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Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

202 points by elorant 7y ago

misiti3780 7y ago
"Over all, air travel accounts for about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions — a far smaller share than emissions from passenger cars or power plants." 2.5% means we should focus on reducing somewhere else in the near term.
- munk-a 7y ago
  Eeeeh, it depends. People in the US are going to go totally librarian poo if someone comes to take away their cars.
  - mfer 7y ago
    The people of the US won't if.... 1. The alternative's include things they can own and control. This is really important in rural or suburban areas. It's also important for a lot of businesses. 2. The alternative's are handled in a cost effective rollout manner. Basically, the solutions need to be in the public interest with them in mind. Not sure how that factors into startup and VC thinking these days. I would imagine that eco friendly public transit systems could cut down on emissions, cut overall costs, and cut congestion in cities. That seems like a good place to target as low hanging fruit.
    - pound 7y ago
      Unfortunately public transit contradicts that "they can own and control" part above. For many in US just the idea of sharing a space with strangers is revolting. Same applies to dense living. And that brings another question: how would you have effective public transit system in suburban sprawl?
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    I will happily continue to vote for and fund our over-budget under-delivering mass transit projects, even though I (and the overwhelming majority of people providing said funding) won't be in a position to actually use them for the foreseeable future, because it's the right thing to do. However, if someone tries to take my car before those alternatives are in place, we're going to have a problem. My problem will be getting to work. The transport authority's problem will be obtaining money from a hostile and/or evaporated tax base. We build a better world by working together, not by raiding each other and hoping that somehow, in the aftermath, the mass fixes itself.
    - munk-a 7y ago
      I absolutely agree, taking away private transit just isn't a workable solution with how people live and commute right now - and I wasn't advocating for anything of the kind, just pointing out that considering reducing private transit is absolutely off the table right now socially. I use and love public transit and would love to see downtown car free zones that help encourage transit usage and phase out the need to have a car - I wouldn't love to see everyone's car instantly impounded.
  - flatline 7y ago
    In the US you have a choice between insufficient/unaffordable urban housing, and suburban/rural living. In the former case a few people can take public transit, bike, walk, or work remotely, and yet urban congestion continues to worsen. In the latter case the vast majority need some form of private transportation to live. It's a big country, any solution is going to have a large technological component.
- Symmetry 7y ago
  It depends on who you are. The median person doesn't fly. But a round trip flight from Shanghai to New York is 3.4 tons of carbon, pretty close to the average global anual per capita emissions of 4.0 tons.
  - csallen 7y ago
    Seems implausible to me that this is a problem that's going to be solved by asking people to make personal sacrifices. The numbers don't add up. When the op says, "we should focus on…" I assume he's talking about policy, technology, etc., not individual concessions. The best argument I can imagine for encouraging individual concessions is that, if the campaign to do so is massively successful, it might create a new norm, which will increase public awareness, which will increase public support for new policies and participation in the development of new technologies. But imo that's an unnecessarily roundabout course to chart.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      There are people who believe that is an essential course to chart because with out the will to change we are nothing. I’m not saying that is or isn’t my perspective, just pointing out that it is a perspective that may hold some validity.
      - csallen 7y ago
        Totally, and this is the perspective I'm responding to. I don't think it's necessarily invalid. But I do think it's very easy to get sucked into a mindset of, "Let's shame individuals into making sacrifices," without actually doing the math on whether or not that's an effective approach.
        TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
        Yep, that’s it, shifting the Overton window to better practices.
    - 7y ago
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  Can somebody give a simple to read breakdown of what compromises the majority of the global carbon dioxide emissions picture/pie?
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    Apparently the EPA can do that. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
  - itcrowd 7y ago
    Yes: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions#co2-emissions-by-sector https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis... This is global data per sector. The rest of the page is fantastically insightful, too.
- weeksie 7y ago
  Yeah, this reads very much as the same kind of moral panic we recently endured over plastic straws. Air travel does emit a ton of carbon per person, but on the whole we're better off putting effort into making renewables cheaper and greening up the agriculture industry. Not that we shouldn't put pressure on the airlines to put R&D into lowering emissions but pretending this is something people can fix by "flying a little less" is silly at best, and smacks more of religion than of reasoned responses to climate change.
  - rubinelli 7y ago
    There's nothing wrong in picking the low-hanging fruit. Pick enough of these, and you start seeing a difference with minimal cost.
    - weeksie 7y ago
      Precisely why you go for the largest polluters, like agriculture and ground transport. Air travel is the opposite of low hanging fruit because it's difficult to make jets more fuel efficient—the air travel industry is already incentivized to do this to cut costs, so most of the low hanging fruit has been picked. You end up striving for incremental improvement on 2.5% of the problem.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  At least it got the segment right; ~30% of CO2 emissions are from transportation. It cracks me up when people talk about plastic and throwaway clothing as ways to cut back on carbon emissions.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    People confuse two separate issues. Plastic straws and throwaway synthetic clothing are about microplastics. CO₂ emissions are about climate change. The former may or may not turn out to be a health hazard (I'm betting not that much), and may or may not affect the ecosystem negatively somehow. The latter is going to kill our civilization for sure. I think we should leave the former problem for another time, and focus on dealing with the latter.
    - kaybe 7y ago
      An argument I've heard for also dealing with the former is that for some people it might be easier to approach because it is more obvious and less scary (more actionable). Once you have them onboard, you can start with the harder things. I'm not sure whether I believe that, but it's not totally implausible.
- usaar333 7y ago
  It's the high growth rate that is the issue, not the existing amount.
  - goldcd 7y ago
    And also the difficulty replacing the fuel in the increasing number of flights. On the ground, we're starting to have "entirely green days" for electricity - and say new cars that use it.
- phkahler 7y ago
  Air travel is more important because of the water vapor far more than the carbon. The week following 9/11 was dramatically different. NASA recorded the change in daily temperature range. Less significantly, we had crystal clear skys where I live - for a week! Water vapor can also seed cloud formation. Air travel causes a daily cycle in this, which might just keep more heat in at night. You can look at data and see the temperature rise along with energy use (CO2). But to compare it with the rise in air travel is also informative. IIRC there is even an uptick of both during WWII. But y'all can keep screaming 'bout CO2 till the cows come home. It may be that we really need coal fired airplanes that dont emit water vapor, just more CO2.
  - Maximus9000 7y ago
    > "The week following 9/11 was dramatically different. NASA recorded the change in daily temperature range. Less significantly, we had crystal clear skys where I live - for a week!" Do you have links for this?
    - wmf 7y ago
      https://web.archive.org/web/20160411094048/http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~rennert/etc/courses/pcc587/ref/Travis-etal2002_Nature.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160411094048/http://www.atmos.... https://www.nature.com/news/2008/081231/full/news.2008.1335.html https://www.nature.com/news/2008/081231/full/news.2008.1335....
      - andreasley 7y ago
        The second link actually states the opposite: "A new analysis now claims that altered US temperature patterns during the three flight-free days can be explained by natural variations in cloud cover, rather than the absence of planes."
        mehrdadn 7y ago
        Just imagine how this will get magnified and drive the world nuts when half the things we try to do to tackle climate change end up being plausibly explainable by natural variation. It's already a hard enough problem to solve without natural variance being thrown into the mix.
- pera 7y ago
  If you think 2.5% is too small to care, consider what would your company do for an extra +2.5% of annual net profit.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  I wonder where that 2.5% figure came from, I was always under the impression it was quite a bit higher than that.
  - bennofs 7y ago
