8 ms·

This will not slash carbon emissions by 20%. Blended wing body will make flying cheaper, and increase the number of flyers.

lorenzhs 7y ago
It's pretty obvious that the measure used is carbon emissions per passenger mile, not worldwide carbon emissions of aviation.
- abyssin 7y ago
  You're right, but talking about individual passenger emissions doesn't make much sense since the issue of carbon emissions is a global one.
- lxpz 7y ago
  Then the measure is wrong.
azepoi 7y ago
Exactly, this is called the Jevons paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Gravityloss 7y ago
It depends on legislation. AFAIU currently kerosene is very lightly taxed, if at all. If there is taxation of fuel or fuel-based payments for airlines, it will be reflected on ticket prices more than currently. So the airlines can claw some of that back by introducing more efficient planes. But they will be expensive to develop and build, which is again reflected in ticket prices.
Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
* emissions per person-kilometer of flying, of course. I thought this was implied. It works this way with any optimization of any transport method.
acchow 7y ago
How much of a plane ticket is the fuel cost? For example, New York to Paris.
- chvid 7y ago
  Last time I bought a Ryanair ticket I was offered to purchase a co2 emission offset. The price was less than 1 euro. Telling me that there better ways to lower co2 emissions than not flying. (Or creating new airplanes.)
  - chimprich 7y ago
    I'm not sure what your point is, but I wouldn't trust Ryanair's suggestion of how much to pay to offset their CO2 emissions, or that they'd use that fee effectively.
    - chvid 7y ago
      It tells you something about how expensive it would be to have someone else save the CO2 you have emitted by flying a plane. But you are right. The price going to purchase the CO2 offset is probably less than what I would be paying.
      - throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
        I don’t think that was his point. He is saying you can neither assume that this fee is enough to offset the carbon, nor that Ryanair will spend it appropriately. Just because it says carbon offset doesn’t mean all of the carbon is offset. If the true price were actually that low, it would be easy to solve.
- sbradford26 7y ago
  So here are the numbers for New York to Paris. I used a 737 Max 7 for this since the max range is right about the same distance so the math is easy and the 737 Max is a fairly efficient plane but an A321 neo would be similar. Albeit a 737 or A321 neo are not planes that you would fly New York to Paris in. So it is looking like jet fuel is around $2 a gallon for airlines right now.[1] A 737 Max takes a total of 6,820 gallons.[2] Since the flight from New York to Paris would be almost the max range we can assume all of it would be burned to transport the 172 passengers. So ($2 * 6820 Gallons) / 172 People = $79 per person in fuel. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/197689/us-airline-fuel-cost-since-2004/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/197689/us-airline-fuel-c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX
kohtatsu 7y ago
Great, you're right; screw this design, and maybe let's even regulate flying to be more inefficient per mile so as to reduce total flying. More subtly though, yes you are right; we need to dedicate some money to carbon offsets and not pass all of the savings to passengers.
aaron695 7y ago
So Jevons paradox is garbage, it's neither true nor is there evidence it would be applicable here even if it was true. Moving on.... you're playing with words, they are talking about specific flights. At to a global level it might be a 15% reduction or maybe 18% for these specific flight routes. But they make no claim to know that figure. It's hard to know. They just are presenting facts. And for the 2% or 5% or whatever difference to the 20%, that's people making flights that couldn't before. That's people exploring the world. That has amazing value as well. It's not just 'less than 20%'
- hackeraccount 7y ago
  So my understanding of Jevon's Paradox is that when efficiency increases so price decreases. When price goes down then usage goes up. What's the argument that that's garbage - or is my description not a good one?
  - aesthesia 7y ago
    It's impossible to tell from that argument whether total usage of the resource will be higher or lower than in the alternative universe where efficiency never increased. Usage will go up, but it might not go up enough to completely offset the efficiency gains.
  - aaron695 7y ago
    > So my understanding of Jevon's Paradox is that when efficiency increases so price decreases. When price goes down then usage goes up. No, it's the usage of the resource made efficient will be more than before, not the product. The reason people believe it, other than annoying blogs saying it's true, is we can see as efficiencies increase price goes down and we will use the product more, so it mind hacks people about the resource But it's really hard to ever intuitively see if the resource gets used more. I think the original idea seems legit, it's just never been reproduced that I've ever seen. I've never seen a legit example of Jevon's Paradox outside of the original idea.
glenneroo 7y ago
Global flying demand has been increasing[0] year-on-year and is estimated to continue increasing[1] into the foreseeable future, partly due to flying subsidies provided by many countries[2] to encourage tourism, etc. If you are alluding to a problem of people flying too often, I would work towards eliminating these subsidies first. [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/193533/growth-of-global-air-traffic-passenger-demand/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/193533/growth-of-global-... [1]: https://www.iata.org/contentassets/d4b60cffceeb4213bb5993d5fa2f358f/toptenpaxmarkets_graph.pdf https://www.iata.org/contentassets/d4b60cffceeb4213bb5993d5f... [2]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318691221_Subsidies_in_Aviation https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318691221_Subsidies...
- jorvi 7y ago
