. Flying less is one of the easiest ways for an individual to reduce their carbon footprint. Just taking one less flight a year makes a dent in your total footprint. There aren't many other actions an individual can take that, if all individuals took them, would make an impact.
Nope, Musk and Bezos should fly less recreational rockets first. After they stop and abandon their scale up plans, then I will stop visiting my overseas family.
That's literally among the least useful or relevant things we could do to stop climate change.
"We should all stop flying only if Steve puts out the campfire in his back yard" - ok, but that one of these things dwarfs the other. There will always be people doing things they shouldn't - or that you think they shouldn't - but that cannot stop you from making good decisions.
I'm not saying stop visiting your family, just that this line of thinking is completely counterproductive.
> "We should all stop flying only if Steve puts out the campfire in his back yard" - ok, but that one of these things dwarfs the other.
The carbon footprint of a single commercial space flight is orders of magnitude higher - in fact, it's higher than the entire lifetime carbon footprint of the median human being, and approximately equivalent to the lifetime carbon footprint of the average American.
One doesn't have to depend on the other, but this comparison is wrong because it ignores the fact that commercial space travel is, in fact, one of the single most environmentally-damaging activities imaginable.
I think the poster above didn't try to say that commercial space travel is good. Just that the attitude of "I won't change if someone else doesn't" is not productive. Sure a single space flight can't compare to a single normal flight but if enough people restrict them self a bit it would make a big dent.
I just looked it up. [edit](An average rocket)[1] emits 300T of CO2 on the round-trip. That's the same as a 777 flying from NYC to LHR round-trip. Except there have been 18 Blue Origin launches and there's 85,000 annual round trips from NYC to LHR alone.
It's certainly inefficient and not individually good for the planet, but it's a pricy luxury few can afford, and one that can be easily managed via carbon tax.
Refusing to address the 85,000 annual round-trips on just the NYC-LHR corridor because one rich guy ran 18 launches with the same carbon footprint, I mean, I'm sure he's flown his private jet over the Atlantic more than 18 times.
Remember, per person, the Blue Origin launch produces as much CO2 as 85 Bitcoin transactions.
It's not their individual flights that are the problem, it's starting a business unit that burns an average lifetime's worth of carbon for a couple day recreational trip that's the problem.
> it's starting a business unit that burns an average lifetime's worth of carbon for a couple day recreational trip that's the problem
Can’t think of many better ways to kill political support for real climate change legislation than advocating ceding our technological leadership in space technology like this.
Who claims climate change is the greatest policy concern to the U.S. or any of the world's regional powers?
It's plain as day that isn't the case. That's the problem. That's why nipping at small fry, like plane travel and rockets, is stupid. It deploys limited political capital to a small problem. That distracts from the bigger stuff we need to accomplish, e.g. carbon taxes, electrifying transportation and greening primary production.
I'm not sure how "look at stopping recreational flights if we're getting to the point of asking average people to take less airliner flights", is "ceding our technological leadership in space technology".
Sorry, I was responding to advocating against e.g. SpaceX and Blue Origin. Strongly believe we need a carbon tax, which would reduce air travel organically.
An average American home emits 5T of CO2 per year.
One round-trip flight from New York to London emits 1T of CO2 per person, and seats about 300 people.
So for perspective, it produces about as much CO2 to fly 4 people to space as a 777 from New York to London round-trip. Now there are 233 daily flights from New York to London - or 85,000 per year. And that's just New York to London.
There have been 18 Blue Origin launches.
It's a campfire. A pricy luxury that a few folks take advantage of. Should everyone do it? No. Can everyone do it? No. A carbon tax will sort all this out.
But saying we shouldn't address the 85,000 flights from NYC to LHR per year because Bezos blasted off a few times is a really poor way of framing the conversation.
I see, I was using this [1] although you are of course right that it's a liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen rocket. While it's not carbon free to obtain those, but the numbers are probably quite a bit lower for New Shepard.