    You need to consider that flying is still somewhat uncommon, if you consider the whole population on earth. From a quick search on google, less than 20 percent of the world's population took a plane in their entire lifetime.
- sp332 7y ago
  On the other hand, air travel is relatively difficult to de-carbonize due to fuel density requirements. So it's going to need lots of R&D investment now so we have something ready to go once we've addressed the cheaper stuff.
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  Near term, we should be slamming money into batteries and energy density of said batteries, if we want to decarbonize air-travel. Electric planes have numerous advantages, but jet fuel is just so much more energy dense than a battery at the current juncture. Hopefully by 2050, we will be able to scale up from smaller electric airplanes in the 2020-2030 timeframe, such that jet liners will be decarbonized too.
  - elihu 7y ago
    It seems to me that synthetic or plant-based carbon-neutral fuels are more feasible in the near-term, though I don't know what the current state of the art is. In the long term, electric planes would be ideal if we can figure out energy storage (or perhaps wireless energy transmission).
    - m4rtink 7y ago
      This is ideal - if you use a C02 neutral power source & use atmospheric CO2 (either directly or via plants) you are effectively making planes flow battery powered. With the flow battery using synthetic fuel you produce & atmospheric oxygen to produce energy & CO2. Which will then get captured again by your synthetic fuel factory. Win win. :)
  - bluGill 7y ago
    My understanding of the laws of physics that govern batteries is we are already close to the limits. There might be a doubling or two of capacity left, but that doesn't get us anywhere near the weight/energy ratio of jet fuel. There are options to make fuels from other sources - but every time someone brings this up we get the oil shrills screaming about why use food for fuel, or their tired old energy neutral studies that haven't changed their numbers in 20 years.
- eisa01 7y ago
  The thing is, very few things is a large share of global carbon dioxide emissions. "It doesn't matter what Norway does because we're less than 1% of global emission" "It doesn't matter with air travel because it's only 2.5% of emissions" "It doesn't matter with coal power in Germany, because overall it's not that much" If the rest of the world has that attitude, it won't matter if China and the US (often cited as the ones that matter) get to zero, as that's still not enough. CO2 emissions is death by a 1000 papercuts, we need to tackle them all So yes, let's bring aviation under carbon tax and/or cap and trade schemes, then people can decide how much they're willing to pay for these emissions compared to other sector emissions. I would guess travel is something people value and would be willing to pay for, until there are better solutions available Note: I say this as someone that travel quite a bit for work and leisure - I would definitely be penalized if I have to pay for my emissions
- yongjik 7y ago
  I don't think so - 2.5% is pretty significant. We only have to divide the total global emission into 40 pieces before each piece fall below 2.5%. Or, considering that total US emission is 14% of the world (2017), you just have to divide the whole nation into six sectors and claim each and every one is not significant enough, so that we have to focus on "something else". There's always some "something else". Of course we have to be smart about our efforts, but it's time we stopped passing the buck around.
- opportune 7y ago
  However, if you are a wealthy firstworlder businessman, air travel is likely your single biggest source of carbon emissions, aside from your car. If you are a management consultant you probably produce more CO2 from air travel in a year than from all other CO2 sources in 5 years
- jellicle 7y ago
  The idea of "focus" is only meaningful if you are resource-constrained - my 3-person team can only do 3 things at once, so they must focus. However, when talking about world climate actions, we have 7 billion people acting. There's no need to focus. We can cut air travel AND ALSO do everything else. And in fact we need to.
- asdfadsfgfdda 7y ago
  And imagine all of the benefits we get from only 2.5%. More migration - the smartest researchers in photovoltaics can move to a city where they can make a bigger impact, and still visit their families. Even without migrating, researchers can collaborate across continents. Increases economic productivity - when production stops at a nuclear plant, you can fly in parts/personnel quickly. Economic development - if you couldn't fly in technical experts to China, how could you source components from there? Imagine how expensive lithium batteries would be if all components were made in western (expensive) countries. Teslas are fairly expensive, and they already source many parts from China. The solutions for climate change requires technology and money. Why kill the economy with draconian measures? We need this economy to produce the solutions.
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    Not to mention people learning more about other countries, people and cultures from personal experience. This can make them more rational and less prone to manipulation & hysteria than if they never left the town or country they were born in.
- munificent 7y ago
  This depends entirely on the distribution of the other categories. Look at this like optimizing a program. If you do a profile and one function takes up 80% of the profile and everything else is a tiny fraction, sure, focus on that hot spot. But if you have many many slow functions and none is a clear hotspot, they all need attention, even the 2.5% one.
maxaf 7y ago
Stop fucking flying everywhere. If you think you have to travel far enough to justify a flight, think again. Do you really have to be there in person? Telecom technology has matured enough to make personal presence unnecessary. Your instagram vacation can wait until we have cleaner travel tech.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  Lol no. Not gonna happen.
  - baq 7y ago
    Oh yes it will as soon as carbon and stratospheric water vapor is priced in airfares.
    - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
      Yeah, okay ace.
- DisruptiveDave 7y ago
  > Telecom technology has matured enough to make personal presence unnecessary Holy moly that's sad if anyone actually believes this.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    I actually believe this, could you maybe expand on for what interactions you think personal presence is still necessary and adds real value?
    - read_if_gay_ 7y ago
      Seeing family or friends and like, you know, maybe something like doing stuff together?
    - groby_b 7y ago
martamoreno2 7y ago
2.5% eh? We should all immediately stop flying... This is outrageous. Just imagine, 2.5%!! But on a more serious note, this article is again wrong, like so many others about climate change. Being a combination of clickbait and false assumptions, it fails to miss the point entirely that first, 2.5% are irrelevant, but also that it makes no sense whatsoever to tackle this now. The technology is just not there yet. What we urgently NEED to do is invest HUGE amounts of money into two key technologies. One is batteries. Make them as small, lightweight and efficient as possible. Pretty much everything depends on that and there has been no notable breakthrough in like forever... Without "super" batteries, we can kiss "preventing climate change" goodbye. Another one is sucking the carbon out of the atmosphere. And no, we DON'T need to reduce our carbon emission, one of the key mistakes people make when it comes to climate change. What we need to do is to suck out more than we put in. There is no way in hell that 200 countries in the world agree on being C02 neutral. The leading countries need to suck the shit back out, that is the only way forward. As for all the people who preach changing the entire world by reducing emissions... I mean, I get you are very naive, but seriously: It's not gonna happen. It is cute to have girl sail through the Atlantic to make so pep talk at congress. But it is also really meaningless. This is not the way the world will change. It never has. Politicians can't agree on the color of shit within their own country, not to mention between them. The only way to avoid catastrophe is to outpace climate change with innovation. The world is not going to sacrifice living standards until they all drown in their own filth.
- mveety 7y ago
  Also if we suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere we could turn it into petrochemicals and fuel which would help with making existing things carbon neutral.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    That's the most viable path to sustainable aviation (rather than electrifying the fleet).
- funklute 7y ago
  Any time someone actually does the math on sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, it seemingly becomes clear that it is simply not scalable to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere. Have you done the math, and if so, why is everyone who comes to the aforementioned conclusion wrong?
rolltiide 7y ago
This is sad to read as the budget airlines are really just taking off. So many people are just getting to obtain some of their travel dreams and now they have to stop :(
- quotemstr 7y ago
  No, nobody has to stop. Nobody has to listen to people who continually promote a variety of ad-hoc, ineffective, and annoying emissions mitigation measures.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
bmmayer1 7y ago
What's the tradeoff? How many people aren't driving because flying is cheaper? What is the economic efficiency gained by air travel and how does that translate into emissions? A cost number without a benefit number is completely useless for real analysis.
ahelwer 7y ago
It is an interesting exercise to ask people to imagine a world without air travel. Where you can't just appear halfway around the world at the drop of a hat. Travel again becomes the domain of boats & trains. To almost anyone you talk to, banning air travel sounds completely ridiculous. In reality it wouldn't be enough by itself. It's on the lower end of action that is required.