  .... which inevitably turns flying / vacationing far abroad back into something exclusively for upper class people, which is easy to advocate for when you work in the tech salary bubble. If we're gonna slash subsidies and introduce carbon tax on flights, it needs to hit corporate and expensive tickets as hard as possible whilst sheltering cheaper tickets as much as possible. There's so many things HN proposes should be taxed / excised extra: cars, flights, gas, soda, alcohol, meat, rare metals in devices, batteries, electricity consumption etc etc. They aren't bad ideas (hell, I agree fully with the sentiment of most of said ideas) but it's so easy to be blind to the fact that you'd basically be turning daily life into a two caste system where only the rich are allowed vices.
  - Brave-Steak 7y ago
    > whilst sheltering cheaper tickets as much as possible. I'm sorry, why? I don't see being able to travel across the world at high environmental cost to be some god given right. It's not sustainable, especially as use of long-distance travel continues to grow with no end in sight. Make it expensive for everybody, instead of subsidizing it for whatever group you have a bias for.
    - nitrogen 7y ago
      I still can't wrap my head around the prominence of this idea that the only way to solve our problems as a species is to live worse lives and to be more disconnected from others. Whether "it" is international travel, point-to-point personal transportation, or whatever, make it sustainable for everybody, instead of criticizing it for whatever group you have a bias against.
PunchTornado 7y ago
fuel is a very small percentage of a ticket price. Depending on route, more than half goes to airport taxes and then crew services etc.
diffeomorphism 7y ago
Even if we go by your choice of total emission instead of a normalized one, it will then slash emissions by what, 15%?
mrfusion 7y ago
That’s ok too.
MarkMc 7y ago
Good example of second order thinking
mattlondon 7y ago
There is talk of a "Frequent Flier" tax that could be used to address this. Currently 70% of the flights are made by 15% of the population (1). If you start adding increasing taxes on each additional flight you take, it would rapidly curtail a lot of the travel I'd expect. I am sure a lot of us in Europe (and perhaps USA? Not sure if it is as prevalent) in the past have been guilty of taking a "weekend break" somewhere that is a 1 or 2 hr flight away where the tickets usually cost something like £30-40 return on Easyjet or Ryanair (and often cheaper than a taxi to get to the airport!) E.g. after 2 flights a year, start adding £50 per flight (so 3rd is +£50, 4th +£100, 5th +£150 etc etc). Suddenly your £30 return flight from London to Lisbon/Rome/Dublin/Barcelona/Berlin etc is no longer so absurdly cheap. Put all the proceeds from the tax into decarbonisation and fast intercity rail. That would soon make people (myself included) think twice about taking "frivolous" city-breaks every month or so where you fly out after work on a Friday and come home again Sunday night ready to be back at your desk on Monday morning. 1 - https://fullfact.org/economy/do-15-people-take-70-flights/ https://fullfact.org/economy/do-15-people-take-70-flights/
- slazaro 7y ago
  The problem I always see with using taxation to solve problems (to prevent too many people from doing X), is that you're filtering by socioeconomic status. You're making it so that only the richer people can do it, and the poorer people are screwed once again. It's a simple fix from an institutional point of view, and it might "solve" the problem, but it just feels wrong to me. Not that I have a better solution though...
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
    Welcome to the real world. Besides, how many poor people are flying multiple times per year anyway? I don't have the numbers, but I would bet that this tax would be paid overwhelmingly by businesses on behalf of their employees who travel for work.
    - tomatotomato37 7y ago
      And that tax would be absorbed unnoticed in the businesses' expense again right next to the reciepts for over-priced steak dinners and strip clubs. The whole reason airlines can get away with charging so much for business class is because businesses don't generally give a shit if their sales personal are charging them for in-flight champagne when they go to close a billion dollar contract. The truth is that you'll have to be more strategic than randomly throwing a tax at the problem if you want to change the behavior of entities who already dump hundreds of thousands on maintaing a private jet fleet so that a C-level doesn't have to wait in line at security.
ekimekim 7y ago
Given that: a) Flying is basically the only practical option for long-distance travel (edit: by which I mean humans travelling to be at a destination, not cargo/goods). b) Travel is a hugely important good for society (debatable, but consider: experience of diverse cultures, being able to visit friends / have relationships, generation of economic value by skill sharing / conferences / etc). I would argue that anything that increases the amount people are flying / lowers barriers to travel is a good thing. Obviously if we can lower carbon emissions from airlines then we should, but I'd much rather curtail ANY other industry that produces huge amounts of emissions before trying to cut down on human travel.
- abyssin 7y ago
  It is the most practical long-distance option. But we should be able to give up things that are bad, even if they're practical (like asbestos – an amazing material, but it causes cancer to those who have to work with it). Traveling is nice. I'd argue that most flying done nowadays does not increase cultural understanding. Hitchhiking or slow and uncomfortable means of transportation do increase cultural understanding, because they force people to share something. Modern traveling technologies offer a chance to travel half the globe while staying in a safe bubble. By the way here's an interesting phenomenon that you can notice when people talk about their travels. Stories always revolve around technical issues. Flight was cancelled, they had to take a cramped bus through the mountain, something was broken in the hotel, they got delayed when crossing a border. Traveling is often a game of moving around in unusual and adverse circumstances, and somehow making it work in the end. Climate change is currently hurting economies, and the trend is worsening. Something that contributes to climate change is bad for the economy. Having friends far from home is a bad choice. I've done it myself and it does have something attractive. But it makes life more difficult and these friends won't be there when you need them, simply because it's not practical. Of course it might sound great to say that someone flew thousands of kilometers to visit you. It sounds great because it's a huge waste, like showering a loved one with flowers.

