I find myself oscillating between bargaining, depression, and acceptance on this topic.
Something will happen in the world, like Bolsonaro losing his election and Lula making some promises, and I will gain hope. Then I'll look at the IPCC again and feel depressed. Then I'll make some commitment to change my life habits in some way that's a bit greener and accept that I can't do much more.
But there's still some cognitive dissonance when I reach acceptance. I don't really accept it deep down. I live in fear, especially fear for my kids' generation.
What's helped me is changing my opinion about what I, my kids and the rest of humanity deserve in the grand scheme of things. I used to think we deserve to live in comfort and safety, with the hope of reaching an old age. I thought technology, knowledge and progress where the reason for all that luxury. Now I believe it's got more to do with a sudden rise in available energy. The trend is going down. Life is becoming more tragic again. I won't lie to my children and let them believe war happens to others. I know the world has never been as safe and rich as it's been recently. But I think the peak is around in my part of the world, and the environmental crisis is going to cause many peaks everywhere.
I often wonder about refugee camps and wonder how I'd fare in one of them. Is it possible to organise theater courses? How difficult is it to find a space to meditate? Would people still care to have intellectual discussions?
It‘s not a consequence but your imagination. Peak oil and global warming are actually opposites. You can‘t fix climate change and hope to find more oil.
There‘s a big difference between perhaps not doing holidays in a place far away or even not buying a smart TV or new phone and what you describe.
They aren't opposites, they're different things. My energy hungry lifestyle contributes to global warming and it is comfortable in the short term. What's good now and has been good for me in the past causes something bad in the future. The decline of easy energy is bad for my current lifestyle, and I don't think it can be avoided.
But what would be even worse is trying to avoid the decline of easy energy. Because even if there's petrol and coal and gas left in the ground, we should stop burning it, because we have to mitigate climate change. That's the tragedy.
We're faced with a choice: maximizing short-term comfort by putting back the consequences of reducing available energy, or minimizing long-term discomfort (might be a euphemism) by deliberately cutting down on still available energy.
It has to do with both, but the rate of growth of knowledge and progress have been made possible by the abundance of energy. If you remove energy even in a developed society, people go back to surviving.
Fear is the problem, not the solution. I recently talked to a friend and he‘s so much in fear that he just gave up on all the good ways to improve the situation.
If you don't want to navigate a link to understand what rate 70 means, it refers to a A320 Family production rate of 70 aircraft per month by Q1 2024. Up from 45 aircraft per month in Q4 2021.
While I am completely convinced that humans are changing the climate, I am not convinced that air travel is the big contributor claimed by many. We are only now getting satellite evidence of the amount of methane venting being done industrially, which seems to be a bigger contributor per unit of mass emitted.
I live in the U.S., which has many big automobiles transporting just one person. They are a much bigger emitter of carbon per person per unit of distance traveled. I don’t see why we should be discouraging commercial air travel while allowing individual automobiles to emit so much.
Those of you who are against air travel for climate reasons, can you share a source that has convinced you that it is a real problem?
I'm not against air travel for climate reasons, so I can only venture a guess that this is the result of the same psychological mechanism that rivets people attention to air crashes and terrorism, not to car deaths and heart attacks: saliency of former and familiarity of latter.
All sources of emission are real problems, because the consequences of emissions are catastrophic. The issue is to prioritize which ones to work on first. Flying is nice, but less necessary than many other human activities. Living at a continental or planetary scale is completely unnecessary.
Given the countries that travel the least also often are the countries most likely to trigger a war, I'd say we might want to leave that one alone for now and focus on other creators of CO2.
Not claiming I am against air travel, but the point often made is that the growth rate of aviation means that it will consume ever higher slices of the “carbon budget”.
> His [Dr Joeri Rogelj] calculations suggest aviation emissions between 2015 to 2050 will consume 27% of the remaining carbon budget to have a decent chance of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5C above preindustrial levels.
Sure, animal farming is another large emitter (more concentrated of course, so it's more visible in such pictures than a global trafic of airplanes or cars spread around the whole planet surface), another bucket of sand to consider. It's a global optimisation problem, and everything has to be reduced
You are looking at those pie charts graphs by sector/application and indeed it looks fragmented.
However once you look at each sector the biggest contributors can be lumped:
1. Energy generation from Coal/Gas
2. Road transport with ICEs.
However my gut feeling is that Oil&Gas refinery and extraction are grossly under reporting Methane emissions. So it could be that the chart doesn't show the full picture of GHG.
> However my gut feeling is that Oil&Gas refinery and extraction are grossly under reporting Methane emissions. So it could be that the chart doesn't show the full picture of GHG.
There's been a fair amount of focus on this in the past ~5 years. We can constrain methane emissions both from a "bottoms-up" (measuring direct-from-source emissions or tallying up expected emissions given natural gas production and leakage rates) and "top-down" (measuring atmospheric CH4 over time and constraining the year-to-year emissions required to drive observed changes). Work like Rutherford et al (2021; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25017-4) definitely leave room for some unaccounted leakages arising from O&NG production, but there likely is not room for much more "grossly under reported" emissions.
Both things are bad. Reducing one doesn’t mean you can’t reduce the other and vice versa. We will need to curtain emissions in all sectors to avoid more warming.
Also electric cars are coming but electric passenger and cargo planes are very far away or even impossible due to the physics of battery power density.
Obviously. What I don’t understand is why those who claim to be concerned are focused on one and ignoring the other, bigger problem. We should be prioritizing efficiency in emissions.
What's "very far away?" Looks like BETA Technologies has a real airplane, ALIA, that'll potentially be certified next year. They're currently building a manufacturing facility to mass produce it.
I think what's very far away is autonomous flight. But IMO farther is autonomous automobiles, because as both pilot and driver, aviation has rules, standards, predictability, integration of a wide assortment of vehicles of flight, training, and thus a far better prepared environment for autonomous. The automobile environment is so haphazard humans make way more mistakes driving than flying.