- creaghpatr 7y ago
  Or we invent solar-powered planes. Not feasible yet, but who knows.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    there's one but it's a single passenger unit
  - russdill 7y ago
    Solar powered planes are a feasible engineering challenge. The engineering challenge is making synthetic aviation fuels from electricity. Once that is solved, it's just a matter of installing production plants in areas were solar is most productive.
  - tomschlick 7y ago
    The planes don't have to be solar powered, just electric. Leave the energy generation to the ground. The next problem would definitely be the weight of batteries though.
    - glogla 7y ago
      This might be where the hydrogen could be useful (unlike for cars where it costs too much).
- habnds 7y ago
  if prices accurately reflected costs not flying would start to seem a lot more practical
- 7y ago
graeme 7y ago
Can't read due to paywall, but does the 2.5% figure include the worse effect high altitude emissions have? I believe the best estimate is a doubling.
jonsen 7y ago
It’s a rich world which can afford constantly having several million of its people sitting in a chair elevated six miles.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  No, it's a world with cheap energy.
- gcheong 7y ago
  Deregulation of the airlines put air travel within reach of regular people to the point where it is now a commodity and nobody cares about anything but getting the cheapest flight. Growing up it was unusual for my parents to take a flight anywhere for vacation. Even by themselves. Nowadays it seems unusual for people not to take the entire family even overseas for a jaunt. Which certainly makes our lives richer. Time will tell if we can find a balance to the costs incurred.
yread 7y ago
Grounding of MAX could have an effect as lots of airlines kept old gas guzzlers flying longer than they planned - or they contracted some shady companies with 30 year old 733s and 734s
quotemstr 7y ago
There's a cavernous gap between the apocalyptic rhetoric from climate activists and the brittle, ineffective policy they actually promote. If climate activists really believed that climate change were a near-term catastrophic threat, they'd jump on the change to reduce emissions using whatever techniques and technology worked. "Geoengineering? Great! Nuclear power? Great!" --- that's what someone genuinely concerned about the climate would say. Instead, climate activists promote a very narrow Utopian vision and work against everything that falls outside this vision. These activists don't really care about the environment: they're using climate activism as a pretext for advancing some Utopian project and putting themselves in charge of how we all live. These people are discrediting all climate science in the eyes of regular people.
- asokoloski 7y ago
  I'm a climate activist, and I can't control how others act, but I'm in favor of, like you say, anything that works. The Citizens' Climate Lobby is focusing on a carbon fee and dividend. I'm new to the movement (so take what I say with a grain of salt) but I like what I see so far. We're very focused on one particular legislative approach, not because other things won't help, but because it's hard enough getting legislation like H.R. 763 through congress already, and distractions dilute our precious time and energy. So the CCL is pushing on just this one bill, which we think is the most effective approach for us. But I'd love to see people work on everything and everything. I just think it's probably most effective for most organizations to focus on a relatively narrow area.
  - rhinoceraptor 7y ago
    The environmental movement has a lot to answer for, for setting back progress of nuclear power by decades.
- russdill 7y ago
  "them"
algaeontoast 7y ago
Why would people stop flying...? What, the "solution" is going to be blimp travel, boat travel, undersea super train travel... Maybe we should make air travel so expensive that only the rich can use it!
williesleg 7y ago
Just stay home and let the elites fly around and scam your money. All part of the climate conspiracy.
tombert 7y ago
I fly fairly frequently to California from NY for work, lately after reading a few articles like this, I wonder if I should put my foot down to my manager and tell them that I'm not going to anymore until flying is less terrible for the atmosphere. I don't think I'll be fired for that, and even if I were I'd probably be able to find another job without too much trouble at this point, but I feel a bit bad for people don't have this option. NOTE: I realize I'm hardly a beacon of "how to save the world from climate change", but I do try and do a bit where I can; I take public transit almost exclusively and do not own a car, and I have stopped eating beef and pork. I still order a lot of stuff from China online, which is probably the next habit I should break.
- bjelkeman-again 7y ago
  I did change. I dropped from 35-40 flights in 12 months (really not good, in more ways than one) to 3-4. Still too many. But getting there.
  - tombert 7y ago
    I think people are too quick to dismiss incremental progress; you dropped by 90%, that sounds pretty excellent to me!
    - howinator 7y ago
      "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" is something that needs to be included in climate conversations a lot more. You don't have to be a vegan hermit to have an impact. Eating a little less meat, foregoing one flight, and biking to work once a week is better than not doing anything and that's great.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      Agree. I am vegan. Probably 10-20% of my meals end up being vegetarian (usually with a minor ingredient like trace milk in a sauce). This is simply out of practicality - we're talking stuff like, going to a restaurant with friends and there are no vegan options. If everyone did that 80%, the ecosystem would (as it _already has!_) change so much that 100% would be trivial. I used to think that it's pointless to do anything because no-one will follow you. That has been empirically proven to be complete bollocks over the past few years. Go all in. I will follow, they will follow. It's time.
tempsy 7y ago
Can we start by banning the cruise ship industry first? I cannot think of a mode of transportation and form of leisure that is as useless and ecologically damaging.
- sp332 7y ago
  Well there's a new low-sulphur fuel regulation coming into effect in a few months. http://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/Pages/MEPC-70-2020sulphur.aspx http://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/Pages/MEPC-... That will help with some of the pollution anyway.
  - tempsy 7y ago
    That doesn't exactly solve the problem of cruise ships dumping raw waste into the ocean.
    - sp332 7y ago
      Of all the kinds of pollution, why worry about that? There's way more poop in the ocean already.
blondie9x 7y ago
I work remote and can pretty much be anywhere anytime working. But I try to be content and focus on where I chose to live. To build relationships and deeper connections to the local community. I try to do one trip a year max by plane and when I go its usually for longer periods of time. We should travel less and focus more on the place we call home. When people tell me they love to travel. I reply why? It's usually I want to get away or I'm sick of where I am now in my life. Try to understand this feeling deeper and think about how you can better structure your life to appreciate the moment and where you choose to build yourself and your community. People also sometimes describe travel as a sort of escape. It's important to try and understand that feeling deeper. Why do you need to escape from your life as it is now?
j-pb 7y ago
If I take the train, which is the most green transport (CO2 neutral) from one edge of europe to the other (e.g. Berlin to Sicily), the amount I pay is 500 euros and it takes me 35 hours. If I fly the same distance it takes me 3 hours, and I pay 100 euros. Heres the kicker, it costs me 100 euro to buy CO2 compensation and make the flight CO2 neutral, and whenever me and my spouse fly we always pay twice that so that we are actually carbon negative. So everytime we fly we reduce the earths CO2 by one flight and still have 200 euros more in our bank account.
- egdod 7y ago
  Where do you buy your carbon offsets? What actually happens to the money that you spend on them?
  - gjasny 7y ago
    For example at atmosfair: https://www.atmosfair.de/en/ https://www.atmosfair.de/en/ Their website lists some CO2 compensation projects.
  - frakkingcylons 7y ago
    I've used COTAP in the past: https://cotap.org/ https://cotap.org/
- alex_young 7y ago
  That sounds great, but how do you manage to offset 2 flights? I don't really understand how money can undo putting a bunch of carbon in the atmosphere.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    You're paying for pulling the carbon back out. The cheapest way to do this is to pay someone to plant trees for you.
    - henryfjordan 7y ago
dr_dshiv 7y ago
Can't we put some chemicals in the fuel to mitigate the warming effects? Just do it secretly, so the chemtrails people don't freak. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_inject...
- tobib 7y ago
  Have you learned nothing from the movie "Snowpiercer"?
  - jnwatson 7y ago
    The silly dystopian arguments against climate engineering are facile. Do you think the first attempt will be done at global scale? No, it will be done first at small scale, and then larger and larger. There is no reasonable scenario in which we would be surprised by the impact of climate engineering.
    - dr_dshiv 7y ago
      Especially when using techniques like marine cloud brightening. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening Imagine if cruise ships and cargo ships had snow machine jets on the back, lofting prepped salt water into the air, to seed clouds. The problem is that this is geoengineering which means career suicide for interested scientists. At the moment.
    - tobib 7y ago
