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Flight risk: can we take the carbon out of air travel?
- pwarner 7y agoWouldn't we focus on taking it out of most other things first? Solve electricity and land based transport first and figure out sea and air later? I not read the article so down vote they explain why we should focus on this when we are so far from solving other easier problems.
- t34543 7y agoRight but that wouldn’t fit with HN’s aggressive stance against air travel.
- Kiro 7y agoI don't know any forum that is as pro air travel as HN. In my country you get publicly shamed if you even consider flying anywhere.
- kortilla 7y agoWhat country is that? Presumably that’s born out in stats on air travel comparing it to other countries with similar personal spending power?
- Kiro 7y agoSweden, where "flygskam" has become a norm everyone has to conform to. https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/flygskam-anti-flying-flight-shaming-sweden-greta-thornberg-environment-air-travel-train-brag-a8945196.html https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/flygska...
- balfirevic 7y agoSince you haven't provided any statistics, I will. Number of domestic passengers flying in Sweden went from 7.9 million in 2017 to 7.7 million in 2018. That does not sound like "flygskam has become a norm everyone has to conform to".
- journalctl 7y agoWe can solve multiple problems at a time. This just reads as really defensive. Like it or not, air travel DOES have a big carbon footprint, and arguably most of it is unnecessary (we fly people across the country to help manage PowerPoint presentations). We’re going to have to solve it at some point, so why not now?
- mirimir 7y agoYes. More realistically, we could take lots of the air travel out of life. Looking back at all my years of work-related flying, there's very little that could not have been accomplished remotely. Especially with current videoconferencing capabilities.
- closeparen 7y agoWhen leisure travelers don't fly, they drive. Having clean, efficient ground transportation is required to reap the benefit of reducing air travel. (If you cut off all avenues to seeing Grandma at Christmas besides FaceTime, you'll get voted out of office).
- journalctl 7y agoLet’s solve both of these problems then, which it seems like people are doing. Plus, we already know how to solve ground transport, we just refuse to actually do it (renewables, public transit, dense development, etc). Air travel is more challenging given the massive amount of energy required.
- closeparen 7y agoPublic transit and dense development can reduce the necessity of renting a car or hiring a cab when you arrive in another city, but that's not where the energy goes in long distance travel. Without high speed rail, reducing air travel just puts more cars on the interstates.
- ars 7y ago> We can solve multiple problems at a time It's not "multiple" problems. There's just one: Where do you get energy? Trying to change the fuel (not energy) source of an airplane is the most useless of all the things that should be changed. Remember: The place the fuel is burned makes no difference, what matters is how you sourced the energy, so why go for expensive and complicated hydrogen for airplanes, when the EXACT SAME energy can be used on land?
- galago 7y agoI agree about the air transport, but sea transport might be one of those low hanging fruits because it doesn't have any direct effect on individuals. I have no idea what could replace bunker fuel as an energy source, but if something did, no one would notice.
- FrojoS 7y agoBecause we need to be carbon neutral soon and so far we have no solution, even theoretical, apart from synthetic fuels. So, we better start ASAP to find a solution. The focus you are suggesting is in play, afaik.
- Gibbon1 7y agoI don't think we have to restrict ourselves to implementing policies serially. My thought it some industries are going to have to reduce their CO2 footprint 30% and others will need to reduce 90%. Whatever is doable. For aircraft two things we could do is invest heavily in high speed rail for high volume short to medium flight corridors and electrified aircraft for short low volume ones. And accept that for the foreseeable future we're going to burn jet fuel for transatlantic and pacific flights.