I tend to agree. Air travel contributes around 4% to increased global warming. That is substantial for a single industry. That said, of all industries, it feels like the practical difficulties of reducing that footprint are enormously more difficult than other industries. Air travel is just enormously energy intensive and has unique difficulties in switching to carbon-free energy that other industries do not.
I think some regulations are great, like the prohibition against short haul flights in France that the article mentions. But I think overall efforts to reduce global warming should be targeted in ways that give the "biggest bang for the buck", and aviation-specific changes ain't it.
4% for only 10-15% of the world population, while most other industries distribute more uniformly. I don't subscribe to the alarmism but the hubris of frequent flyers telling everyone else to cut down emissions triggers me. Most idiotic are the people virtue signalling by not eating meat to offset their air travel as if one category cancels the other while the co2 emissions of one transatlantic round-trip flight are about a lifetime of meat consumption (pork and chicken)...
Hypocrites. Like a friend of mine who drives an electric car and takes 30+ flights per year including multiple trips across the Atlantic, entirely for pleasure, since selling his business and entering partial retirement. He's a bit of a prig about everything, politics included, so he's a constant source of judgment about people's politics and emissions. I don't doubt he buys carbon offsets for every flight he takes and blames lack of regulation of the carbon offset market for any harm he's causing.
I think it's closer to a year than a lifetime but the point still stands. Vegetarians who fly are not prioritizing GHG emissions (they usually have other well-weighted decision factors like the agricultural/nitrogen/pesticide pollution and cruelty).
> That said, of all industries, it feels like the practical difficulties of reducing that footprint are enormously more difficult than other industries.
Only if we assume that we need to maintain or increase the level of air travel. The number of air travel passengers in 2019 (before the pandemic) was around 3.5X as many as it was in the early 1990s. That wasn't that long ago, and people managed just fine with fewer vacations abroad etc. It's easy to look at what we do today and take for granted that it's whats normal and no change is possible, but we consume the resources of 1.8 earths, so clearly we're living above our means. And since millions of people are currently on their way out of poverty and towards the same lifestyle as we as westerners are enjoying, this overconsumption of the planet's resources will get worse if nothing changes.
Aviation currently represents ~2% of total emissions according to our world in data. So yeah, not that much.
On the long tun though, we have to reach net zero. And if possible even go into negative carbon emissions. 2% isn't much but there are probably activities much more critical than flying which we could use our carbon offset capabilities.
My biggest concern with aviation today are people flying private. It is symbolic but I don't think we will be able to ask people to sacrifice some of their comfort if the wealthiest people are not in the same boat.
What would you do with a number of giga tons in a vacuum? I can't picture what a giga is, nor a ton of CO2. You probably cannot either.
What matters is how much it represents in relation with our total emissions (2%) or with other activities we also have to tackle to decide where to put our efforts first. (Or all at once whenever possible)
Therefore, I maintain what I say. 2% of the pie doesn't represent that much if we want to achieve net zero. But at some point we will have to tackle it.
Ok, my own lifestyle is a half tonne per year, so all flights in a year emit 2 billion times more than me, so virtually 25% increase of the world population with my lifestyle as reference
I agree with the other comment but I also believe in answering the question asked: global aviation peaked at just over 1 gigaton in 2019, before COVID-19 nuked the industry. It's trivial to figure out the carbon emissions because every kilo of aviation fuel sold emits a definite amount of CO2.
True on the simple chemistry of combustion, but it’s also true that upper atmosphere combustion products may have a different climate forcing than sea level combustion.
There’s an argument I haven’t evaluated myself that even if the fuel was carbon neutral, high altitude combustion might have a residual forcing.
I think transoceanic travel is critical to human flourishing, so I definitely hope we can minimize that residual.
By official stats, aviation is something like 3% of global emissions. Global emissions seem wildly underestimated while aviation emissions are pretty hard to obfuscate.
I also couldn't believe when I found out a Learjet 7 seater might get 4MPG while an average US-sized SUV pulls about 12mpg. I thought it would be an order-of-magnitude or two different, not a factor of 3. Trucks are even closer. Americans drive trucks that never go off road or haul or tow.
And I think industry is far worse than individuals about emissions.
Overall, would I say planes are good for the world? No, not really. But I don't think they're anywhere near the first or most valuable place to focus efforts on
You raise good points, but let's also consider that:
-planes travel a lot of miles very quickly. MPG is a fine number, but we should also look at something like total emissions per year of average use.
-planes emit around 3% of the global carbon total but serve only around 15% of the global population, unlike most industries.
I'm not going to stop flying anytime soon, but let's not kid ourselves about the impact our collective lifestyle has on the rest of the world.
Also worth mentioning that measures like carbon taxes, while having many problems, neatly solve what to optimize for when fighting carbon emission. Scale is automatically baked in.
Air travel is a way for an individual to blow through a significant chunk of their individual annual carbon budget in a couple of hours - and it’s emitted high in the atmosphere where the warning effect is amplified. Globally it doesn’t look so bad because overall, few people use air planes. Among those who use air planes, it looks pretty bad.
Also consider that those who advocate against excessive air travel also argue for the use of public transportation, walking and bicycling as a means to replace car travel. For long distance travel, the alternatives aren’t so obvious, that’s why aviation is such a concern.
> Those of you who are against air travel for climate reasons, can you share a source that has convinced you that it is a real problem?
No, because it is obvious that flying less is better for the planet. Replace “flying” with “eating meat”, “driving”, etc.
The problem is that all the research in the world won’t get people to change their behavior. The incentives are too strong (it’s fun to go on vacation, meat tastes good, I can make money by selling cars) and the disincentives are too weak (some fish I’ve never seen goes extinct, 50 years from now Miami will be fucked, some people halfway around the world will die, etc.).
Personal emissions are framed as a moral issue by environmental activists. Those allied with the activists are perceived to be outsized users of air travel. And most air travel is non-essential.
Amongst users of air travel, it is a significant source of emissions. A single round-trip across an ocean is on the same magnitude as driving emissions for the average american.
The hypocrisy is obvious. Morality and personal responsibility are a terrible foundation for environmentalism.