      Not that I was serious in any way. But since we're talking about it, I am not convinced that our societies are able to coordinate an effort like that on a scale that would make a difference to the global climate. Maybe I'm unaware of relevant history, maybe I'm being too cynical.
blondie9x 7y ago
Carbon offsets are completely useless. https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-offsets/inconvenient-truth-carbon-credits-dont-work-deforestation-redd-acre-cambodia/ https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-offsets/inconv... there are better ways to protect the environment.
dr_dshiv 7y ago
Just carbon tax it as an externality, so we can get on with life.
kylek 7y ago
Any ideas how much of a contributor (domestic) air freight is compared to shipping via train/truck? (Is the volume of goods currently shipped through either method even comparable? This is way out of my realm!)
blunte 7y ago
If you need to travel long distances, there's little substitute for an airplane. If air travel accounts for less emissions than passenger cars, and if the top 15 polluting large container ships produce as much (noxious oxides of nitrogen and sulphur) pollution as all cars, then we need to fix shipping first. And if you look at a lot of the crap that is being shipped, it's stuff we just don't need. A lot of things are replaced frequently with cheap and short-lived new things, so there's plenty of room to reduce the amount of shipping. We should also focus on trains and electric buses to reduce the amount of car use. Some parts of the world already do. And after spending many years commuting in heavy Texas road traffic, I much prefer European train/metro/tram (and even bus) travel. Oh, and bikes and feet for the last 1-2km.
- js8 7y ago
  Actually, there are substitutes. People who need to travel (and most of them don't) can just use trains or ships, and make the overall stay longer (decreasing overall number of trips). It was already possible more than 100 years ago, and it would be much less of a problem in today's digital economy.
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    Trains are an option, but ships seem equally bad or worse than planes for transporting people
  - jalgos_eminator 7y ago
    There's only so much time each day, and a plane gets you to your destination so much faster. Trains? Maybe for shorter trips like NYC to Philadelphia or DC, but NYC to Seattle? A train going 150mph would take 19 hours for that trip not counting stops. It would probably be more than 30 hours with stops, and significantly longer if the train can't average 150 mph. The flight is 6 hours gate to gate. You can't beat the speed of modern air travel, its just so much better than any other alternative. And no, most people can't just work from literally anywhere on a ship or train. That probably isn't even workable for a remote programmer let alone a marketing manager, welder, electrician, office assistant, salesperson, etc.
c0nfused 7y ago
I haven't gotten around the paywall to read the article but the last stats from the US government I can find, 2017 show that aviation has reduced emissions 7.5 percent compared to 1990. Medium and heavy truck emissions are UP 89.5 percent in the same period but aviation is the crisis. Passenger cars up 20%. Let's look at Tg emissions in 2017 Aviation: 174.8 On road vehicles 1,558.6 Source: https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P100WUHR.pdf https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P100WUHR.pdf page 2
Lramseyer 7y ago
One thing that's very important to keep in mind when looking at air travel emissions is how fuel efficient planes actually are. The math works out to around 100 miles per gallon per passenger. And at an underwhelming 2.5% of global emissions, I can't really put it in the category of "low hanging fruit." That's not to say that we shouldn't invest in things like high speed rail, (because we absolutely will see quality of life improvements for North America) but I'm more excited about improvements in vehicle transportation and energy production.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  The math works out to around 100 miles per gallon per passenger. That assumes maximum passenger load, I assume. At maximum passenger load, my car gets 170 miles per gallon per passenger. A giant, gas-guzzling Chevy Suburban gets 198 miles per gallon per passenger. I don't think "per gallon per passenger" is a useful measure.
  - ojagodzinski 7y ago
    your car is full probably 5% of a time, airlines have profits from full planes, you don't. "per gallon per passenger" is a useful measure for planes.
    - dhdicbxkcjc 7y ago
      If you’re running an airline, yes that’s the relevant metric. If you’re comparing an urban elite with a poor bloke with his truck, no. Mr. Loves-his-truck drives, at the insane most, 20 000 miles a year. That’s a round trip Thai vacation.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    I think it is. Freight is typically measured in cargo-ton-miles per gallon. I can't think of a reason to measure airline travel in other than passenger-miles per gallon. (You have to do it "as flown" and "as driven" for the comparison to be meaningful, but it's pretty rare for me to see anything under a 90% full flight lately with the economy booming.)
AcerbicZero 7y ago
I can no longer take any of these articles seriously. The hysteria around climate change precludes the possibility of reasoned rational discourse on the topic, and as such political solutions are all but impossible.
newnewpdro 7y ago
When interpreting statements like "Over all, air travel accounts for about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions", keep in mind that air travel emissions are higher impact due to occurring in the upper atmosphere. The commonly established multiplier is 2.7X [0]. So while the claim is 2.5% of global co2 emissions, in terms of impact it's more like ~6.7%. And growing, largely just so people can take selfies in different places, which are then used to promote more travel via social media. We need to tax fuel used for international air travel. The Chicago Convention [1] may have made sense in establishing the industry but we're well past that point now. Make this high-speed, high-impact transportation method high-cost so it's used less frivolously. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_(travel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_(travel) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Convention_on_International_Civil_Aviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Convention_on_Internat...
Robotbeat 7y ago
I'm convinced we need zero emissions aircraft. Efficiency improvements alone are going to suffer from the Jevons Paradox. In fact, that "paradox" could help explain why air travel emissions have increased so much even as aircraft have gotten much more efficient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox So to avoid the Jevons Paradox, we need actually zero emissions aircraft. Battery-electric or possibly hydrogen are the main contenders, here. Battery-electric in the near term is limited to about 1000km, maybe 2000km range. That's technically enough to do transatlantic crossings if you stop by Greenland and Iceland or possibly the Azores. And you could do transpacific by following the Aleutians. Pretty much the hardest place to visit is actually Hawaii. But for domestic flights, battery-electric is actually a superior option to high speed rail in the US. Typical HSR routes in the US are only about 300 miles or so, well within range of existing electric battery tech that could be adapted to airplanes, and even a fully subsonic, Mach 0.5 propeller-drive electric airplane would be much faster than even the fastest practical HSR. And operating at high altitude (with far lower air density) would mean that the electric aircraft would be more efficient than a hypothetical Mach 0.5 high speed train. But all of this will require probably non-traditional aircraft makers. The duopoly is culturally unprepared for the kind of radical engineering necessary to make a 1000km battery electric aircraft feasible (almost sailplane-like efficiency, combined with very high battery mass fraction, combined with extremely efficient battery packaging, state of the art structural mass, and transition to higher performance chemistry where possible). Liquid hydrogen is also a possibility for electric air travel. Compressed room temperature hydrogen is hardly more energy-dense than battery-electric, though, so you're going to have to go at least cryogenic, if not liquid, for hydrogen storage. Liquid hydrogen wouldn't be too bad in this application since the time of storage wouldn't be too long, and the scale would be large enough (if used in a widebody aircraft) that boil-off may not be too much of a problem (besides, you need a constant feed of hydrogen anyway). But a big problem is the fact that anthropogenic high altitude water vapor is maybe even worse (by a factor of 2) for climate change than CO2, so you'd probably want to condense the output. That means using fuel cells and then storing the condensed water on board and doing occasional low altitude dumps (it may even be feasible to store the water for the entire trip, dumping only right before you land) or perhaps freezing the condensate into pellets (small enough to not pose a lethal hazard but large enough to not evaporate on the way down) and then dropping them along the way. So long-haul air is a major challenge.
finchisko 7y ago
>If you need to travel long distances, there's little substitute for an airplane. the question if the distance you travel doesn't have substitute. like many business people travel just to meet, which has zero carbon alternative - video call.
nitwit005 7y ago
More efficient aircraft generally means cheaper flights, which unfortunately also means more flights. The efficiency may well make things worse. I'd actually prefer if air travel was more expensive. It's become expected that you fly groups of people across the continent to business meetings, and some people make regular flights.
cma 7y ago
Is it more from leisure (maybe due to Instagram vacation sharing, etc.), or business use?