Policy needs to be consistent to work. You cannot on one hand legislate to cut pennies worth of emissions from individuals making them poorer and more miserable and then on the other hand allow for an orders of magnitude more waste for a handful of selected ones, specially when their mission is to scale up the waste for recreation.
Just as a matter of interest: the CO2 equivalent contributions to total greenhouse gas production from air travel and wood-fires for cooking are about the same (about 2%).
Bezos' spaceship is zero-carbon (as long as they use green hydrogen rather hydrogen steam reformed from natural gas) and Musk has promised to make his zero-carbon as well.
I do not understand this argument of using less of something so beneficial to society instead of focusing on improving the technology to reduce the carbon footprint.
Which relies on investment and users to fund its growth.
It’s not just flying but also meat, cars, plastic, etc. I get that useless consumption is bad, but abstinence is hardly a solution for most problems.
If you were diagnosed clinically obese and at risk of heart disease would you carry on eating pork pies until you died, or abstain until there is a suitable pork pie alternative?
A bad example maybe, but the market isn't the solution to everything.
Without letting my jimmies be rustled, my post contained about as much content as GP's. It also contained two usages of "pork pies". And this comment contains one. Happy holidays, and good luck.
I think it would be great to live in a world where everyone can fly as much as they want without feeling guilty. This would be a lot easier to do if there weren't 8 billion people in the world.
And if it weren't powered by fossil fuels dug out of the ground adding to the climate change emergency. If it were hydrogen catalyzed by renewables, it would be a completely different conversation.
Arguing that there are simply too many people on Earth is never a popular comment on HN, but it's just simply the truth.
There is no path forward that allows for continued improvement in quality of life for the developing world and also prevents climate and environmental disaster.
The only paths forward are: 1. fewer people or 2. lower quality of life.
Thankfully people are having fewer babies, so it seems like #1 may actually win out. However, the change in birth rate isn't happening nearly fast enough to avert disaster.
The author lowballs the emissions produced by air travel. He appears to only account for greenhouse gas emissions (1.9%) while ignoring total emissions which are 3.5% and growing each year.
Air travel sucks and I wanted less of it - for years. Then COVID made all of our work remote and life has improved quite a bit as a result of that.
Air travel isn't 'good', it is good in the same sense that driving electric is good, it isn't as bad as some of the alternatives but it is better to do without by moving to something even better. In my case: to simply stop traveling.
The article argues in a totally different direction but the impact of planes on climate change is not only from its green house gas emission. Studies are not totally clear about this but generally attribute a far larger fraction to the caused increase in cirrus clouds. Accordingly, even a plane fueled by renewable gasoline will have an impact on climate change. On the other hand, that impact on climate change should not last and disappear once all planes are grounded again.
I think the last two years have proven that we don't need air travel to connect people for business. I like the idea of making it cost prohibitive for businesses to frivolously fly folks around the world.
But we can all be a little reasonable and recognize no one should shame anyone for seeing their distant family every blue moon.
The author never would have met his partner and she never would have lived on a different continent to her parents if air travel wasn't a thing. Just like the US never would have become so car-dependent if the car was never invented. It's very difficult to take something away once it's been established. It can literally result in tearing apart families, and worse.
This is why sustainability needs to be better understood and we need to come to an agreement as a species that movement into unsustainable territory does not count as progress. The electric car does close to nothing for sustainability and should be considered stagnation, not progress.
I personally believe we need to make rather large sacrifices before we can begin real progress. This requires top-down enforcement where everyone shares their part of the sacrifice. People rarely volunteer for personal sacrifice and they are even less likely to when they observe their neighbours making no sacrifice at all.
1. Air travel constitutes only 1.9% of greenhouse gas emissions
2. Air travel won't cease to exist so we might as well not try (or do more of it?)
3. Author had serious reasons for air travel and "smug bloke" rubbed him the wrong way.
I don't agree with the substance of point 2. It can logically be applied to all sorts of things that we can all agree that we should try to limit.