The issue with aviation should not be framed by its share in total carbon emissions, which appears to be not that much. It's the fact that, in a world where the individual target of CO2 emissions is 2T, there is no room for aviation. Same thing for eating meat more than once a week, or using a personal car.
People fear their living standards will have to be degraded to that level. It’s not true though.
Those country comparisons are totally idiotic because they produce the wrong fears. Example: look at that table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... , Switzerland is 4.8 tons and a third of the US. I like the US but Switzerland is another scale for quality of life on most metrics.
Air travel is one of the few things that’s hard to fix, but for example I can’t understand why everyone won’t buy an EV, that’s basically 99% the same as an ICE car and even better in many aspects. Probably less meat, that will make food cheaper and people will live longer. Else all pretty much the same. Hell, nothing can beat renewables at the moment. They are 4-5x cheaper than fossil fuels. So we’ll be richer with renewables, well save trillions in insurance and I have no clue how people can still thing fossil fuels are the way. Inform yourselves and start to think about the near future, not the past. Stop being a passive fossil fuel lobby repeater.
You might have posted on the wrong comment because I don't think anything I wrote could have led you to believe that I am a "a passive fossil fuel lobby repeater." ;).
I don’t fear QoL being degraded (If it’s necessary, it’s cool for our children); I fear the loss of meritocracy, as I have never seen any other model work. I also fear it’s competing countries that fuel the climate fight in my country to persuade us of consuming less, while we’ll never be able to have an impact on them, even through international agreements.
So basically, the “China is just dis-industrializing Europe, by convincing us to self-sabotage our industries” argument.
Last point, I’ve never seen scientific studies used in politics that were not massively forged.
1. Fear of meritocracy 2. Fear of countries not negotiating an equalitarian deal 3. Fear of the awful science of “that camp” (and I know exactly what 3 arguments you’ll oppose, so, don’t bother with the direct answer, please assume everything you want to answer is already understood and incorrect, and go straight to a second level of answers).
What are the 3 arguments? Are you referring to IP theft when you mention meritocracy?
I know the current problems around manufacturing a little bit. My reading is that, yes, we can’t get out of fossil immediately, but I think we mostly failed to prepare and the current situation shows us that renewables are significant more resilient than detractors rate them.
Also I think producing cheaper products by running on coal is a thing of the past. What happens though is that bureaucracy and pay is clearly lower in some countries. Every country has to build a strategy based on those facts. In Europe I’ve seen too many countries comfortable with the past results and thus failed to plan for the future. Then blamed it on other countries because it’s an easy target for deflecting failures as always.
> what the planet can absorb divided by the number of people.
> why not ?
How do you incentive people to work if, in the end, everyone can consume and therefore emit exactly as much?
What’s the goal of studying hard if I’m not getting more consumption rights; Why wouldn’t we all coast school, since we’ll all get the same results; How would the society get any work done if no-one is incentived to work hard (That’s the neat part: You don’t, and you’re all poor as peons); Isn’t it always the same communist dream entering the main door after being kicked out for criminal activity by the back door for being at minimum the least efficient way to organize a society; If you’re going to react to the communist trope as being “not so bad”, doesn’t it confirm that it was what you intended all along.
Why would my consumption rights be exactly 1/8-billionth of the Earth capacity, independently on my work?
You seem to think that you work more, or harder than other people, hence you are given more "consumption rights". Please consider that:
- A lot of people are not working to consume more, and it does not prevent them to work hard. They just aren't fulfilling themselves through consumerism.
- A lot of people are working harder than you, for less. Should we take parts of your share a give it to them ? Spoiler alert, you will be constrained below 2T of CO2 emission, that's for sure, because you are not working harder than others.
- In a finite world, emitting more than your share means stepping on somebody else's share. But why would have that privilege if you are not working more?
- In a finite world, stepping on someone else's share that you are not permitted to take leads to a conflict. Conflict means war in a planetary context.
If I may suggest, if what's blocking you from emitting less, is your desire to consume more, you should try to change that, as your consumption capability will reduce in the future, whether you want it or not. This is because our energy sources are becoming less abundant, which means less consumption capability for the same amount of work.
> 1. Fear of meritocracy 2. Fear of countries not negotiating an equalitarian deal 3. Fear of the awful science of “that camp” (and I know exactly what 3 arguments you’ll oppose, so, don’t bother with the direct answer, please assume everything you want to answer is already understood and incorrect, and go straight to a second level of answers).
1. Meritocracy is a way to make you feel better for having more than others. In a finite world, having more than other means stealing from them. Nobody merits more than somebody else. At least not at the scale it is happening now. And don't assume that you work more than others.
2. I don't understand what you mean.
3. What is "that camp" ? What scientific studies are you talking about ?
Most of the people who have the option of “studying hard” do not work as hard as the blue collar workers in rural India or rural China. I’m not sure there is a valid argument that consumption should be based on who “works hardest”.
Emissions taxes are the fairest way to balance consumption. That works even for the privileged who consume without hard work.
Car carbon emission are usually around the level of aviation emissions with typical occupancy levels [1]. But Air travel encourages flying much larger distances as opposed to e.g. driving. Without air travel, no sane person would travel to e.g. Asia from Europe a few times per year. Flights over 4000km are 6% of flights but around 52% of emission in europe [1]. Few people will drive 4000km with a car.
In my opinion, simply comparing the averages is also not useful. I expect that car occupancy will be higher for distances where flying becomes reasonable, reducing the average emission levels. For example vacation travel most often happens in a group not alone. I also think that the economic benefit of car emissions is higher than plane emissions.
Emissions of air travel are commonly often given as CO2 Emissions (around 2% of emissions worldwide), while the complete warming effects are likely around 4% of warming worldwide [2].
Air travel is very unevenly distributed, with most of the population never flying as opposed to e.g. cars (in germany 2/3 of people fly less than once per year with half of them never flying [3], 12% of adults in the US account for 68% for flights takes [5]. In general look at [6] figure 4). Thus a small portion of the population benefits from air travel as opposed to e.g. car travel.