- esotericn 7y agoProgressive taxation is generally a thing we accept. I'm happy to pay more tax than my friends who don't earn as much too. I think it makes sense to just whack a huge tax on flying. Right, you can't easily cross continents without flying, but I imagine the percentage of flights that are being made for super crucial stuff like say, unwell relatives, is a low percentage of the total. So whilst we're in this transition period, tax it enough that you can offset or capture the emissions a few times over. It's a no-brainer. You don't even encounter the "but what about those in poverty" problem because flying is the quintessential luxury. edit: I should be clear, as responders seem to misunderstand me, that the mechanism I prefer would be to tax according to emissions. I just think that flying should have a multiplier because it's primarily used for leisure or non-essential business travel. My preference would be for the taxes to be used on actual carbon capture / storage / research rather than being redistributed, and in that model you need to pull more out of the top end because otherwise the poor eat fuel taxes and get nothing back.
- Cenk 7y agoIsn’t most of the cost of a flight already taxes and duties? I recently booked a 700€ flight from Europe to Latin America, and out of the 700 over 400 were taxes and airport charges.
- esotericn 7y agoAirport charges aren't taxes. Aside from that - sure, there are taxes on flying. Are they enough to offset or capture the carbon emissions (at a rate higher than 100% if we want this to be progressive), and is the money going towards either doing that or researching future methods of how to do that?
- hamandcheese 7y ago> tax it enough that you can offset or capture the emissions a few times over. Why should we tax any more than required to offset or capture emissions just 1 time over?
- 7y ago
- jstsch 7y agoI think synthetic fuel from renewable energy (electricity + water + co2 from the air) is a better way to go. Much less complexity in the plane.
- im3w1l 7y agoA drop in replacement would be very attractive. How much electricity would it take to make a liter of fuel? How much money?
- dredmorbius 7y agoThat's an interesting option. It's been proposed and on the table for nearly 60 years -- M. King Hubbert first made the suggestion in the early 1960s. All the research I'm aware of, up to and including Google's synfuel startup, struggle with cost-effectiveness though. CO2 from seawater may be more energy-efficient than from air, but either way, scaling cost-effectively hasn't happened.
- Pxtl 7y agoRaise carbon prices until HSR is economically viable. Climate change is a problem today, so solve it with today's technology instead of waiting for the tech fairy to fix it for you.
- Aloha 7y agoHSR will never be viable cross country in the US - HSR could replace much flying however in the sub 500 mile trip range.
- _delirium 7y agoIs economic viability the problem with HSR? California voters approved a huge bond package for one eleven years ago. Over a decade later and there's still no rail line close to done. The issue doesn't seem to be that its fares can't compete with plane tickets, but that the state is just totally incapable of actually building it. Even when the money's there, you still have: NIMBYs, corruption/incompetence among officials and contractors, and (ironically) vague environmental laws with loose standing rules that cause any infrastructure project to end up in court. Among other things.
- dredmorbius 7y agoPolititical opposition is also clearly a part of the issue, and much of that may be entrenched interests, including airlines. I'd like to see the full breakdown, I suspect the story may be interesting.
- Scoundreller 7y agoDunno if we can ever take it out, but more efficient routing, reduced seat pitch and more fuel efficient planes has definitely lead to big improvements.
- DocTomoe 7y ago> reduced seat pitch Calm down, Satan. Reduced seat pitch was the major reason that prompted me to start flying Business Class on short hauls and First Class on long hauls, producing considerably more CO2 than an Economy Class passenger. Also: Seat pitch already has been shrunken considerably in the last years.
- stillbourne 7y agoI'd like to see zeppelins make a come back.
- firethief 7y agoHydrogen fears are overblown.
- dredmorbius 7y agoSafety, intrinsic in voluminous ultra-lightweight structures particularly in heavy winds and storms, seems to be an intractable problem. The US airship programme, based on helium, not hydrogen, still saw both the Macon and Ohio lost in high winds and/or storms. Britain's Airship One fared poorly as well, though it relied on hydrogen. Stuff that flies through the air has intrinsic issues with mass, and lifting bodies require tremendous volumes.
- danenania 7y agoWe really need bullet trains in the US. With fast wifi, comfortable sleeper cars, good food, and great scenery, I would happily spend a day or two on a train for long trips instead of flying, without even considering pollution. You end up basically losing a day when flying anyway, even for short trips, and it's infinitely more stressful.