On point 1, some commenters have noted that this figure may not be entirely accurate. But more importantly, a relatively small aggregate notwithstanding, skipping a flight is possibly the easiest way for an end-consumer to directly shrink their carbon contributions (source: Joro Carbon offset app [1])
Fossil Fuel resources are a limited resource, and we've pretty much burned up all the easy pickings. So, aside from the obvious carbon problems, we've effectively squandered most of this resource on transport and burning for heating.
These resources should be conserved for exactly these uses — like flying — where a very high mass-energy density is essential.
We need to stop burning it for anything stationary, and most things that roll or float. Direct electric at lower power densities are at this point in history fairly straightforward to swap in (acknowledging that this still is a lot of work), requiring few true breakthroughs.
When fossil fuel use is just down to the few true high mass-energy density applications, CO2 generation won't be a problem.
So, overall this "what's your carbon footprint" thing is just successful deflection by the oil companies to shift blame from the producing side (who CAN do something about it) to the consuming side, who can only choose among available alternatives.
I have nothing against the act of flying a plane. But we should follow the lead of New Zealand, Hong Kong and South Korea and impose a mandatory quarantine of two weeks in a dedicated quarantine facility for all international travelers arriving in the US.
> The real reason is for the sort of fuzzy, hard to define feelings that connecting people together is good and that the more we get to know our fellow humans, the more we will view ourselves as one people with a common humanity.
Is this ironic? Facebook and Twitter, etc. have amply shown that "connecting people together" isn't very good.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadA lot of activists see the (often) unnecessary flights taken by business travelers or celebrities, in addition to the entire private jet market. They, (probably) rightfully so, attack this behavior. People who travel maybe once a year or less, say for vacation or to visit their families, feel now attacked as well and fight back. This may be their only bit of luxury which they saved up for. I can totally understand such a reaction.
As is regularly the case this develops into a flame-war and in the end more and more extreme viewpoints are taken, and the nuance gets lost.
https://stay-grounded.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/progres...
They should. France recently stated that we'd need to go from 11T to 2T of co2 per year per inhabitant by 2050. A classic short distance vacation flight (Paris -> Barcelona for example) is already ~0.5T
> This may be their only bit of luxury which they saved up for. I can totally understand such a reaction.
The thing is people get used to convenience and leisure, no matter the environmental cost. So yeah, if you didn't leave your home town to go work for a mega corp on the other side of the country/world to gain more money to consume more, maybe you wouldn't "need" to take a plane to see your family, &c. We all live like fucking kings, better than kings in fact. It's time to swallow our pride and take our responsibilities. The world won't function with 8B+ people taking the plane once a year to roast on a beach or ski for a week
Of course people don't want to let go what they've been told is their goal in life: "consume and travel", the problem is that it simply doesn't scale
Plane engines are more efficient than ever but we also fly waaaaay much more than we used to, same for cars, &c.
There aren't any ways to solve the problem without taking away personal convenience. At the end of the day you're still burning insane amount of non renewable energy for leisure.
Yea, that takes energy today, but is close to carbon neutral and I strongly suspect will happen in the next 50 years on a commercially viable scale.
The endgame would be reproducing the plants cycle: grab atmospheric CO2, turn it into fuel (jet fuel instead of sugars), burn it, rinse, repeat.
Do I think there could be an order of magnitude or more improvement in the costs for DAC fuels with research and scale? I do.
I'd say that combustion engines / turbines are so cheap to operate only because the cost of the fuel is the cost of drilling + refining + transportation, and it lacks the cost of exhaust.
Now that the exhaust started to have a very real cost for the environment, it should start passing that cost to the engine operation.
Estimating this cost is, of course, not very easy, but rough estimates can definitely be made. Levy a CO2 tax, and spend it exclusively on measures to fight the consequences of the global warming, like building dams around coastal cities.