The increase in flying for developed countries and the further economic growth in developing countries means that without any intervention flying is expected to increase a lot in the next decades and threathen the paris goal.
It's very unlikely that air travel can meaningfully decarbonise in the next decades as opposed to car travel where a broad adoption of electric vehicles is expected in the next decade. The adoption of SAF has been pretty much non-existent up 'till now, contrary to industry promises (and fraught with issues both financial and energy usage) and battery-based solutions are only an option for ultra-short distance flights. Hydrogen based solutions are also very much in the early development phase and IMHO also unlikely to succeed.
Long-distance air travel is also without real alternative and can't be rolled back. For example, as air travel gets adopted more broadly, more people live in other countries a longer distance away and regularly visit their families at home. Trying to revert this is basically impossible (people can't see friends and family anymore), so higher adoption is hard to revert. If the population broadly becomes used to international vacations, reducing them in a large way also becomes unpopular. This is continually increases, so social solutions continually get harder.
Thus we expect to increase flights (but still with uneven distribution), have little hope for technical solutions for eliminating emissions in the next decades and social solutions will get harder as time goes on.
> Those of you who are against air travel for climate reasons, can you share a source that has convinced you that it is a real problem?
1. As others have said: Many things contribute some non-trivial percentage to climate change. And anything that is above 1% on a global scale is non-trivial.
2. Personal carbon budgets are very quickly exhausted by flying
3. You have to start somewhere to avoid emissions. Some things are harder to avoid than others. I am convinced that 99% of flights are not needed to maintain a good standard of living. It is a low-hanging fruit that we need to pick. The same thing applies to cruise ships.
I agree that cruise ships are an abomination in terms of energy consumption. But wrt flying, the whole "personal carbon budget" thing is a PR move by the major carbon generators to shift responsibility from themselves (who have the ability to make systemic changes) onto individuals (who don't).
The planes fly anyway; business travelers make them worthwhile even if they are mostly empty. Your 100kg does not make an appreciable difference, and no significant percentage will stop flying even if most vacationers abstain. See in particular the flights that flew completely empty during early COVID so the airlines could keep their precious airport terminal allocations.
I don’t think my frequency of air travel is exceptional for my demographic.
(Though I did charter a private jet two years ago for a business need. I took a small team to a place without regularly scheduled service. It is not clear to me if it was a net win or loss for carbon emissions given the other routes available.)
While I personally choose to live in a walkable downtown for many reasons, including climate impact, I end up having to travel in an automobile often. I think the taxes for this are misaligned to the impact.
Personally, I am a proponent of global travel. I think more travel means fewer wars and more benefits for humanity.
But part of the problem is that for almost every demographic air travel is not only a big part of each person's total emission budget, it's increasing over time. You're probably flying more than your parents did, and your children have probably flown more now than you had at their age. The aviation industry took a big hit die to the pandemic, but it's been growing steadily up to then[0], and is soon back to pre Covid numbers. People are used to flying several times each year now, while it was considered a luxury to do one flight per year a couple decades ago, and something you did maybe a handful of times in your life a few decades before that. And like most consumption, it's also vastly skewed towards the rich, whether it's the richest in your country or the richest countries in the world.
Personally I don't think global travel does much if anything for peace. Most wars are between neighboring countries and are started by leaders that have other reasons than not having visited the other country for doing so. Although travel isn't the issue, fossil fuel is, so instead of framing it as travel is good or bad, it should be about where the energy is coming from. And just like with economy, if you have a certain (carbon) budget, you can't spend more if you already spent all of it.
> Most wars are between neighboring countries and are started by leaders that have other reasons than not having visited the other country for doing so.
My reasoning on travel being good for peace has little to do with leaders.
The issues with aviation are two-fold: First, the amounts of emissions are very high relative to total passenger throughput. Second, the issue is very difficult to address meaningfully, because heavier-than-air aircraft have inherently high energy requirements that must be fulfilled by very dense, high-quality fuel, which we have no way to sustainably produce in sufficient quantities.
I'm kinda confused why the rate 70 is negative thing. They are an aircraft company, obviously they are going to try to sell as many aircraft as possible? What else are they going to do? Having a "green aircraft program" is all nice and dandy, but you need money to do so and money comes from sales.
They're a killing company, obviously they are going to kill as many people as possible. What else are they going to do? Killing less people is nice and dandy, but you need money to do so and that comes from sales.
One of the biggest mental blocks people have in regards to climate change, is not being able to separate carbon emissions from general environmental angst. In short there's nothing stopping us from converting our civilization to being carbon neutral, but our very existence will always have some environmental impact there is no getting past that.
Aviation in particular will be carbon neutral either through synthetic hydrocarbon fuel (Prometheus Terraform), new hydrogen engines, or a network of shorter hop flights with battery powered aircraft (Eviation). In fact it may turn out to be one of the easier industries convert to carbon neutral. If you're really worried, you can work on one of these. If you don't have the skills or the time there's always politics, since you approaches like this will face regulatory and political hurdles that are at least as big as the technical hurdles.
I have taken a plane less than 10 times in my whole life (I'm 35) and that'll stay like that for the rest, I already declined travels for work. My CO2 impact is around 400kg/year, so just 2 flights would double it. The average person CO2 impact in my country is around 9tonnes/year
No it isn‘t. The single most impactful one would be to not have kids. And let me make it clear that I‘m not saying to not have them. I’m just saying that there are different factors that contribute and how one person chooses to cut is their and only their decision.
Going a long distance by car is about 4x better than flying, but if you drive 4x as far you have emitted more than on that flight.
It's an optimisation problem, with no binary answers, so everything has to be optimised. Personally: no cars, no plane travels, no kids, no meat/fish, no consumerism, but people don't have to go that far like 1 kid, a light fuel-efficient or light electric vehicle, local food, eggs, and an optimised consumerism, this already cuts down by at least 2 the average CO2 impact by person which is around 9t/y in developed countries
Refusing to have children to stop global warming completely defeats the purpose. Global warming isn't going to destroy the Earth within our lifetime, so our future generations are the only reason we should worry about it at all.