- Trisell 7y agoI wish we had these. Crossing Europe on one was magnificent. The issue is with states being what they are it would take something like the Eurotrain system and that won’t happen in our country any time soon. There just isn’t the desire to do this in this country. :(
- reaperducer 7y agoIf you're interested in the history of why Europe has such a dense train network, and the United States doesn't, it's partially about war. There was a multi-part show I saw on BBC Four about a year ago that explained that Europe's train network isn't the result of some kind of visionary urban planning or anything altruistic. It's because European nations have such a long history of fighting one another. And in the early part of the last century, the continent went on a rail-building frenzy because of WWI. The United States have only gone to beating each other up once, and that was before trains were viable as large-scale tools of war. Perhaps if the Civil War was delayed by a couple of decades, things might be different. Of course, there are many other factors, but this is one that I find interesting and almost never explored.
- hodgesrm 7y agoRail was in fact critical for supply during the US Civil War. The Siege of Petersburg, whose eventual loss doomed the Confederacy, hinged on the important rail junction in the town. That's just one of many examples. Use of rail in the America conflict prefigured its application the war of 1870 and of course WWI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_railroads_in_the_American_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_railroads_in_the_A...
- nstom 7y agoWhile this is a good development, hydrogen based planes would not be climate neutral. Unfortunately a large and often overlooked part of planes’ climate impact stems not from their carbon emissions but from the water vapor they produce [1]. Contrails reflect heat and thereby contribute to global warming. If we want planes to actually be harmless to the climate, we should probably be looking at electric planes. [1] https://www.transportenvironment.org/news/aviation-2-3-times-more-damaging-climate-industry-claims https://www.transportenvironment.org/news/aviation-2-3-times...
- mrfusion 7y agoShouldn’t they reflect the suns heat away from earth?
- mdorazio 7y agoSeems there's some debate about that and the article didn't actually cite any resources to back it up. According to the end of this National Science Foundation article [1], it depends on the type of cloud. Contrails are maybe analogous to cirrus clouds, which block more thermal energy from the ground than they reflect back into space. [1] https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/clouds/question.jsp https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/clouds/question.jsp
- bootlooped 7y agoWouldn't the reflection of heat work in both directions?
- Bud 7y agotl;dr: no, we are nowhere close to taking the carbon out of anything even roughly approximating modern passenger air travel.
- lmilcin 7y agoThe solution is quite simple. Just require every company and person that emits co2 to pay for scrubbing it and let the market solve the problem efficiently. The only issue is getting everybody to agree to clean after themselves which practically guarantees this doesn't get solved until we are about to suffocate.
- namibj 7y agoI agree. Get an international body with 50% +1 voting rules, proportional to people represented (say, 1 for every 5e6 living humans, including minors). Get a carbon certificate system up, where there is exactly 1 way to create certificates: permanently sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. I.e., grow plants, char them, and bury the coal deep enough to convince the international carbon committee that the cover won't erode for some minimum time (something above 1e7 years, I'd suggest), or something as effective. Find a way to sanction local governments that don't enforce the need for carbon certificates when digging up stored carbon/burning down (old?) forests/etc. . I think mutual economic sanctions against the local government by way of a full (Maybe except imports of basic grains and such into the offending area, if the international carbon commission deems them at risk of famine otherwise. Also medicine and medical equipment deemed essential. Possibly with international ground troop supervision/fact-checking in cases where abusing the embargo loophole would be significant, i.e. spare electronics.) trade embargo between the offender and the rest of the world. There might be reasons to use a selective embargo instead, which allows imports of technology for zero/net-negative carbon industry, along with 1:1 export quotas to pay for the imports. Likely coupled by way of 1:1 exchanges of container loads, i.e. export this heap of containers, in exchange for importing this heap of containers with "green" technology/medicine/food, but no money changing hands there. To be fair though, it might actually be possible to found the international carbon commission in a technocratic way, obviously without any way to enforce anything at the start, but a sort of small founding group that serves to organize the first year/first years of meetings, building the physical place, managing funding from the benevolent technocrats, etc.