202 points by elorant 7y ago

"Over all, air travel accounts for about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions — a far smaller share than emissions from passenger cars or power plants." 2.5% means we should focus on reducing somewhere else in the near term.

munk-a 7y ago
Eeeeh, it depends. People in the US are going to go totally librarian poo if someone comes to take away their cars.
- mfer 7y ago
  The people of the US won't if.... 1. The alternative's include things they can own and control. This is really important in rural or suburban areas. It's also important for a lot of businesses. 2. The alternative's are handled in a cost effective rollout manner. Basically, the solutions need to be in the public interest with them in mind. Not sure how that factors into startup and VC thinking these days. I would imagine that eco friendly public transit systems could cut down on emissions, cut overall costs, and cut congestion in cities. That seems like a good place to target as low hanging fruit.
  - pound 7y ago
    Unfortunately public transit contradicts that "they can own and control" part above. For many in US just the idea of sharing a space with strangers is revolting. Same applies to dense living. And that brings another question: how would you have effective public transit system in suburban sprawl?
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  I will happily continue to vote for and fund our over-budget under-delivering mass transit projects, even though I (and the overwhelming majority of people providing said funding) won't be in a position to actually use them for the foreseeable future, because it's the right thing to do. However, if someone tries to take my car before those alternatives are in place, we're going to have a problem. My problem will be getting to work. The transport authority's problem will be obtaining money from a hostile and/or evaporated tax base. We build a better world by working together, not by raiding each other and hoping that somehow, in the aftermath, the mass fixes itself.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    I absolutely agree, taking away private transit just isn't a workable solution with how people live and commute right now - and I wasn't advocating for anything of the kind, just pointing out that considering reducing private transit is absolutely off the table right now socially. I use and love public transit and would love to see downtown car free zones that help encourage transit usage and phase out the need to have a car - I wouldn't love to see everyone's car instantly impounded.
- flatline 7y ago
  In the US you have a choice between insufficient/unaffordable urban housing, and suburban/rural living. In the former case a few people can take public transit, bike, walk, or work remotely, and yet urban congestion continues to worsen. In the latter case the vast majority need some form of private transportation to live. It's a big country, any solution is going to have a large technological component.
Symmetry 7y ago
It depends on who you are. The median person doesn't fly. But a round trip flight from Shanghai to New York is 3.4 tons of carbon, pretty close to the average global anual per capita emissions of 4.0 tons.
- csallen 7y ago
  Seems implausible to me that this is a problem that's going to be solved by asking people to make personal sacrifices. The numbers don't add up. When the op says, "we should focus on…" I assume he's talking about policy, technology, etc., not individual concessions. The best argument I can imagine for encouraging individual concessions is that, if the campaign to do so is massively successful, it might create a new norm, which will increase public awareness, which will increase public support for new policies and participation in the development of new technologies. But imo that's an unnecessarily roundabout course to chart.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    There are people who believe that is an essential course to chart because with out the will to change we are nothing. I’m not saying that is or isn’t my perspective, just pointing out that it is a perspective that may hold some validity.
    - csallen 7y ago
      Totally, and this is the perspective I'm responding to. I don't think it's necessarily invalid. But I do think it's very easy to get sucked into a mindset of, "Let's shame individuals into making sacrifices," without actually doing the math on whether or not that's an effective approach.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
        Yep, that’s it, shifting the Overton window to better practices.
  - 7y ago
MuffinFlavored 7y ago
Can somebody give a simple to read breakdown of what compromises the majority of the global carbon dioxide emissions picture/pie?
- dehrmann 7y ago
  Apparently the EPA can do that. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
- itcrowd 7y ago
  Yes: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions#co2-emissions-by-sector https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis... This is global data per sector. The rest of the page is fantastically insightful, too.
weeksie 7y ago
Yeah, this reads very much as the same kind of moral panic we recently endured over plastic straws. Air travel does emit a ton of carbon per person, but on the whole we're better off putting effort into making renewables cheaper and greening up the agriculture industry. Not that we shouldn't put pressure on the airlines to put R&D into lowering emissions but pretending this is something people can fix by "flying a little less" is silly at best, and smacks more of religion than of reasoned responses to climate change.
- rubinelli 7y ago
  There's nothing wrong in picking the low-hanging fruit. Pick enough of these, and you start seeing a difference with minimal cost.
  - weeksie 7y ago
    Precisely why you go for the largest polluters, like agriculture and ground transport. Air travel is the opposite of low hanging fruit because it's difficult to make jets more fuel efficient—the air travel industry is already incentivized to do this to cut costs, so most of the low hanging fruit has been picked. You end up striving for incremental improvement on 2.5% of the problem.
dehrmann 7y ago
At least it got the segment right; ~30% of CO2 emissions are from transportation. It cracks me up when people talk about plastic and throwaway clothing as ways to cut back on carbon emissions.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  People confuse two separate issues. Plastic straws and throwaway synthetic clothing are about microplastics. CO₂ emissions are about climate change. The former may or may not turn out to be a health hazard (I'm betting not that much), and may or may not affect the ecosystem negatively somehow. The latter is going to kill our civilization for sure. I think we should leave the former problem for another time, and focus on dealing with the latter.
  - kaybe 7y ago
    An argument I've heard for also dealing with the former is that for some people it might be easier to approach because it is more obvious and less scary (more actionable). Once you have them onboard, you can start with the harder things. I'm not sure whether I believe that, but it's not totally implausible.
usaar333 7y ago
It's the high growth rate that is the issue, not the existing amount.
- goldcd 7y ago
  And also the difficulty replacing the fuel in the increasing number of flights. On the ground, we're starting to have "entirely green days" for electricity - and say new cars that use it.
phkahler 7y ago
Air travel is more important because of the water vapor far more than the carbon. The week following 9/11 was dramatically different. NASA recorded the change in daily temperature range. Less significantly, we had crystal clear skys where I live - for a week! Water vapor can also seed cloud formation. Air travel causes a daily cycle in this, which might just keep more heat in at night. You can look at data and see the temperature rise along with energy use (CO2). But to compare it with the rise in air travel is also informative. IIRC there is even an uptick of both during WWII. But y'all can keep screaming 'bout CO2 till the cows come home. It may be that we really need coal fired airplanes that dont emit water vapor, just more CO2.
- Maximus9000 7y ago
  > "The week following 9/11 was dramatically different. NASA recorded the change in daily temperature range. Less significantly, we had crystal clear skys where I live - for a week!" Do you have links for this?
  - wmf 7y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20160411094048/http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~rennert/etc/courses/pcc587/ref/Travis-etal2002_Nature.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160411094048/http://www.atmos.... https://www.nature.com/news/2008/081231/full/news.2008.1335.html https://www.nature.com/news/2008/081231/full/news.2008.1335....
    - andreasley 7y ago
      The second link actually states the opposite: "A new analysis now claims that altered US temperature patterns during the three flight-free days can be explained by natural variations in cloud cover, rather than the absence of planes."
      - mehrdadn 7y ago
        Just imagine how this will get magnified and drive the world nuts when half the things we try to do to tackle climate change end up being plausibly explainable by natural variation. It's already a hard enough problem to solve without natural variance being thrown into the mix.
pera 7y ago
If you think 2.5% is too small to care, consider what would your company do for an extra +2.5% of annual net profit.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
I wonder where that 2.5% figure came from, I was always under the impression it was quite a bit higher than that.
- bennofs 7y ago
  You need to consider that flying is still somewhat uncommon, if you consider the whole population on earth. From a quick search on google, less than 20 percent of the world's population took a plane in their entire lifetime.
sp332 7y ago
On the other hand, air travel is relatively difficult to de-carbonize due to fuel density requirements. So it's going to need lots of R&D investment now so we have something ready to go once we've addressed the cheaper stuff.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
Near term, we should be slamming money into batteries and energy density of said batteries, if we want to decarbonize air-travel. Electric planes have numerous advantages, but jet fuel is just so much more energy dense than a battery at the current juncture. Hopefully by 2050, we will be able to scale up from smaller electric airplanes in the 2020-2030 timeframe, such that jet liners will be decarbonized too.
- elihu 7y ago
  It seems to me that synthetic or plant-based carbon-neutral fuels are more feasible in the near-term, though I don't know what the current state of the art is. In the long term, electric planes would be ideal if we can figure out energy storage (or perhaps wireless energy transmission).
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    This is ideal - if you use a C02 neutral power source & use atmospheric CO2 (either directly or via plants) you are effectively making planes flow battery powered. With the flow battery using synthetic fuel you produce & atmospheric oxygen to produce energy & CO2. Which will then get captured again by your synthetic fuel factory. Win win. :)
- bluGill 7y ago
  My understanding of the laws of physics that govern batteries is we are already close to the limits. There might be a doubling or two of capacity left, but that doesn't get us anywhere near the weight/energy ratio of jet fuel. There are options to make fuels from other sources - but every time someone brings this up we get the oil shrills screaming about why use food for fuel, or their tired old energy neutral studies that haven't changed their numbers in 20 years.
eisa01 7y ago
The thing is, very few things is a large share of global carbon dioxide emissions. "It doesn't matter what Norway does because we're less than 1% of global emission" "It doesn't matter with air travel because it's only 2.5% of emissions" "It doesn't matter with coal power in Germany, because overall it's not that much" If the rest of the world has that attitude, it won't matter if China and the US (often cited as the ones that matter) get to zero, as that's still not enough. CO2 emissions is death by a 1000 papercuts, we need to tackle them all So yes, let's bring aviation under carbon tax and/or cap and trade schemes, then people can decide how much they're willing to pay for these emissions compared to other sector emissions. I would guess travel is something people value and would be willing to pay for, until there are better solutions available Note: I say this as someone that travel quite a bit for work and leisure - I would definitely be penalized if I have to pay for my emissions
yongjik 7y ago
I don't think so - 2.5% is pretty significant. We only have to divide the total global emission into 40 pieces before each piece fall below 2.5%. Or, considering that total US emission is 14% of the world (2017), you just have to divide the whole nation into six sectors and claim each and every one is not significant enough, so that we have to focus on "something else". There's always some "something else". Of course we have to be smart about our efforts, but it's time we stopped passing the buck around.
opportune 7y ago
However, if you are a wealthy firstworlder businessman, air travel is likely your single biggest source of carbon emissions, aside from your car. If you are a management consultant you probably produce more CO2 from air travel in a year than from all other CO2 sources in 5 years
jellicle 7y ago
The idea of "focus" is only meaningful if you are resource-constrained - my 3-person team can only do 3 things at once, so they must focus. However, when talking about world climate actions, we have 7 billion people acting. There's no need to focus. We can cut air travel AND ALSO do everything else. And in fact we need to.
asdfadsfgfdda 7y ago
And imagine all of the benefits we get from only 2.5%. More migration - the smartest researchers in photovoltaics can move to a city where they can make a bigger impact, and still visit their families. Even without migrating, researchers can collaborate across continents. Increases economic productivity - when production stops at a nuclear plant, you can fly in parts/personnel quickly. Economic development - if you couldn't fly in technical experts to China, how could you source components from there? Imagine how expensive lithium batteries would be if all components were made in western (expensive) countries. Teslas are fairly expensive, and they already source many parts from China. The solutions for climate change requires technology and money. Why kill the economy with draconian measures? We need this economy to produce the solutions.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  Not to mention people learning more about other countries, people and cultures from personal experience. This can make them more rational and less prone to manipulation & hysteria than if they never left the town or country they were born in.
munificent 7y ago
This depends entirely on the distribution of the other categories. Look at this like optimizing a program. If you do a profile and one function takes up 80% of the profile and everything else is a tiny fraction, sure, focus on that hot spot. But if you have many many slow functions and none is a clear hotspot, they all need attention, even the 2.5% one.