Well, first it will have an impact is our lifetime. It already has.
But you have a point. But the idea is not to have no future generations. It's to have smaller generations over time. Perhaps 10-50x times smaller. This would requires a few generations to happen. Even by just having one kid 10x would be achieved in three or four generations. In theory. In practise it would create a lot of economical problems as well, because the economy would shrink a lot. We are currently not prepared for that and nobody knows how to do it. On the other hand it's a moot point, the global population is actually growing and even in rich countries it's at least more or less stable.
you're answering in a binary way after my response saying it's a multifactor optimisation problem. Some people will have 2, 1 or 0 children. Improving education and healthcare also have this effect to lower birth rate. And of course everything else has to be done, low-impact transports, food, etc..
The parent comment "No it isn‘t. The single most impactful one would be to not have kids." is also again turning things into a binary problem, there is no single solution, artificial CO2 sinks are not a single solution at all, we should not skip emissions because they represent less than 2% of global emissions for the same reason
> And it has been quite surprising to discover that, behind the curtains, Airbus employees are much less corporate than we might think.
It's depressing that this is surprising, and even more depressing that it gives him optimism about the behavior of Airbus as a whole. The behavior of corporations doesn't reflect the morality of the people in them. The myth that it does is consistently used to argue against the necessity of regulations and enforcement. "Hey, look at all these people working in the ____ industry, they aren't evil. Bad behavior is the exception, a rare perfect storm when a handful of morally bankrupt individuals randomly converge." No, indifference to good and evil is the rule, regardless of the morality of the individuals involved. Destructive strategies that result in profit will be pursued to the hilt, and individuals inside a corporation are helpless to prevent this without laws and aggressive enforcement to support them.
Airbus have always been a beloved company in Europe. It’s the company we are proud of. It’s the demonstration of the European countries working together. I’m not trying to get romantic, it’s a big company with a lot of issues of course. But it’s a symbol. It’s a company you are proud to say you work for.
And I truly hope they will be smart enough to transition or to to help in the energetic transition because if they don’t, they’ll die. And it would be a shame when you are employing so much good engineers.
I find this sort of discussion a bit too shallow and simple minded. What is Airbus supposed to do exactly? The author sort of implies that Airbus is somehow refusing to adapt or something.
But this is just not a good representation of reality. There are only two options to reduce carbon from aviation: 1. don't fly, 2. use synthetic fuels. The use of synthetic fuels is not really up to Airbus. They are not in the fuel business and they do not even build their own engines. So it's really not up to them at all as far as I can see.
That is exactly what I am referring to with "synthetic fuels". But this is actually not up to Airbus at all. Airbus cannot, by themselves, create a whole synthetic fuel supply chain. This would be an undertaking that the whole of Europe needs to do together. And Airbus do not produce their engines either. And there is no point in creating an aircraft that cannot be flown because no fuel for it is available.
Synthetic fuels is usually referring to synthetic kerosene which you can just feed into the existing jets as JET-1A.
Hydrogen is very-very different and needs complete redesign of the plane.
Hydrogen availability is pretty good, I mean most of the availability is not much better in CO2 emissions but with the time it would take Airbus to get the plane into commercial service getting the supply chain there would be pretty easy.
I still don't buy your argument that poor airbus has nothing it can do. If it wants to stay relevant in the 20-40 year horizon it needs to go at these hard problems now. If it doesn't then it has made a decision and might die, so what?
The last time that Airbus made a plane that needed modification to existing airfields (the A380), few airports or airlines did it and bought the plane. And that was a lot simpler than changing the fundamental fueling infrastructure.
It has taken, what, two decades and counting to even get unleaded avgas approved, let alone banning the leaded version? Why would a more complex change be a feasible one-company effort?
It does not have to be a one-company effort at all.
But someone has to propose a solution.
I still stand by my view that the supply chain of hydrogen is solvable with current tech. Whereas hydrogen (or other green long range) planes are not. It does not make much sense for supply chain companies to go first if they know that it takes airbus or Boeing or whoever 20 years with 50% odds of success.
I'm reading these comments and I'm remembering Ted Nelson's famous quote:
"Everything is intertwingled"
google it.
The point being that everything is connected, meaning: (In my view) trying to argue distinct components in some massively connected universe may not be all that helpful.
It's true that reductionism gets us some grand theories, but, what are the ways we could structure vastly more holistic conversations on these matters?
This article is very suspicious considering aviation's future is looking very bright with Airbus, specially in the UK [1], supposed country of the author
Don't fall for the FUD, it's like EVs/FuelCell [2]
Flying less or more generally consuming less is not going to solve the climate crisis. We need to go to net zero emissions and then to net negative emission, we need to capture the excess of GHGs to go back to a level where warming stops.
If we divide, let's say, by 10 the emissions, we are still emitting too much.
The only solution is too eliminate completely the use of fossil fuels. For flying this means zero emissions planes (electric, hydrogen, ...) and/or synthetic fuels.
Synthetic fuels is probably the fastest path to net zero emissions: no need of new technology, no need even to build new airplanes.
Synthetic fuels is quite easy, if electricity is cheap enough synthetic kerosene will be cheaper than classic kerosene. Luckily, thanks to renewables, electricity is becoming exponentially cheaper.
Several companies are on the path of producing synthetic fuels cheaper than fossil ones. One example in mind: terraform industries in Pasadena.
102 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadSomething will happen in the world, like Bolsonaro losing his election and Lula making some promises, and I will gain hope. Then I'll look at the IPCC again and feel depressed. Then I'll make some commitment to change my life habits in some way that's a bit greener and accept that I can't do much more.
But there's still some cognitive dissonance when I reach acceptance. I don't really accept it deep down. I live in fear, especially fear for my kids' generation.
https://workonclimate.org/
https://www.mcjcollective.com/
https://bootup.airminers.org/
I often wonder about refugee camps and wonder how I'd fare in one of them. Is it possible to organise theater courses? How difficult is it to find a space to meditate? Would people still care to have intellectual discussions?
