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"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

"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.

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.