- kmlx 7y ago"Get an international body with 50% +1 voting rules" wrong age? this seems to be the age of splitting, not coming together.
- enqk 7y agoElectronics and the internet are 4% of the world's total CO2 emissions. That's more than plane travel and growing at 9% each year. "Climate crisis: the unsustainable use of online video”: Our new report on the environmental impact of ICT" https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/ https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-onl...
- KptMarchewa 7y agoIt's easier (or maybe: more feasible) to deal with emissions regarding electronics. We know how to produce renewable energy.
- enqk 7y agoDo we know how to make enough of it? Do we have a mechanism to cap the increase in energy usage, considering the low price of energy?
- adrianN 7y agoYes we know how to make enough of it. You just need to build lots of wind turbines and put solar panels whereever you have room, e.g. on all roofs. If you're really in a pinch for space you can always build a few nuclear reactors, but I don't think that is really necessary.
- sokoloff 7y agoDo we need (or even want) a cap if the energy source is non-emitting? If there's no significant externality, let the supply/demand price balance provide the back-pressure.
- enqk 7y agoWorlwide the large majority of electricity is produced with coal. Price of energy is not a thing. We pay for the conversion and its transport but not itself. So it does not provide the adequate signal for the management of the supply or its side effects
- seanwilson 7y agoThe core problem I feel is people are straining for ingenious tech and taxation solutions that allow them to keep their exact same current lifestyle instead of looking for solutions that require lifestyle changes. Nobody seems to discuss how we collectively work towards being happy with traveling less and eating more substainably. Were people not happy before we took flights so often and ate meat for every meal? What about changes to work and social culture so frequent and global travel is no longer the norm? The uncomfortable truth to me is that if everyone is always chasing the new next best thing, nothing we do is going to make our lifestyles substantial. We need to adapt to being happy with what we have or less rather than looking for solutions that feed into an entitlement of always wanting more.
- dageshi 7y agoPeople will concentrate in cities even more than they do now. Perhaps that is the inevitable solution.
- noobermin 7y agoThat is probably 60%-70% of the solution, especially when you consider in the US the leading causes of climate change (Transpo and Electricty usage add up to nearly 60%) is driven quite directly by sprawl.
- darawk 7y ago> The core problem I feel is people are straining for ingenious tech and taxation solutions that allow them to keep their exact same current lifestyle instead of looking for solutions that require lifestyle changes. That is actually what taxation-based solutions do. They make travel cost more, so fewer people do it.
- onion2k 7y agoThat is actually what taxation-based solutions do. They make travel cost more, so fewer people do it. People aren't happy about it though, so promising to remove the taxes is a way to win votes at the next election. The incentive becomes a voter bargaining chip rather than an practical long term solution. We need a solution that actually stops a majority of people wanting to fly so much, then removing the taxation isn't a way to win votes, and consequently it remains in place as disincentive to those who do want to fly.
- mkagenius 7y agoAren't we over-travelling, whenever a technology becomes available people tend to over use it - example is cars in India - no infrastructure to support such density of cars in cities like Bangalore, yet everyone has one. This will continue till a new superior technology replaces it. Why do we over-use every new thing, this is clear failure of policies. Carbon won't come down unless we have policies in place.
- nateburke 7y agoTech is one solution. So is taxation. There is a third solution, too: recession. Widespread flying for vacation or business is a luxury that people quickly abandon when they can't pay their mortgage or payroll. Recession is capitalism's solution for reducing CO2 emissions.
- nmeofthestate 7y ago"Greta Thunberg’s zero-carbon Atlantic crossing is not an option for most" Lucky, because it uses more carbon to be accompanied by a yacht crew who then take flights home when you finally get to America. I was all set to travel everywhere by yacht until I discovered that downside.