A difficult life is still one worth living.
I hope you’re trolling.
There‘s a big difference between perhaps not doing holidays in a place far away or even not buying a smart TV or new phone and what you describe.
But what would be even worse is trying to avoid the decline of easy energy. Because even if there's petrol and coal and gas left in the ground, we should stop burning it, because we have to mitigate climate change. That's the tragedy.
We're faced with a choice: maximizing short-term comfort by putting back the consequences of reducing available energy, or minimizing long-term discomfort (might be a euphemism) by deliberately cutting down on still available energy.
> Now I believe
Exactly. You believe. Old age has very little to do with energy and far more with knowledge and progress in medicine.
I live in the U.S., which has many big automobiles transporting just one person. They are a much bigger emitter of carbon per person per unit of distance traveled. I don’t see why we should be discouraging commercial air travel while allowing individual automobiles to emit so much.
Those of you who are against air travel for climate reasons, can you share a source that has convinced you that it is a real problem?
Goong abroad and learning about people, cultures, and yourself is a difficult thing to quantify but it absolutely pays dividends later in life.
> His [Dr Joeri Rogelj] calculations suggest aviation emissions between 2015 to 2050 will consume 27% of the remaining carbon budget to have a decent chance of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5C above preindustrial levels.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/aviation-consume-quarter-carbon-...
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
That's why putting a price on emissions helps.
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-nasa-tool-super-emitters-metha...
You are looking at those pie charts graphs by sector/application and indeed it looks fragmented.
However once you look at each sector the biggest contributors can be lumped:
1. Energy generation from Coal/Gas
2. Road transport with ICEs.
However my gut feeling is that Oil&Gas refinery and extraction are grossly under reporting Methane emissions. So it could be that the chart doesn't show the full picture of GHG.
There's been a fair amount of focus on this in the past ~5 years. We can constrain methane emissions both from a "bottoms-up" (measuring direct-from-source emissions or tallying up expected emissions given natural gas production and leakage rates) and "top-down" (measuring atmospheric CH4 over time and constraining the year-to-year emissions required to drive observed changes). Work like Rutherford et al (2021; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25017-4) definitely leave room for some unaccounted leakages arising from O&NG production, but there likely is not room for much more "grossly under reported" emissions.
Also electric cars are coming but electric passenger and cargo planes are very far away or even impossible due to the physics of battery power density.
https://tinyurl.com/4uf7v3wm
I think what's very far away is autonomous flight. But IMO farther is autonomous automobiles, because as both pilot and driver, aviation has rules, standards, predictability, integration of a wide assortment of vehicles of flight, training, and thus a far better prepared environment for autonomous. The automobile environment is so haphazard humans make way more mistakes driving than flying.
https://www.flightglobal.com/airframers/what-would-it-take-t...
I think some regulations are great, like the prohibition against short haul flights in France that the article mentions. But I think overall efforts to reduce global warming should be targeted in ways that give the "biggest bang for the buck", and aviation-specific changes ain't it.
Do you mean just those rich enough to use private jets?
Only if we assume that we need to maintain or increase the level of air travel. The number of air travel passengers in 2019 (before the pandemic) was around 3.5X as many as it was in the early 1990s. That wasn't that long ago, and people managed just fine with fewer vacations abroad etc. It's easy to look at what we do today and take for granted that it's whats normal and no change is possible, but we consume the resources of 1.8 earths, so clearly we're living above our means. And since millions of people are currently on their way out of poverty and towards the same lifestyle as we as westerners are enjoying, this overconsumption of the planet's resources will get worse if nothing changes.
https://www.icao.int/Newsroom/Pages/2021-global-air-passenge...
On the long tun though, we have to reach net zero. And if possible even go into negative carbon emissions. 2% isn't much but there are probably activities much more critical than flying which we could use our carbon offset capabilities.
My biggest concern with aviation today are people flying private. It is symbolic but I don't think we will be able to ask people to sacrifice some of their comfort if the wealthiest people are not in the same boat.
Do you have an idea of how many giga tonnes of CO2/year we're talking about here?
What matters is how much it represents in relation with our total emissions (2%) or with other activities we also have to tackle to decide where to put our efforts first. (Or all at once whenever possible)
Therefore, I maintain what I say. 2% of the pie doesn't represent that much if we want to achieve net zero. But at some point we will have to tackle it.
the short answer is "1"
There’s an argument I haven’t evaluated myself that even if the fuel was carbon neutral, high altitude combustion might have a residual forcing.
I think transoceanic travel is critical to human flourishing, so I definitely hope we can minimize that residual.
I also couldn't believe when I found out a Learjet 7 seater might get 4MPG while an average US-sized SUV pulls about 12mpg. I thought it would be an order-of-magnitude or two different, not a factor of 3. Trucks are even closer. Americans drive trucks that never go off road or haul or tow.
And I think industry is far worse than individuals about emissions.
Overall, would I say planes are good for the world? No, not really. But I don't think they're anywhere near the first or most valuable place to focus efforts on
-planes travel a lot of miles very quickly. MPG is a fine number, but we should also look at something like total emissions per year of average use.
-planes emit around 3% of the global carbon total but serve only around 15% of the global population, unlike most industries.
I'm not going to stop flying anytime soon, but let's not kid ourselves about the impact our collective lifestyle has on the rest of the world.
Also worth mentioning that measures like carbon taxes, while having many problems, neatly solve what to optimize for when fighting carbon emission. Scale is automatically baked in.
Also consider that those who advocate against excessive air travel also argue for the use of public transportation, walking and bicycling as a means to replace car travel. For long distance travel, the alternatives aren’t so obvious, that’s why aviation is such a concern.
No, because it is obvious that flying less is better for the planet. Replace “flying” with “eating meat”, “driving”, etc.
The problem is that all the research in the world won’t get people to change their behavior. The incentives are too strong (it’s fun to go on vacation, meat tastes good, I can make money by selling cars) and the disincentives are too weak (some fish I’ve never seen goes extinct, 50 years from now Miami will be fucked, some people halfway around the world will die, etc.).