There is no way to pass the cost to airline companies, because the cost is infinite. We're playing a losing game, and we know it, it's just a matter of time until we either run out of renewable energy or until the damage done to the environment is so bad that we physically can't continue. There is no winning combination for us, we have to accept that earth won't be able to sustain 8b+ people living like the average westerner, especially once we phase out non renewable energies
I guess one downside to this is then people can just actually pay to destroy these things and so we might wind up with just ultra expensive and rare "natural environments".
I'm not trying to attack you in particular here, but is this this actually a big realization to people here? This is a "no shit, sherlock" statement in my eyes. We were never going to control climate change with a "please do the right thing" argument.
> if you didn't leave your home town to go work for a mega corp on the other side of the country/world to gain more money to consume more
I don't think it's fair to blame people for moving for better economic opportunities, especially when a lot of that movement is to escape local political inability/poverty/etc.
I agree largely with your point, particularly about "consumption" and that we get used to convenience and leisure, but I think travel is a totally different beast and should be treated with more nuance.
I live in Berlin, I see the people coming here, it's not about sharing and culture, it's about consuming, same in virtually every other tourism hotspot I can think of in Europe. Globalisation took care of levelling off everything and making every city some kind of disneyland for lost souls. I'll give you that travel isn't inherently bad, tourism and especially the kind of mass tourism we mostly see these days is though
> I don't think it's fair to blame people for moving for better economic opportunities
Yeah I guess I should blame the game and not the players.
Sweet dirtiness tax on literally everything is the only way. A flight to the other side of the world vs 100kg of beef vs driving a car daily... Your choice.
Every time I want to buy a ticket, I get carbon emission metrics in all the sites I visit. Sometimes, the ticket itself comes with these. I have never taken a train, or a bus, or a ship, where these are showed so prominently. Cars are rarely advertised as "less contaminant", and I would say that most people buying an electric car nowadays don't care that much about emissions, as they do about efficiency or simply the "cool factor".
I also feel that most of the criticism is directed to those traveling for pleasure, but decreasing air travel and/or increasing rates would penalise those who live far away from their families, and they are many.
Not reducing air travel (yet clamping other dirty activities) would penalise those who happen to live close to family.
Air travel is, in many cases, essential. There are no viable alternatives for certain routes, e.g. transcontinental in the US, international in many countries, but there are perfectly reasonable alternatives to car travel.
Are we fighting pollution or looking for emotional excuses to pollute?
No, we are looking for the most efficient way of cutting carbon emissions with the solutions available right now.
Sadly, electric planes are a lifetime away, still. But cars are not, neither are buses or trains, or even freighters it seems. Air travel makes for an insignificant chunk of the emissions, compared to any other mode of transportation.
Currently our government is planning to drop diesel-for-agriculture subsidies. Because apparently farmers should switch to electrical tractors right away :) But reducing air travel? It's a human right to go on holiday to the other side of the globe twice a year :)
Because domestic air travel is one of the worst pollutants?
https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
> Cars are rarely advertised as "less contaminant", and I would say that most people buying an electric car nowadays don't care that much about emissions, as they do about efficiency or simply the "cool factor".
In Europe they list the emissions along with the mpg.
> and I would say that most people buying an electric car nowadays don't care
Many care.
> but decreasing air travel and/or increasing rates would penalise those who live far away from their families, and they are many.
I live across the country from my family, we know the environmental cost of visits and minimize as a result. I wish this cost was just explicit instead so everyone could recognize it.
The largest possible carbon footprint would in be something like a cross country flight in an ICE flying car like a (vaporware) Moller.
Trains run 6-60 g/km whereas single-passenger vehicles are 90+.
The smallest might be in a solar-powered glider or solar-powered "car", effectively 0.
Also, if you can personally offset your footprint by actively participating in carbon capture and sequestration permanently, then some luxuries are okay in small quantities.