- pfdietz 7y agoAir travel may be one of the last major users of carbon-containing fuels. Perhaps there will be sufficiently little of it that the fuels can all be sourced from biomass (upgraded with hydrogen from non-biomass renewable sources).
- dredmorbius 7y agoI've run the numbers on that using one a biofuel crop heralded as "the biggest breakthrough that there is out there". The numbers don't add up. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings_biofuel_breakthrough_less_than/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings... We use mind-boggling amounts of fuels, and although aviation is a small fraction of the total, a small fraction of a very large number remains a very large number.
- pfdietz 7y agoThe US burns about 60 million tons of jet fuel per year. The US produces about 300 million tons of municipal solid waste per year, 360 million tons of corn, 130 million tons of hay. These are only some of the biomass streams in the US economy. It's not at all out of the question that the entire US jet fuel consumption could be produced with biomass-derived carbonaceous materials. The energy yield could be increased with extra hydrogen input, so carbohydrates could undergo hydrodeoxygenation (as in the Virent process, which can produce a drop-in replacement for current jet fuel). https://www.virent.com/technology/ https://www.virent.com/technology/
- dredmorbius 7y agoRaw biomass != fuel equivalent. There's collection and unification costs as well, and conversion to something suitable for fuels. Aircraft run poorly on cotton fibres. In 1900, the US ran a largely biofuel-powered transportation network, especially for local "last-mile" deliveries, utilising horses, which can eat minimally processed feeds. About a quarter of all grain production went to horse feed, and in fact a segment of opposition to adoption of automobiles were farmers who feared grain demand would fall. Henry Ford looked at an agriculturally-based fuel supply, based on methanol. That might have worked at the time, for a population of roughly 100 million, and widely scattered automobile ownership. It simply doesn't scale now. The Boeing study claimed to be among the biggest breakthroughs in aviation biofuel in years, but fails to pencil out. I ran numbers on numerous other biofuel crops. None, save algael biofuels (which present phenomenal practical issues) pass the basic quantity checks, even for just aviation fuel. Your supplemental hydrogen has to come from somewhere, that's not free. Producing kerosene-equivalent fuels isn't all that much of a problem chemically, the processes are understood. It's scaling the processes.
- dkraft 7y agoMore importantly is it even relevant to? No evidence points in thus direction.
- winslett 7y agoShameless plug, Cloverly has a air travel offset endpoint: curl https://api.cloverly.com/2019-03-beta/estimates/flight https://api.cloverly.com/2019-03-beta/estimates/flight -X POST -d '{"airports": ["bhm", "atl", "sfo"]}' -H "Content-type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer public_key:47800ea0ee541b4c"
- Nasrudith 7y agoThe emphasis on flight's CO2 emissions confuses me and has me wondering if I am missing something. While fully loaded trains and buses are better it is still better in per person miles than single occupant car road trips or even some loaded carpools. It strikes me as a "symbolically motivated" meme as opposed to a practical issue since air traffic is seen more as a luxury.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoIt could be low-hanging fruit. Thousands of airships to change, vs hundreds of millions of cars.
- algaeontoast 7y agoThis kind of approach is tone death and idiotic. This is why we shouldn't elicit policy recommendations from an unhinged 16 year old child from a privileged background who's severely lacking in life experience of any kind. The developed world is only part of the problem and a majority of the developed world is too poor to prioritize issues of climate and the impact of transportation. A more important question is if and when the masses will either bend to authoritarian calls for drastic cultural and political change, or retain their individual rights and count on existing political and scientific structures.
- MayeulC 7y agoI came across these petitions today. If EU citizens are interested, they can sign them https://back-on-track.eu/ending-the-tax-exemption-on-aviation-fuel-in-europe/ https://back-on-track.eu/ending-the-tax-exemption-on-aviatio... Maybe they would warrant a HN submission of their own, since it is something interesting to discuss. The proposals are well-written, and concerns an EU-wide fuel tax on kerosene, and a carbon tax.