Amongst users of air travel, it is a significant source of emissions. A single round-trip across an ocean is on the same magnitude as driving emissions for the average american.
The hypocrisy is obvious. Morality and personal responsibility are a terrible foundation for environmentalism.
To evaluate your individual CO2 emissions, you can use this simulator: https://nosgestesclimat.fr
> Why do I have the same goal as an Indian or Nepalese person?
I do not understand, why not ?
Those country comparisons are totally idiotic because they produce the wrong fears. Example: look at that table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... , Switzerland is 4.8 tons and a third of the US. I like the US but Switzerland is another scale for quality of life on most metrics.
Air travel is one of the few things that’s hard to fix, but for example I can’t understand why everyone won’t buy an EV, that’s basically 99% the same as an ICE car and even better in many aspects. Probably less meat, that will make food cheaper and people will live longer. Else all pretty much the same. Hell, nothing can beat renewables at the moment. They are 4-5x cheaper than fossil fuels. So we’ll be richer with renewables, well save trillions in insurance and I have no clue how people can still thing fossil fuels are the way. Inform yourselves and start to think about the near future, not the past. Stop being a passive fossil fuel lobby repeater.
So basically, the “China is just dis-industrializing Europe, by convincing us to self-sabotage our industries” argument.
Last point, I’ve never seen scientific studies used in politics that were not massively forged.
1. Fear of meritocracy 2. Fear of countries not negotiating an equalitarian deal 3. Fear of the awful science of “that camp” (and I know exactly what 3 arguments you’ll oppose, so, don’t bother with the direct answer, please assume everything you want to answer is already understood and incorrect, and go straight to a second level of answers).
I know the current problems around manufacturing a little bit. My reading is that, yes, we can’t get out of fossil immediately, but I think we mostly failed to prepare and the current situation shows us that renewables are significant more resilient than detractors rate them.
Also I think producing cheaper products by running on coal is a thing of the past. What happens though is that bureaucracy and pay is clearly lower in some countries. Every country has to build a strategy based on those facts. In Europe I’ve seen too many countries comfortable with the past results and thus failed to plan for the future. Then blamed it on other countries because it’s an easy target for deflecting failures as always.
> why not ?
How do you incentive people to work if, in the end, everyone can consume and therefore emit exactly as much?
What’s the goal of studying hard if I’m not getting more consumption rights; Why wouldn’t we all coast school, since we’ll all get the same results; How would the society get any work done if no-one is incentived to work hard (That’s the neat part: You don’t, and you’re all poor as peons); Isn’t it always the same communist dream entering the main door after being kicked out for criminal activity by the back door for being at minimum the least efficient way to organize a society; If you’re going to react to the communist trope as being “not so bad”, doesn’t it confirm that it was what you intended all along.
Why would my consumption rights be exactly 1/8-billionth of the Earth capacity, independently on my work?
- A lot of people are not working to consume more, and it does not prevent them to work hard. They just aren't fulfilling themselves through consumerism. - A lot of people are working harder than you, for less. Should we take parts of your share a give it to them ? Spoiler alert, you will be constrained below 2T of CO2 emission, that's for sure, because you are not working harder than others. - In a finite world, emitting more than your share means stepping on somebody else's share. But why would have that privilege if you are not working more? - In a finite world, stepping on someone else's share that you are not permitted to take leads to a conflict. Conflict means war in a planetary context.
If I may suggest, if what's blocking you from emitting less, is your desire to consume more, you should try to change that, as your consumption capability will reduce in the future, whether you want it or not. This is because our energy sources are becoming less abundant, which means less consumption capability for the same amount of work.
> 1. Fear of meritocracy 2. Fear of countries not negotiating an equalitarian deal 3. Fear of the awful science of “that camp” (and I know exactly what 3 arguments you’ll oppose, so, don’t bother with the direct answer, please assume everything you want to answer is already understood and incorrect, and go straight to a second level of answers).
1. Meritocracy is a way to make you feel better for having more than others. In a finite world, having more than other means stealing from them. Nobody merits more than somebody else. At least not at the scale it is happening now. And don't assume that you work more than others.
2. I don't understand what you mean.
3. What is "that camp" ? What scientific studies are you talking about ?
Emissions taxes are the fairest way to balance consumption. That works even for the privileged who consume without hard work.
In my opinion, simply comparing the averages is also not useful. I expect that car occupancy will be higher for distances where flying becomes reasonable, reducing the average emission levels. For example vacation travel most often happens in a group not alone. I also think that the economic benefit of car emissions is higher than plane emissions.
Emissions of air travel are commonly often given as CO2 Emissions (around 2% of emissions worldwide), while the complete warming effects are likely around 4% of warming worldwide [2].
Air travel is very unevenly distributed, with most of the population never flying as opposed to e.g. cars (in germany 2/3 of people fly less than once per year with half of them never flying [3], 12% of adults in the US account for 68% for flights takes [5]. In general look at [6] figure 4). Thus a small portion of the population benefits from air travel as opposed to e.g. car travel.
The increase in flying for developed countries and the further economic growth in developing countries means that without any intervention flying is expected to increase a lot in the next decades and threathen the paris goal.
It's very unlikely that air travel can meaningfully decarbonise in the next decades as opposed to car travel where a broad adoption of electric vehicles is expected in the next decade. The adoption of SAF has been pretty much non-existent up 'till now, contrary to industry promises (and fraught with issues both financial and energy usage) and battery-based solutions are only an option for ultra-short distance flights. Hydrogen based solutions are also very much in the early development phase and IMHO also unlikely to succeed.
Long-distance air travel is also without real alternative and can't be rolled back. For example, as air travel gets adopted more broadly, more people live in other countries a longer distance away and regularly visit their families at home. Trying to revert this is basically impossible (people can't see friends and family anymore), so higher adoption is hard to revert. If the population broadly becomes used to international vacations, reducing them in a large way also becomes unpopular. This is continually increases, so social solutions continually get harder.
