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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

• 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.
    • js8 7y ago
      You can't beat the speed of the Concorde either, and it was too expensive commercially. Perhaps if we correctly externalize carbon fuels, people will en-masse choose trains rather than airplanes. I think the work argument gets pretty weak in modern society, where we have automation and most people could afford significant leisure. Sure, perhaps in capitalist reality it is different but it is still a social choice.
• mehrdadn 7y ago
  > If you need to travel long distances, there's little substitute for an airplane. The emphasis here isn't on substitute, it's on "need". Not many people need to travel long distances on a regular basis; they're just made to believe they need do.
  • loeg 7y ago
    Price in the carbon and let consumers decide if they still need the travel. I expect a carbon offset tax wouldn't actually decrease air travel that much -- there's so much business travel that needs doing -- but it probably would slow down growth.
    • mehrdadn 7y ago
      Definitely tax it, but I actually view a lot of the business travel as unnecessary compared to consumer travel, and that's what I'd want to get rid of first with a tax. I'm far more sympathetic to people trying to see their dying uncles or attend their sister's wedding or visiting their parents once a year than, say, professionals "needing" to attend conferences or whatever. Heck, come to think of it, if I ever saw a legit use for VR, it might well be substituting for business travel? Edit: And somewhat relevantly: business class is far less fuel-efficient too, which would suggest maybe we should get rid of first and business class altogether. Heck, forcing businesses to use economy minus for travel might itself be an easy way to get rid of some unnecessary business trips!
      • loeg 7y ago
        I don't really support arbitrary penalties on certain classes of travelers or banning, e.g., business class. Note that the corresponding inefficiency would be priced in to the carbon offset tax and business and first class travelers would still be paying their larger portion of the carbon externality.
      • chadlavi 7y ago
        I agree with you there big time. You can virtually attend a conference. FaceTime with grandma from her deathbed is not an acceptable alternative. Kicking the price of this kind of policy down to individual consumers is a great way to just make everyone really mad and get more money from business customers who will still go on not-strictly-necessary trips.
• loeg 7y ago
  (And little substitute for burning hydrocarbons as airplane propellant. Energy density and stuff like fire safety really really matters in aviation.) Totally agree that air travel is one of the last places to look for carbon savings. That said, carbon offset taxes should be applied where they are not already. The market can price this cost in and judge whether the value is there, if the incentives are structured correctly.
  • snowwrestler 7y ago
    An area of research that I don't hear much about is creating hydrocarbon fuels for applications that really need them, like airplanes. Essentially, using hydrocarbons as a chemical battery instead of an out-of-the-ground energy source. As with any contributor to climate change, the issue is not burning the fuel, the issue is that the fuel is bringing new carbon out of the ground into today's carbon cycle. Hydrocarbons generated in real time from carbon currently in the environment, using carbon-free energy[1], would not contribute to global warming. The chemistry is complicated and presumably it would take a tremendous amount of energy to do so. I think I read that the Navy was exploring it for aircraft carriers--which have plenty of energy thanks to redundant nuclear power plants onboard, and obviously would benefit from being able to generate more jet fuel whenever they need it. [1] I know there is not really such a thing yet; nuclear, wind, even solar panels take fossil fuel to make today. But in theory man-made jet fuel would decouple the end use from the generation, allowing planes to keep flying the same way they always have, while cleaner fuel generation could incrementally supplant new oil in the supply chain.
    • outworlder 7y ago
      > An area of research that I don't hear much about is creating hydrocarbon fuels for applications that really need them, like airplanes. Essentially, using hydrocarbons as a chemical battery instead of an out-of-the-ground energy source. Oh yes, I was going to comment on exactly that point. > The chemistry is complicated That depends on which type of fuel you are talking about. If you can use Methane (AKA Natural Gas), then you could use the Sabatier reaction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction). You need CO2 (which is what we want to remove) and Hydrogen (which is the energy consuming part). Then you have to compress it (more energy). The advantage of adding CO2 to the mix(instead of just burning hydrogen) is that it becomes much easier to store and you have decent energy density. Of course, that's not Jet-A. If you really need that (turbines don't care too much, but logistics and storage will care), then you need to use something else. Eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces... As I understand it, that's what the Navy was struggling against. But forget about the energy costs, think about human labor costs. Because if you can reduce labor to zero and have these things be self-sufficient, then we really don't care about energy costs. Stick a bunch of these fuel facilities wherever they will fit, power them with whatever renewables are available, wait a bit, then come back to collect. I think the first large scale application will actually come from SpaceX. They need to figure out fuel manufacturing for a Mars return trip.