maxaf 7y ago

Stop fucking flying everywhere. If you think you have to travel far enough to justify a flight, think again. Do you really have to be there in person? Telecom technology has matured enough to make personal presence unnecessary. Your instagram vacation can wait until we have cleaner travel tech.

GhettoMaestro 7y ago
Lol no. Not gonna happen.
- baq 7y ago
  Oh yes it will as soon as carbon and stratospheric water vapor is priced in airfares.
  - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
    Yeah, okay ace.
DisruptiveDave 7y ago
> Telecom technology has matured enough to make personal presence unnecessary Holy moly that's sad if anyone actually believes this.
- munk-a 7y ago
  I actually believe this, could you maybe expand on for what interactions you think personal presence is still necessary and adds real value?
  - read_if_gay_ 7y ago
    Seeing family or friends and like, you know, maybe something like doing stuff together?
  - groby_b 7y ago

martamoreno2 7y ago

2.5% eh? We should all immediately stop flying... This is outrageous. Just imagine, 2.5%!! But on a more serious note, this article is again wrong, like so many others about climate change. Being a combination of clickbait and false assumptions, it fails to miss the point entirely that first, 2.5% are irrelevant, but also that it makes no sense whatsoever to tackle this now. The technology is just not there yet. What we urgently NEED to do is invest HUGE amounts of money into two key technologies. One is batteries. Make them as small, lightweight and efficient as possible. Pretty much everything depends on that and there has been no notable breakthrough in like forever... Without "super" batteries, we can kiss "preventing climate change" goodbye. Another one is sucking the carbon out of the atmosphere. And no, we DON'T need to reduce our carbon emission, one of the key mistakes people make when it comes to climate change. What we need to do is to suck out more than we put in. There is no way in hell that 200 countries in the world agree on being C02 neutral. The leading countries need to suck the shit back out, that is the only way forward. As for all the people who preach changing the entire world by reducing emissions... I mean, I get you are very naive, but seriously: It's not gonna happen. It is cute to have girl sail through the Atlantic to make so pep talk at congress. But it is also really meaningless. This is not the way the world will change. It never has. Politicians can't agree on the color of shit within their own country, not to mention between them. The only way to avoid catastrophe is to outpace climate change with innovation. The world is not going to sacrifice living standards until they all drown in their own filth.

mveety 7y ago
Also if we suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere we could turn it into petrochemicals and fuel which would help with making existing things carbon neutral.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  That's the most viable path to sustainable aviation (rather than electrifying the fleet).
funklute 7y ago
Any time someone actually does the math on sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, it seemingly becomes clear that it is simply not scalable to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere. Have you done the math, and if so, why is everyone who comes to the aforementioned conclusion wrong?

rolltiide 7y ago

This is sad to read as the budget airlines are really just taking off. So many people are just getting to obtain some of their travel dreams and now they have to stop :(

quotemstr 7y ago
No, nobody has to stop. Nobody has to listen to people who continually promote a variety of ad-hoc, ineffective, and annoying emissions mitigation measures.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

bmmayer1 7y ago

What's the tradeoff? How many people aren't driving because flying is cheaper? What is the economic efficiency gained by air travel and how does that translate into emissions? A cost number without a benefit number is completely useless for real analysis.

ahelwer 7y ago

It is an interesting exercise to ask people to imagine a world without air travel. Where you can't just appear halfway around the world at the drop of a hat. Travel again becomes the domain of boats & trains. To almost anyone you talk to, banning air travel sounds completely ridiculous. In reality it wouldn't be enough by itself. It's on the lower end of action that is required.