We should avoid frivolous and wasteful use of those resources though. How many consultants were flying 2x a week to and from a client prior to COVID?
According to that link, total domestic air travel carbon footprint in the UK would be negligible, compared to diesel engines.
> I live across the country from my family, we know the environmental cost of visits and minimize as a result.
I would need to take several trains, buses, and board a ship, to see my family. Mine is not an exceptional case.
Should we not look at every source of emissions? Domestic air travel is something like 1% of global emissions and international is ~1.2% and both are growing significantly.
> I would need to take several trains, buses, and board a ship, to see my family. Mine is not an exceptional case.
Okay? I can take a 54 hour bus ride, I could drive, or I could fly. I just don't go. I'm not saying everyone should do this, but I also don't think we should continue looking at air travel the way we did prior to COVID. As I mentioned in another comment, how many consultants were flying twice a week to and from clients? How many flights were for handshakes and quick flights home?
Those things being minimized gives us more margin for flights that "matter" - seeing family, etc.
Absolutely. But right now, the solutions for land travel aren't available for air travel, and air travel is negligible, compared to land travel.
My point here is that air travel is receiving a lot of hate, when it is not the main pollutant when it comes to modes of transportation, not by a long shot.
> As I mentioned in another comment, how many consultants were flying twice a week to and from clients? How many flights were for handshakes and quick flights home?
I agree with this position. Work travel has been pushed by the belief that face to face meetings are mostly indispensable, and COVID-19 proved that they are not.
I also think that there is a component pushed and exacerbated by patronage networks.
In any case, in a world with free and non-greenhouse-emitting energy it won't be particularly hard to decarbonize air travel. You can manufacture hydrocarbons from CO2 in the air and energy if you have enough of it.
However, counterpoints:
1. The carbon footprint of flying is expected to triple by 2050. It will still not be the worst sector, but it is getting worse quickly, and it makes sense to avoid that.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043803529/google-flights-car...
2. Flying less is one of the easiest ways for an individual to reduce their carbon footprint. Just taking one less flight a year makes a dent in your total footprint. There aren't many other actions an individual can take that, if all individuals took them, would make an impact.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/climate/airplane-pollutio...
We should fly less.
"We should all stop flying only if Steve puts out the campfire in his back yard" - ok, but that one of these things dwarfs the other. There will always be people doing things they shouldn't - or that you think they shouldn't - but that cannot stop you from making good decisions.
I'm not saying stop visiting your family, just that this line of thinking is completely counterproductive.
The carbon footprint of a single commercial space flight is orders of magnitude higher - in fact, it's higher than the entire lifetime carbon footprint of the median human being, and approximately equivalent to the lifetime carbon footprint of the average American.
One doesn't have to depend on the other, but this comparison is wrong because it ignores the fact that commercial space travel is, in fact, one of the single most environmentally-damaging activities imaginable.
It's certainly inefficient and not individually good for the planet, but it's a pricy luxury few can afford, and one that can be easily managed via carbon tax.
Refusing to address the 85,000 annual round-trips on just the NYC-LHR corridor because one rich guy ran 18 launches with the same carbon footprint, I mean, I'm sure he's flown his private jet over the Atlantic more than 18 times.
Remember, per person, the Blue Origin launch produces as much CO2 as 85 Bitcoin transactions.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/19/billionaires...
It's not a "campfire".
Can’t think of many better ways to kill political support for real climate change legislation than advocating ceding our technological leadership in space technology like this.
Climate is way down the in list of priorities.
Should we just stop pretending?
Who claims climate change is the greatest policy concern to the U.S. or any of the world's regional powers?
It's plain as day that isn't the case. That's the problem. That's why nipping at small fry, like plane travel and rockets, is stupid. It deploys limited political capital to a small problem. That distracts from the bigger stuff we need to accomplish, e.g. carbon taxes, electrifying transportation and greening primary production.
https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/greatest-threat-glob...
A single Bitcoin transaction emits 1T of CO2.