Thus we expect to increase flights (but still with uneven distribution), have little hope for technical solutions for eliminating emissions in the next decades and social solutions will get harder as time goes on.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_aviat... [3]: https://www.eurocontrol.int/sites/default/files/2021-02/euro... [4]: http://www.mobilitaet-in-deutschland.de/pdf/MiD2017_Tabellen... page 74 [5]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802... [6]: [deleted] ↗ (comment deleted)
1. As others have said: Many things contribute some non-trivial percentage to climate change. And anything that is above 1% on a global scale is non-trivial.
2. Personal carbon budgets are very quickly exhausted by flying
3. You have to start somewhere to avoid emissions. Some things are harder to avoid than others. I am convinced that 99% of flights are not needed to maintain a good standard of living. It is a low-hanging fruit that we need to pick. The same thing applies to cruise ships.
The planes fly anyway; business travelers make them worthwhile even if they are mostly empty. Your 100kg does not make an appreciable difference, and no significant percentage will stop flying even if most vacationers abstain. See in particular the flights that flew completely empty during early COVID so the airlines could keep their precious airport terminal allocations.
(Though I did charter a private jet two years ago for a business need. I took a small team to a place without regularly scheduled service. It is not clear to me if it was a net win or loss for carbon emissions given the other routes available.)
While I personally choose to live in a walkable downtown for many reasons, including climate impact, I end up having to travel in an automobile often. I think the taxes for this are misaligned to the impact.
Personally, I am a proponent of global travel. I think more travel means fewer wars and more benefits for humanity.
Personally I don't think global travel does much if anything for peace. Most wars are between neighboring countries and are started by leaders that have other reasons than not having visited the other country for doing so. Although travel isn't the issue, fossil fuel is, so instead of framing it as travel is good or bad, it should be about where the energy is coming from. And just like with economy, if you have a certain (carbon) budget, you can't spend more if you already spent all of it.
[0] https://www.icao.int/Newsroom/Pages/2021-global-air-passenge...
Amusingly, while this is likely true for many people with the same wealth, it is not true for me. My mother was a pilot and I have no children.
My reasoning on travel being good for peace has little to do with leaders.
This video series explains the issues well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k50qD40p3WU&list=PL_AaC0duf8...
How fortunate that nobody is actually suggesting that.
Coming out of the chaos of Brexit and Covid and now with Ukraine, I am not surprised. Seems to be the mood in most large corps in the EU.
Producing as many as we possibly can right now is a step in the wrong direction.
Why is it a step in the wrong direction?
Aviation in particular will be carbon neutral either through synthetic hydrocarbon fuel (Prometheus Terraform), new hydrogen engines, or a network of shorter hop flights with battery powered aircraft (Eviation). In fact it may turn out to be one of the easier industries convert to carbon neutral. If you're really worried, you can work on one of these. If you don't have the skills or the time there's always politics, since you approaches like this will face regulatory and political hurdles that are at least as big as the technical hurdles.
Going a long distance by car is about 4x better than flying, but if you drive 4x as far you have emitted more than on that flight.
The parent comment "No it isn‘t. The single most impactful one would be to not have kids." is also again turning things into a binary problem, there is no single solution, artificial CO2 sinks are not a single solution at all, we should not skip emissions because they represent less than 2% of global emissions for the same reason
It's depressing that this is surprising, and even more depressing that it gives him optimism about the behavior of Airbus as a whole. The behavior of corporations doesn't reflect the morality of the people in them. The myth that it does is consistently used to argue against the necessity of regulations and enforcement. "Hey, look at all these people working in the ____ industry, they aren't evil. Bad behavior is the exception, a rare perfect storm when a handful of morally bankrupt individuals randomly converge." No, indifference to good and evil is the rule, regardless of the morality of the individuals involved. Destructive strategies that result in profit will be pursued to the hilt, and individuals inside a corporation are helpless to prevent this without laws and aggressive enforcement to support them.
And I truly hope they will be smart enough to transition or to to help in the energetic transition because if they don’t, they’ll die. And it would be a shame when you are employing so much good engineers.
But I’m not sure they will.
Please don't be with a limited imagination.
Hydrogen is very-very different and needs complete redesign of the plane.
Hydrogen availability is pretty good, I mean most of the availability is not much better in CO2 emissions but with the time it would take Airbus to get the plane into commercial service getting the supply chain there would be pretty easy.
I still don't buy your argument that poor airbus has nothing it can do. If it wants to stay relevant in the 20-40 year horizon it needs to go at these hard problems now. If it doesn't then it has made a decision and might die, so what?
It has taken, what, two decades and counting to even get unleaded avgas approved, let alone banning the leaded version? Why would a more complex change be a feasible one-company effort?
But someone has to propose a solution.
I still stand by my view that the supply chain of hydrogen is solvable with current tech. Whereas hydrogen (or other green long range) planes are not. It does not make much sense for supply chain companies to go first if they know that it takes airbus or Boeing or whoever 20 years with 50% odds of success.
We might even arrive at novel regulatory technology involving carbon provenance. We shall see.
"Everything is intertwingled"
google it.
The point being that everything is connected, meaning: (In my view) trying to argue distinct components in some massively connected universe may not be all that helpful.
It's true that reductionism gets us some grand theories, but, what are the ways we could structure vastly more holistic conversations on these matters?
Don't fall for the FUD, it's like EVs/FuelCell [2]
[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/27/airbus-sets-up-uk-facility-t...
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WeoeJyJmN4&t=455s
If we divide, let's say, by 10 the emissions, we are still emitting too much.
The only solution is too eliminate completely the use of fossil fuels. For flying this means zero emissions planes (electric, hydrogen, ...) and/or synthetic fuels.
Synthetic fuels is probably the fastest path to net zero emissions: no need of new technology, no need even to build new airplanes.
Synthetic fuels is quite easy, if electricity is cheap enough synthetic kerosene will be cheaper than classic kerosene. Luckily, thanks to renewables, electricity is becoming exponentially cheaper.
Several companies are on the path of producing synthetic fuels cheaper than fossil ones. One example in mind: terraform industries in Pasadena.