6 ms·

Has anyone considered the albeit short term emissions impact of grounding flights due to COVID-19? Airlines have in some cases experienced over 70% reduction in

Has anyone considered the albeit short term emissions impact of grounding flights due to COVID-19? Airlines have in some cases experienced over 70% reduction in volume in the past weeks[0]. Not to mention, so many companies have been forced to adopt remote working practices and social life has been forced into a sedentary routine. I wonder what the inertial impact of this pandemic will be on emissions over the coming years. [0] https://www.economist.com/business/2020/03/15/coronavirus-is-grounding-the-worlds-airlines https://www.economist.com/business/2020/03/15/coronavirus-is...

jupp0r 7y ago
Air travel makes up for 2.5% of global carbon emissions. Not really worth micro optimizing a lot in those 2.5% if you asked me. At least not if you can focus efforts in energy production and cars instead.
- rb666 7y ago
  Ya think? "Unless market constraints are put in place, growth in aviation emissions will result in the sector's emissions amounting to all or nearly all of the annual global CO 2 emissions budget by mid-century, if climate change is to be held to a temperature increase of 2 °C or less." (from: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Environmental_impact_of_aviation https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Environmental_impact_of_aviation)
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    Growth is not something that continues forever. There's already constraints on the aviation industry (lack of pilots, congested routes) that will anyway slow down the growth significantly as time goes.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    The same links says: "The central case estimate is that aviation's contribution could grow to five percent of the total contribution by 2050 if action is not taken to tackle these emissions, though the highest scenario is 15 percent." So which is it? 5%/15% or 100% by 2050?
  - jupp0r 7y ago
    The article you quote validates my point by assuming other emissions can be decreased to a minimum. If all emissions we have to worry about in 2050 was air travel, that would be spectacularly good news!
  - easytiger 7y ago
    once you get rid of other big thing, this now small thing becomes big, relatively speaking. Getting rid of air travel completely would give 0.03 degree tep benefit
  - api 7y ago
    That assumes vast reductions in emissions from every other sector except air travel, for physical energy density reasons. Air travel alone is not sufficient to affect climate much... if we were to get rid of fossil fuels on the ground.
  - rsynnott 7y ago
    That's in the scenario where fossil fuel use elsewhere is essentially eliminated; eliminating it for air travel is obviously particularly challenging.
- mrpopo 7y ago
  This is a pretty common fallacy that I read every few days on HN. Air transportation is a major contributor to CO2, if you limit the scope to the people who use it. It is estimated that about 80% of the world's adults have never taken a flight, and 94% of the world's adults have not taken a flight in over a year. So, the real picture is that this 2.5% of global CO2 emissions are caused by as few as 6% of the population, who also are incidentally the richest and bear a high personal carbon footprint in other domains than transportation. Also please remember that the aviation sector is growing, and therefore its global contribution to GHG emissions will grow as well in the future. Discounting the carbon footprint of the aviation sector based on today's numbers is a mistake. If you do not want to impede on your ability to travel, you shouldn't object to it for the 94% of the population that want the same thing as you, and when it becomes available to them the aviation sector's emissions will increase 15-fold.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    everyone has that one thing that they don't want to give up to help reduce emissions. I'll admit for me it's fast cars. for a lot of people on HN, it seems to be that they don't want to sacrifice travel or visiting that distant family member. I've seen people go so far as to argue that the holistic benefit of seeing other places is worth the cost in emissions. I suspect if emissions were priced into air travel, we would start to see a lot of businesses realizing that video can replace a lot of in-person meetings. we might also see people start to place more value in living close to the people they care about.
    - vidarh 7y ago
      Really we ought to price in the genuine cost of countering whatever emissions a product or service causes. My guess is that the effect that would have on demand for different product and services would surprise us, in that I don't think we understand very well where people would cut when externalities are priced in, partly because we're bad at estimating what value people put on different things, and partly because we're bad at assessing what impact different things has when e.g. factoring in supply lines.
  - jupp0r 7y ago