An average American home emits 5T of CO2 per year.
One round-trip flight from New York to London emits 1T of CO2 per person, and seats about 300 people.
So for perspective, it produces about as much CO2 to fly 4 people to space as a 777 from New York to London round-trip. Now there are 233 daily flights from New York to London - or 85,000 per year. And that's just New York to London.
There have been 18 Blue Origin launches.
It's a campfire. A pricy luxury that a few folks take advantage of. Should everyone do it? No. Can everyone do it? No. A carbon tax will sort all this out.
But saying we shouldn't address the 85,000 flights from NYC to LHR per year because Bezos blasted off a few times is a really poor way of framing the conversation.
It's replacement, New Glenn, is the problem here.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/19/billionaires...
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-resources
https://twitter.com/erdayastronaut/status/112658698305114112...
Which relies on investment and users to fund its growth.
It’s not just flying but also meat, cars, plastic, etc. I get that useless consumption is bad, but abstinence is hardly a solution for most problems.
A bad example maybe, but the market isn't the solution to everything.
There is no path forward that allows for continued improvement in quality of life for the developing world and also prevents climate and environmental disaster.
The only paths forward are: 1. fewer people or 2. lower quality of life.
Thankfully people are having fewer babies, so it seems like #1 may actually win out. However, the change in birth rate isn't happening nearly fast enough to avert disaster.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation
Air travel isn't 'good', it is good in the same sense that driving electric is good, it isn't as bad as some of the alternatives but it is better to do without by moving to something even better. In my case: to simply stop traveling.
But we can all be a little reasonable and recognize no one should shame anyone for seeing their distant family every blue moon.
This is why sustainability needs to be better understood and we need to come to an agreement as a species that movement into unsustainable territory does not count as progress. The electric car does close to nothing for sustainability and should be considered stagnation, not progress.
I personally believe we need to make rather large sacrifices before we can begin real progress. This requires top-down enforcement where everyone shares their part of the sacrifice. People rarely volunteer for personal sacrifice and they are even less likely to when they observe their neighbours making no sacrifice at all.
As the author points out, high speed rail is superior for regional travel in many ways and we should want more of THAT.
I love trains though; they are much easier in many regards, and give you more comfort or more chance to work while traveling than a plane.
1. Air travel constitutes only 1.9% of greenhouse gas emissions
2. Air travel won't cease to exist so we might as well not try (or do more of it?)
3. Author had serious reasons for air travel and "smug bloke" rubbed him the wrong way.
I don't agree with the substance of point 2. It can logically be applied to all sorts of things that we can all agree that we should try to limit.
On point 1, some commenters have noted that this figure may not be entirely accurate. But more importantly, a relatively small aggregate notwithstanding, skipping a flight is possibly the easiest way for an end-consumer to directly shrink their carbon contributions (source: Joro Carbon offset app [1])
[1] https://www.joro.app/
The Nazis made heavy use of synthetic fuels. They weren't zero carbon but it's basically the same process.
IMO, it's closer to viable than zero-carbon concrete. We need to do both.
Fossil Fuel resources are a limited resource, and we've pretty much burned up all the easy pickings. So, aside from the obvious carbon problems, we've effectively squandered most of this resource on transport and burning for heating.
These resources should be conserved for exactly these uses — like flying — where a very high mass-energy density is essential.
We need to stop burning it for anything stationary, and most things that roll or float. Direct electric at lower power densities are at this point in history fairly straightforward to swap in (acknowledging that this still is a lot of work), requiring few true breakthroughs.
When fossil fuel use is just down to the few true high mass-energy density applications, CO2 generation won't be a problem.
So, overall this "what's your carbon footprint" thing is just successful deflection by the oil companies to shift blame from the producing side (who CAN do something about it) to the consuming side, who can only choose among available alternatives.
Is this ironic? Facebook and Twitter, etc. have amply shown that "connecting people together" isn't very good.