lorenzhs 7y ago

It's pretty obvious that the measure used is carbon emissions per passenger mile, not worldwide carbon emissions of aviation.

abyssin 7y ago
You're right, but talking about individual passenger emissions doesn't make much sense since the issue of carbon emissions is a global one.
lxpz 7y ago
Then the measure is wrong.

azepoi 7y ago

Exactly, this is called the Jevons paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Gravityloss 7y ago

It depends on legislation. AFAIU currently kerosene is very lightly taxed, if at all. If there is taxation of fuel or fuel-based payments for airlines, it will be reflected on ticket prices more than currently. So the airlines can claw some of that back by introducing more efficient planes. But they will be expensive to develop and build, which is again reflected in ticket prices.

Erlich_Bachman 7y ago

* emissions per person-kilometer of flying, of course. I thought this was implied. It works this way with any optimization of any transport method.

acchow 7y ago

How much of a plane ticket is the fuel cost? For example, New York to Paris.

chvid 7y ago
Last time I bought a Ryanair ticket I was offered to purchase a co2 emission offset. The price was less than 1 euro. Telling me that there better ways to lower co2 emissions than not flying. (Or creating new airplanes.)
- chimprich 7y ago
  I'm not sure what your point is, but I wouldn't trust Ryanair's suggestion of how much to pay to offset their CO2 emissions, or that they'd use that fee effectively.
  - chvid 7y ago
    It tells you something about how expensive it would be to have someone else save the CO2 you have emitted by flying a plane. But you are right. The price going to purchase the CO2 offset is probably less than what I would be paying.
    - throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
      I don’t think that was his point. He is saying you can neither assume that this fee is enough to offset the carbon, nor that Ryanair will spend it appropriately. Just because it says carbon offset doesn’t mean all of the carbon is offset. If the true price were actually that low, it would be easy to solve.
sbradford26 7y ago
So here are the numbers for New York to Paris. I used a 737 Max 7 for this since the max range is right about the same distance so the math is easy and the 737 Max is a fairly efficient plane but an A321 neo would be similar. Albeit a 737 or A321 neo are not planes that you would fly New York to Paris in. So it is looking like jet fuel is around $2 a gallon for airlines right now.[1] A 737 Max takes a total of 6,820 gallons.[2] Since the flight from New York to Paris would be almost the max range we can assume all of it would be burned to transport the 172 passengers. So ($2 * 6820 Gallons) / 172 People = $79 per person in fuel. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/197689/us-airline-fuel-cost-since-2004/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/197689/us-airline-fuel-c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX

kohtatsu 7y ago

Great, you're right; screw this design, and maybe let's even regulate flying to be more inefficient per mile so as to reduce total flying. More subtly though, yes you are right; we need to dedicate some money to carbon offsets and not pass all of the savings to passengers.

aaron695 7y ago

So Jevons paradox is garbage, it's neither true nor is there evidence it would be applicable here even if it was true. Moving on.... you're playing with words, they are talking about specific flights. At to a global level it might be a 15% reduction or maybe 18% for these specific flight routes. But they make no claim to know that figure. It's hard to know. They just are presenting facts. And for the 2% or 5% or whatever difference to the 20%, that's people making flights that couldn't before. That's people exploring the world. That has amazing value as well. It's not just 'less than 20%'

hackeraccount 7y ago
So my understanding of Jevon's Paradox is that when efficiency increases so price decreases. When price goes down then usage goes up. What's the argument that that's garbage - or is my description not a good one?
- aesthesia 7y ago
  It's impossible to tell from that argument whether total usage of the resource will be higher or lower than in the alternative universe where efficiency never increased. Usage will go up, but it might not go up enough to completely offset the efficiency gains.
- aaron695 7y ago
  > So my understanding of Jevon's Paradox is that when efficiency increases so price decreases. When price goes down then usage goes up. No, it's the usage of the resource made efficient will be more than before, not the product. The reason people believe it, other than annoying blogs saying it's true, is we can see as efficiencies increase price goes down and we will use the product more, so it mind hacks people about the resource But it's really hard to ever intuitively see if the resource gets used more. I think the original idea seems legit, it's just never been reproduced that I've ever seen. I've never seen a legit example of Jevon's Paradox outside of the original idea.

glenneroo 7y ago

Global flying demand has been increasing[0] year-on-year and is estimated to continue increasing[1] into the foreseeable future, partly due to flying subsidies provided by many countries[2] to encourage tourism, etc. If you are alluding to a problem of people flying too often, I would work towards eliminating these subsidies first. [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/193533/growth-of-global-air-traffic-passenger-demand/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/193533/growth-of-global-... [1]: https://www.iata.org/contentassets/d4b60cffceeb4213bb5993d5fa2f358f/toptenpaxmarkets_graph.pdf https://www.iata.org/contentassets/d4b60cffceeb4213bb5993d5f... [2]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318691221_Subsidies_in_Aviation https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318691221_Subsidies...

jorvi 7y ago
.... which inevitably turns flying / vacationing far abroad back into something exclusively for upper class people, which is easy to advocate for when you work in the tech salary bubble. If we're gonna slash subsidies and introduce carbon tax on flights, it needs to hit corporate and expensive tickets as hard as possible whilst sheltering cheaper tickets as much as possible. There's so many things HN proposes should be taxed / excised extra: cars, flights, gas, soda, alcohol, meat, rare metals in devices, batteries, electricity consumption etc etc. They aren't bad ideas (hell, I agree fully with the sentiment of most of said ideas) but it's so easy to be blind to the fact that you'd basically be turning daily life into a two caste system where only the rich are allowed vices.
- Brave-Steak 7y ago
  > whilst sheltering cheaper tickets as much as possible. I'm sorry, why? I don't see being able to travel across the world at high environmental cost to be some god given right. It's not sustainable, especially as use of long-distance travel continues to grow with no end in sight. Make it expensive for everybody, instead of subsidizing it for whatever group you have a bias for.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    I still can't wrap my head around the prominence of this idea that the only way to solve our problems as a species is to live worse lives and to be more disconnected from others. Whether "it" is international travel, point-to-point personal transportation, or whatever, make it sustainable for everybody, instead of criticizing it for whatever group you have a bias against.