creaghpatr 7y ago
Or we invent solar-powered planes. Not feasible yet, but who knows.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  there's one but it's a single passenger unit
- russdill 7y ago
  Solar powered planes are a feasible engineering challenge. The engineering challenge is making synthetic aviation fuels from electricity. Once that is solved, it's just a matter of installing production plants in areas were solar is most productive.
- tomschlick 7y ago
  The planes don't have to be solar powered, just electric. Leave the energy generation to the ground. The next problem would definitely be the weight of batteries though.
  - glogla 7y ago
    This might be where the hydrogen could be useful (unlike for cars where it costs too much).
habnds 7y ago
if prices accurately reflected costs not flying would start to seem a lot more practical
7y ago

graeme 7y ago

Can't read due to paywall, but does the 2.5% figure include the worse effect high altitude emissions have? I believe the best estimate is a doubling.

jonsen 7y ago

It’s a rich world which can afford constantly having several million of its people sitting in a chair elevated six miles.

dehrmann 7y ago
No, it's a world with cheap energy.
gcheong 7y ago
Deregulation of the airlines put air travel within reach of regular people to the point where it is now a commodity and nobody cares about anything but getting the cheapest flight. Growing up it was unusual for my parents to take a flight anywhere for vacation. Even by themselves. Nowadays it seems unusual for people not to take the entire family even overseas for a jaunt. Which certainly makes our lives richer. Time will tell if we can find a balance to the costs incurred.

yread 7y ago

Grounding of MAX could have an effect as lots of airlines kept old gas guzzlers flying longer than they planned - or they contracted some shady companies with 30 year old 733s and 734s

quotemstr 7y ago

There's a cavernous gap between the apocalyptic rhetoric from climate activists and the brittle, ineffective policy they actually promote. If climate activists really believed that climate change were a near-term catastrophic threat, they'd jump on the change to reduce emissions using whatever techniques and technology worked. "Geoengineering? Great! Nuclear power? Great!" --- that's what someone genuinely concerned about the climate would say. Instead, climate activists promote a very narrow Utopian vision and work against everything that falls outside this vision. These activists don't really care about the environment: they're using climate activism as a pretext for advancing some Utopian project and putting themselves in charge of how we all live. These people are discrediting all climate science in the eyes of regular people.

asokoloski 7y ago
I'm a climate activist, and I can't control how others act, but I'm in favor of, like you say, anything that works. The Citizens' Climate Lobby is focusing on a carbon fee and dividend. I'm new to the movement (so take what I say with a grain of salt) but I like what I see so far. We're very focused on one particular legislative approach, not because other things won't help, but because it's hard enough getting legislation like H.R. 763 through congress already, and distractions dilute our precious time and energy. So the CCL is pushing on just this one bill, which we think is the most effective approach for us. But I'd love to see people work on everything and everything. I just think it's probably most effective for most organizations to focus on a relatively narrow area.
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  The environmental movement has a lot to answer for, for setting back progress of nuclear power by decades.
russdill 7y ago
"them"

algaeontoast 7y ago

Why would people stop flying...? What, the "solution" is going to be blimp travel, boat travel, undersea super train travel... Maybe we should make air travel so expensive that only the rich can use it!

williesleg 7y ago

Just stay home and let the elites fly around and scam your money. All part of the climate conspiracy.

tombert 7y ago

I fly fairly frequently to California from NY for work, lately after reading a few articles like this, I wonder if I should put my foot down to my manager and tell them that I'm not going to anymore until flying is less terrible for the atmosphere. I don't think I'll be fired for that, and even if I were I'd probably be able to find another job without too much trouble at this point, but I feel a bit bad for people don't have this option. NOTE: I realize I'm hardly a beacon of "how to save the world from climate change", but I do try and do a bit where I can; I take public transit almost exclusively and do not own a car, and I have stopped eating beef and pork. I still order a lot of stuff from China online, which is probably the next habit I should break.

bjelkeman-again 7y ago
I did change. I dropped from 35-40 flights in 12 months (really not good, in more ways than one) to 3-4. Still too many. But getting there.
- tombert 7y ago
  I think people are too quick to dismiss incremental progress; you dropped by 90%, that sounds pretty excellent to me!
  - howinator 7y ago
    "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" is something that needs to be included in climate conversations a lot more. You don't have to be a vegan hermit to have an impact. Eating a little less meat, foregoing one flight, and biking to work once a week is better than not doing anything and that's great.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Agree. I am vegan. Probably 10-20% of my meals end up being vegetarian (usually with a minor ingredient like trace milk in a sauce). This is simply out of practicality - we're talking stuff like, going to a restaurant with friends and there are no vegan options. If everyone did that 80%, the ecosystem would (as it _already has!_) change so much that 100% would be trivial. I used to think that it's pointless to do anything because no-one will follow you. That has been empirically proven to be complete bollocks over the past few years. Go all in. I will follow, they will follow. It's time.

tempsy 7y ago

Can we start by banning the cruise ship industry first? I cannot think of a mode of transportation and form of leisure that is as useless and ecologically damaging.

sp332 7y ago
Well there's a new low-sulphur fuel regulation coming into effect in a few months. http://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/Pages/MEPC-70-2020sulphur.aspx http://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/Pages/MEPC-... That will help with some of the pollution anyway.
- tempsy 7y ago
  That doesn't exactly solve the problem of cruise ships dumping raw waste into the ocean.
  - sp332 7y ago
    Of all the kinds of pollution, why worry about that? There's way more poop in the ocean already.

blondie9x 7y ago

I work remote and can pretty much be anywhere anytime working. But I try to be content and focus on where I chose to live. To build relationships and deeper connections to the local community. I try to do one trip a year max by plane and when I go its usually for longer periods of time. We should travel less and focus more on the place we call home. When people tell me they love to travel. I reply why? It's usually I want to get away or I'm sick of where I am now in my life. Try to understand this feeling deeper and think about how you can better structure your life to appreciate the moment and where you choose to build yourself and your community. People also sometimes describe travel as a sort of escape. It's important to try and understand that feeling deeper. Why do you need to escape from your life as it is now?

j-pb 7y ago

If I take the train, which is the most green transport (CO2 neutral) from one edge of europe to the other (e.g. Berlin to Sicily), the amount I pay is 500 euros and it takes me 35 hours. If I fly the same distance it takes me 3 hours, and I pay 100 euros. Heres the kicker, it costs me 100 euro to buy CO2 compensation and make the flight CO2 neutral, and whenever me and my spouse fly we always pay twice that so that we are actually carbon negative. So everytime we fly we reduce the earths CO2 by one flight and still have 200 euros more in our bank account.

egdod 7y ago
Where do you buy your carbon offsets? What actually happens to the money that you spend on them?
- gjasny 7y ago
  For example at atmosfair: https://www.atmosfair.de/en/ https://www.atmosfair.de/en/ Their website lists some CO2 compensation projects.
- frakkingcylons 7y ago
  I've used COTAP in the past: https://cotap.org/ https://cotap.org/
alex_young 7y ago
That sounds great, but how do you manage to offset 2 flights? I don't really understand how money can undo putting a bunch of carbon in the atmosphere.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  You're paying for pulling the carbon back out. The cheapest way to do this is to pay someone to plant trees for you.
  - henryfjordan 7y ago

dr_dshiv 7y ago

Can't we put some chemicals in the fuel to mitigate the warming effects? Just do it secretly, so the chemtrails people don't freak. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_inject...

tobib 7y ago
Have you learned nothing from the movie "Snowpiercer"?
- jnwatson 7y ago
  The silly dystopian arguments against climate engineering are facile. Do you think the first attempt will be done at global scale? No, it will be done first at small scale, and then larger and larger. There is no reasonable scenario in which we would be surprised by the impact of climate engineering.
  - dr_dshiv 7y ago
    Especially when using techniques like marine cloud brightening. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening Imagine if cruise ships and cargo ships had snow machine jets on the back, lofting prepped salt water into the air, to seed clouds. The problem is that this is geoengineering which means career suicide for interested scientists. At the moment.
  - tobib 7y ago
    Not that I was serious in any way. But since we're talking about it, I am not convinced that our societies are able to coordinate an effort like that on a scale that would make a difference to the global climate. Maybe I'm unaware of relevant history, maybe I'm being too cynical.