• opportune 7y ago
  All of these can be fixed with carbon taxes going towards a carbon offset program. At the end of the day we still need cheap plastic shit so just fully price in the externalities
  • triceratops 7y ago
    > At the end of the day we still need cheap plastic shit Do we though? Especially in the quantities that we currently consume?
    • henryfjordan 7y ago
      we'll find that out once it is correctly priced with a carbon tax
• tempsy 7y ago
  Surprised I haven't seen anyone mention Hyperloop yet. I think if any of the major Hyperloop companies are able to realize their vision then traveling city center to city center by Hyperloop would be a much preferable substitute to air travel for most intercontinental travel.
  • bt848 7y ago
    Even if Hypeloop worked, which hasn't been demonstrated, its nameplate capacity is close to zero. It can optimistically replace one highway lane. It cannot possibly displace air travel unless you have dozens of tubes. Each of the Bay Area's three airports averages about 3-4x the passengers that a hypeloop might be capable of moving, and that's averaged over the whole year. Peak day/hour air travel can never be replaced with hypeloop. Ordinary steel-wheel high-speed rail can do it, though. There are many stations in the world that can move 100k pax/hour.
• bt848 7y ago
  You seem to have conflated CO2 with other pollutants. All the world's shipping taken together amounts to only 3% of the carbon emission inventory. It certainly is not the case that 15 ships emit more carbon than all cars.
  • jdc 7y ago
    Where does the 3% figure come from? It's not clear to me that we have or are even trying to get accurate sea-based emissions inventory.
    • semi-extrinsic 7y ago
      You can get a very good inventory just from sales of petroleum-based fuel to the shipping industry. Nobody buys diesel or LNG except to burn it.
    • blunte 7y ago
      This article: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2017/03/11/green-finance-for-dirty-ships https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2017/03/11/g...
  • Supermancho 7y ago
    > It certainly is not the case that 15 ships emit more carbon than all cars. That is correct. However, the pollutants that the referenced ships produce are far more hazardous (immediately) and in greater volumes than many countries produce (in aggregate) per year. To put it in perspective...warning: this is an analogy that mixes metaphors: Talking about CO2 emissions while Nuclear Waste is constantly being pumped into the ocean is shuffling the deck chairs.
    • semi-extrinsic 7y ago
      I don't follow what you're saying. Is it that other emissions than CO2 are more important to fight? Well, that change is already happening with the ongoing big change towards LNG as the preferred fuel for shipping. But when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions, outside of improving energy efficiency, it seems nobody has anything even remotely viable today. That goes both for deep sea shipping and for most air travel.
• saalweachter 7y ago
  > ... then we need to fix shipping first. The problem with this logic is that we aren't one person looking at a bug tracker queue deciding one to tackle next. We are a civilization. We need to fix everything all at once, as quickly as possible. If shipping is a problem, fix it now. If air travel is a problem, fix it now. If grid electric is a problem, fix it now. If automotive emissions are a problem, fix it now. We are many; we can do much.
  • blunte 7y ago
    Fair enough, but unless are organized, we often feel like individuals with little power.
  • esotericn 7y ago
    Right. 7 billion people is an unfathomable amount. You don't understand what it means. I don't understand what it means. A person can tackle a bug in a tracker. A company can tackle a bug tracker. A few cities' worth can tackle manufacturing the computer. The world? We got this. All in. If we're enough to fuck it up, we're enough to sort it out.
    • henrikschroder 7y ago
      > If we're enough to fuck it up, we're enough to sort it out. That's the one thought that gives me comfort around the whole climate crisis problem. We humans have screwed up the climate through absolute mountains of labour. It didn't just happen, it happened as an emergent property of all the various economic activities that humans have been doing for hundreds of years. We don't lack labour to tackle the problem, we lack direction for the labour, incentives that makes civilization as a whole change course and move in the right direction.