PunchTornado 7y ago

fuel is a very small percentage of a ticket price. Depending on route, more than half goes to airport taxes and then crew services etc.

diffeomorphism 7y ago

Even if we go by your choice of total emission instead of a normalized one, it will then slash emissions by what, 15%?

mrfusion 7y ago

That’s ok too.

MarkMc 7y ago

Good example of second order thinking

mattlondon 7y ago

There is talk of a "Frequent Flier" tax that could be used to address this. Currently 70% of the flights are made by 15% of the population (1). If you start adding increasing taxes on each additional flight you take, it would rapidly curtail a lot of the travel I'd expect. I am sure a lot of us in Europe (and perhaps USA? Not sure if it is as prevalent) in the past have been guilty of taking a "weekend break" somewhere that is a 1 or 2 hr flight away where the tickets usually cost something like £30-40 return on Easyjet or Ryanair (and often cheaper than a taxi to get to the airport!) E.g. after 2 flights a year, start adding £50 per flight (so 3rd is +£50, 4th +£100, 5th +£150 etc etc). Suddenly your £30 return flight from London to Lisbon/Rome/Dublin/Barcelona/Berlin etc is no longer so absurdly cheap. Put all the proceeds from the tax into decarbonisation and fast intercity rail. That would soon make people (myself included) think twice about taking "frivolous" city-breaks every month or so where you fly out after work on a Friday and come home again Sunday night ready to be back at your desk on Monday morning. 1 - https://fullfact.org/economy/do-15-people-take-70-flights/ https://fullfact.org/economy/do-15-people-take-70-flights/

slazaro 7y ago
The problem I always see with using taxation to solve problems (to prevent too many people from doing X), is that you're filtering by socioeconomic status. You're making it so that only the richer people can do it, and the poorer people are screwed once again. It's a simple fix from an institutional point of view, and it might "solve" the problem, but it just feels wrong to me. Not that I have a better solution though...
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  Welcome to the real world. Besides, how many poor people are flying multiple times per year anyway? I don't have the numbers, but I would bet that this tax would be paid overwhelmingly by businesses on behalf of their employees who travel for work.
  - tomatotomato37 7y ago
    And that tax would be absorbed unnoticed in the businesses' expense again right next to the reciepts for over-priced steak dinners and strip clubs. The whole reason airlines can get away with charging so much for business class is because businesses don't generally give a shit if their sales personal are charging them for in-flight champagne when they go to close a billion dollar contract. The truth is that you'll have to be more strategic than randomly throwing a tax at the problem if you want to change the behavior of entities who already dump hundreds of thousands on maintaing a private jet fleet so that a C-level doesn't have to wait in line at security.

ekimekim 7y ago

Given that: a) Flying is basically the only practical option for long-distance travel (edit: by which I mean humans travelling to be at a destination, not cargo/goods). b) Travel is a hugely important good for society (debatable, but consider: experience of diverse cultures, being able to visit friends / have relationships, generation of economic value by skill sharing / conferences / etc). I would argue that anything that increases the amount people are flying / lowers barriers to travel is a good thing. Obviously if we can lower carbon emissions from airlines then we should, but I'd much rather curtail ANY other industry that produces huge amounts of emissions before trying to cut down on human travel.

abyssin 7y ago
It is the most practical long-distance option. But we should be able to give up things that are bad, even if they're practical (like asbestos – an amazing material, but it causes cancer to those who have to work with it). Traveling is nice. I'd argue that most flying done nowadays does not increase cultural understanding. Hitchhiking or slow and uncomfortable means of transportation do increase cultural understanding, because they force people to share something. Modern traveling technologies offer a chance to travel half the globe while staying in a safe bubble. By the way here's an interesting phenomenon that you can notice when people talk about their travels. Stories always revolve around technical issues. Flight was cancelled, they had to take a cramped bus through the mountain, something was broken in the hotel, they got delayed when crossing a border. Traveling is often a game of moving around in unusual and adverse circumstances, and somehow making it work in the end. Climate change is currently hurting economies, and the trend is worsening. Something that contributes to climate change is bad for the economy. Having friends far from home is a bad choice. I've done it myself and it does have something attractive. But it makes life more difficult and these friends won't be there when you need them, simply because it's not practical. Of course it might sound great to say that someone flew thousands of kilometers to visit you. It sounds great because it's a huge waste, like showering a loved one with flowers.