blondie9x 7y ago

Carbon offsets are completely useless. https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-offsets/inconvenient-truth-carbon-credits-dont-work-deforestation-redd-acre-cambodia/ https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-offsets/inconv... there are better ways to protect the environment.

dr_dshiv 7y ago

Just carbon tax it as an externality, so we can get on with life.

kylek 7y ago

Any ideas how much of a contributor (domestic) air freight is compared to shipping via train/truck? (Is the volume of goods currently shipped through either method even comparable? This is way out of my realm!)

blunte 7y ago

If you need to travel long distances, there's little substitute for an airplane. If air travel accounts for less emissions than passenger cars, and if the top 15 polluting large container ships produce as much (noxious oxides of nitrogen and sulphur) pollution as all cars, then we need to fix shipping first. And if you look at a lot of the crap that is being shipped, it's stuff we just don't need. A lot of things are replaced frequently with cheap and short-lived new things, so there's plenty of room to reduce the amount of shipping. We should also focus on trains and electric buses to reduce the amount of car use. Some parts of the world already do. And after spending many years commuting in heavy Texas road traffic, I much prefer European train/metro/tram (and even bus) travel. Oh, and bikes and feet for the last 1-2km.

js8 7y ago
Actually, there are substitutes. People who need to travel (and most of them don't) can just use trains or ships, and make the overall stay longer (decreasing overall number of trips). It was already possible more than 100 years ago, and it would be much less of a problem in today's digital economy.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  Trains are an option, but ships seem equally bad or worse than planes for transporting people
- jalgos_eminator 7y ago
  There's only so much time each day, and a plane gets you to your destination so much faster. Trains? Maybe for shorter trips like NYC to Philadelphia or DC, but NYC to Seattle? A train going 150mph would take 19 hours for that trip not counting stops. It would probably be more than 30 hours with stops, and significantly longer if the train can't average 150 mph. The flight is 6 hours gate to gate. You can't beat the speed of modern air travel, its just so much better than any other alternative. And no, most people can't just work from literally anywhere on a ship or train. That probably isn't even workable for a remote programmer let alone a marketing manager, welder, electrician, office assistant, salesperson, etc.

c0nfused 7y ago

I haven't gotten around the paywall to read the article but the last stats from the US government I can find, 2017 show that aviation has reduced emissions 7.5 percent compared to 1990. Medium and heavy truck emissions are UP 89.5 percent in the same period but aviation is the crisis. Passenger cars up 20%. Let's look at Tg emissions in 2017 Aviation: 174.8 On road vehicles 1,558.6 Source: https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P100WUHR.pdf https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P100WUHR.pdf page 2

Lramseyer 7y ago

One thing that's very important to keep in mind when looking at air travel emissions is how fuel efficient planes actually are. The math works out to around 100 miles per gallon per passenger. And at an underwhelming 2.5% of global emissions, I can't really put it in the category of "low hanging fruit." That's not to say that we shouldn't invest in things like high speed rail, (because we absolutely will see quality of life improvements for North America) but I'm more excited about improvements in vehicle transportation and energy production.

reaperducer 7y ago
The math works out to around 100 miles per gallon per passenger. That assumes maximum passenger load, I assume. At maximum passenger load, my car gets 170 miles per gallon per passenger. A giant, gas-guzzling Chevy Suburban gets 198 miles per gallon per passenger. I don't think "per gallon per passenger" is a useful measure.
- ojagodzinski 7y ago
  your car is full probably 5% of a time, airlines have profits from full planes, you don't. "per gallon per passenger" is a useful measure for planes.
  - dhdicbxkcjc 7y ago
    If you’re running an airline, yes that’s the relevant metric. If you’re comparing an urban elite with a poor bloke with his truck, no. Mr. Loves-his-truck drives, at the insane most, 20 000 miles a year. That’s a round trip Thai vacation.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  I think it is. Freight is typically measured in cargo-ton-miles per gallon. I can't think of a reason to measure airline travel in other than passenger-miles per gallon. (You have to do it "as flown" and "as driven" for the comparison to be meaningful, but it's pretty rare for me to see anything under a 90% full flight lately with the economy booming.)

AcerbicZero 7y ago

I can no longer take any of these articles seriously. The hysteria around climate change precludes the possibility of reasoned rational discourse on the topic, and as such political solutions are all but impossible.

newnewpdro 7y ago

When interpreting statements like "Over all, air travel accounts for about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions", keep in mind that air travel emissions are higher impact due to occurring in the upper atmosphere. The commonly established multiplier is 2.7X [0]. So while the claim is 2.5% of global co2 emissions, in terms of impact it's more like ~6.7%. And growing, largely just so people can take selfies in different places, which are then used to promote more travel via social media. We need to tax fuel used for international air travel. The Chicago Convention [1] may have made sense in establishing the industry but we're well past that point now. Make this high-speed, high-impact transportation method high-cost so it's used less frivolously. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_(travel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_(travel) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Convention_on_International_Civil_Aviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Convention_on_Internat...

Robotbeat 7y ago

I'm convinced we need zero emissions aircraft. Efficiency improvements alone are going to suffer from the Jevons Paradox. In fact, that "paradox" could help explain why air travel emissions have increased so much even as aircraft have gotten much more efficient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox So to avoid the Jevons Paradox, we need actually zero emissions aircraft. Battery-electric or possibly hydrogen are the main contenders, here. Battery-electric in the near term is limited to about 1000km, maybe 2000km range. That's technically enough to do transatlantic crossings if you stop by Greenland and Iceland or possibly the Azores. And you could do transpacific by following the Aleutians. Pretty much the hardest place to visit is actually Hawaii. But for domestic flights, battery-electric is actually a superior option to high speed rail in the US. Typical HSR routes in the US are only about 300 miles or so, well within range of existing electric battery tech that could be adapted to airplanes, and even a fully subsonic, Mach 0.5 propeller-drive electric airplane would be much faster than even the fastest practical HSR. And operating at high altitude (with far lower air density) would mean that the electric aircraft would be more efficient than a hypothetical Mach 0.5 high speed train. But all of this will require probably non-traditional aircraft makers. The duopoly is culturally unprepared for the kind of radical engineering necessary to make a 1000km battery electric aircraft feasible (almost sailplane-like efficiency, combined with very high battery mass fraction, combined with extremely efficient battery packaging, state of the art structural mass, and transition to higher performance chemistry where possible). Liquid hydrogen is also a possibility for electric air travel. Compressed room temperature hydrogen is hardly more energy-dense than battery-electric, though, so you're going to have to go at least cryogenic, if not liquid, for hydrogen storage. Liquid hydrogen wouldn't be too bad in this application since the time of storage wouldn't be too long, and the scale would be large enough (if used in a widebody aircraft) that boil-off may not be too much of a problem (besides, you need a constant feed of hydrogen anyway). But a big problem is the fact that anthropogenic high altitude water vapor is maybe even worse (by a factor of 2) for climate change than CO2, so you'd probably want to condense the output. That means using fuel cells and then storing the condensed water on board and doing occasional low altitude dumps (it may even be feasible to store the water for the entire trip, dumping only right before you land) or perhaps freezing the condensate into pellets (small enough to not pose a lethal hazard but large enough to not evaporate on the way down) and then dropping them along the way. So long-haul air is a major challenge.

finchisko 7y ago

>If you need to travel long distances, there's little substitute for an airplane. the question if the distance you travel doesn't have substitute. like many business people travel just to meet, which has zero carbon alternative - video call.

nitwit005 7y ago

More efficient aircraft generally means cheaper flights, which unfortunately also means more flights. The efficiency may well make things worse. I'd actually prefer if air travel was more expensive. It's become expected that you fly groups of people across the continent to business meetings, and some people make regular flights.

cma 7y ago

Is it more from leisure (maybe due to Instagram vacation sharing, etc.), or business use?