      • abathur 7y ago
        To be fair, we didn't have to understand the climate to break it.
• einpoklum 7y ago
  > Oh, and bikes and feet for the last 1-2km. 1. Bikes work for the last 0-5km easily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands 2. Don't forget lightweight electric micro-cars for the disabled. i.e. like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canta_(vehicle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canta_(vehicle) but electric.
• marcosdumay 7y ago
  > noxious oxides of nitrogen and sulphur People keep repeating that. Nobody cares about nitrogen and sulfur oxides on deep sea. Good luck trying to even find evidence it's locally harmful to organisms (most likely, it isn't). At the extent that people are against ship emissions, it's about what they emit at the coast, and that is a very small share of that total you cite. Ships are quite clean of the pollutants that matter. They beat planes on CO2 emission by a huge margin.
  • blunte 7y ago
    There's a great number of humans that live in coastal areas affected by shipping pollution. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1440801/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1440801/ From that publication, "About 98% of the particles emitted from diesel engines are less than 10 microns in diameter (PM10)" -> that gets into your lungs and potentially into your bloodstream.
    • TheCoelacanth 7y ago
      Shipping pollution is not completely unconcerning, but suggesting that it is a bigger concern than cars is just staggeringly wrong.
• arcticbull 7y ago
  Shipping is the single most efficient way to move anything, followed by trains.
  • blunte 7y ago
    That entirely depends on how you define efficient. In pure immediate financial cost, yes - because the negative consequences of shipping are not borne by the shipping companies or their immediate customers. And of course, there is also the question of whether it is necessary to ship all the goods that we ship. For example, the Netherlands is the second largest agricultural exporter in the world. Beyond the standard farming fields, there are immense plots of greenhouses - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-... Yet, if you go to the grocery stores here, you'll find a lot of produce from Brazil and other overseas sources. That's because it's more cost effective, when total costs are not considered, to grow high quality produce here and export it, then import cheaper produce (not necessarily low quality, but just lower cost) from overseas.
    • arcticbull 7y ago
      No, it’s the most efficient in liters of fuel per hundred kilometers of distance traveled.
• m463 7y ago
  I remember reading years and years ago that teleconferencing would really change once we put a panel at the end of a conference table with life size images of the participants. Teleconferencing now isn't what it could be. I think if it were a little bit higher-end it might eliminate a number of physical trips. I mean, it IS doing that now on laptops all over the world, but I mean make it Telepresence instead of Teleconferencing.
  • martyvis 7y ago
    We actually had these in our office at HP. https://youtu.be/TC4sNztp8dk https://youtu.be/TC4sNztp8dk They were quite well used by execs, but those of us at the bottom end probably only a couple of times for virtual team meetings. They were very expensive, to get the high end video (think 2008). As soon as you have one or two remote attendees though the point of it goes away. After the demerger, building shuffles, they were decommissioned
    • m463 7y ago
      This is an interesting layout. Mostly the way I've seen conference rooms set up is a large flat panel (or two) high up on the wall showing a remote converence table. Sometimes there's a system for popping up individuals on their laptop usinge side-by-side images, but they are still high up on the wall. Your video shows people "down with the rest of us", and on the smaller side of things (instead of a 3 foot wide head on the screen). It definitely has a different feel than what is common. It seems more inclusive.
• frereubu 7y ago
  "If air travel accounts for less emissions than passenger cars..." I presume you're talking absolutes, but ICE cars (particularly the more fuel efficient ones in Europe) produce less CO2 emissions per passenger mile that planes as far as I understand it, particularly cars with multiple occupancy. I live with my Spanish wife in the UK, and our family goes to see her parents in northern Spain once a year. Having done the calculations it's way better for the three of us to drive than fly. I also don't agree with the idea that you need to fix one thing before the others - why not try to fix all of them? I don't think it's beyond our ability to tackle more than one thing at a time. The issue here is that emissions from air travel are accelerating - if we do nothing now that will just get worse.
• megaremote 7y ago
  > when we need to fix shipping first. Yes, lets only focus on one problem at a time, right? We are only one person after all.