- netsharc 7y ago
  What problems do we tackle if everything is just "a small percentage" of the big issue? Also, would you give up 2.5% of your net worth?
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    According to https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis..., the biggest sources are electricity and heat production, transport, and manufacturing (I suspect livestock is part of the manufacturing stat). So for CO2 emissions, switch to renewables; for methane and nitrous oxide, do something about agriculture. But please don't mention going vegan; that MIGHT only improve the situation by 0.000000001%. It can only be done if on a national scale meat production and consumption is reduced, or we find a way to capture / sequester methane / nox emissions. Factory farming shouldn't have an excuse in that regard, they keep their animals indoors anyway.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  when you break up carbon emissions by industry, you get a lot of buckets that make up <10% individually. you can't ignore all of them because they're too small to be worth optimizing. also, instead of focusing on optimizing emissions per mile, why not ask how many flights are actually necessary? at the same time that we invest in electric vehicles, cleaner power generation, and public transit, we might also ask if it's really necessary to vacation overseas. we might ask if video chat could replace flying to meet the board or a client.
blauditore 7y ago
Thinking about this, COVID-19 both reduces CO2 emission in terms of transport, and increases energy demand on other ends (people working from home, using more electricity). It would be interesting to see a detailed breakdown of those effects.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Electricity is always produced with a large buffer (which is why you have lower electricity prices at night to encourage people to use it more, otherwise it's wasted capacity) - so I doubt there's any real increase in electricity production.
  - cool_dude85 7y ago
    No, electric capacity has the built-in buffer you describe. But the main driver for ongoing GHG emissions from electricity generation is, of course, generating the electricity. I'm sure there are no formal studies yet as to whether these work from home policies are a net increase in GHG, either within the utility industry specifically (i.e., excluding savings on cars) or overall, but my gut instinct is that it will be a net increase. Distribution to where residential homes are tends to be less efficient, and it's certainly less efficient to heat, cool, and light 1000 houses all day than 1 office building.
- adrianN 7y ago
  I don't use more electricity at home than in the office.
  - blauditore 7y ago
    But you do more video conferencing, buy/order stuff etc., which all generates energy consumption too.
- rsynnott 7y ago
azernik 7y ago
Ground transportation is so much larger of an emitter that drops in commuting have a bigger effect.
mysterydip 7y ago
I'm really curious to see the data in a couple months. There should be a slowing of melting, right? I'm not sure what lag there is between emissions and temperatures. If there isn't a change in rate, what do we do then?
gambiting 7y ago
Remember that any improvement we make will immediately make the situation worse temporarily because of the aerosol masking effect. The temperatures are lower than they should be because of our emissions blocking out the sun, once the emissions improve the temperature will jump up.
geddy 7y ago
If humans continue to raise and eat massive amounts of land animals, nothing will change. The emission won't change in the slightest. Maybe a blip from less cars on the road but overall, nothing big. As someone pointed out, planes are a fraction of the source of emissions, animal agriculture is far more devastating than anything else.
- austincheney 7y ago
  You could cut your agricultural megafauna emissions in half by switching from cattle to bison. https://mrdrscienceteacher.wordpress.com/2019/09/21/bison-vs-cow-greenhouse-gas-emissions/ https://mrdrscienceteacher.wordpress.com/2019/09/21/bison-vs...
  - geddy 7y ago
    That's interesting, but not a solution. It's inefficient to raise an animal for years and feed it plants (and have to deal with feces and other output) for a few million calories of output.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      What percentage reduction would you consider to be a solution? Since AFAICT you already moved the goalposts from "methane emissions" to "resource usage".
overcast 7y ago
Certainly air quality in major cities has dropped significantly, look at the satellite images from China. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DWBhp-oKOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DWBhp-oKOI edit, INCREASED. I'm tired yo.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > Certainly air quality in major cities has dropped significantly Your link shows the exact opposite of what you're claiming - air quality has increased significantly.
  - overcast 7y ago
    too early in the morning, you know what I meant :)

jupp0r 7y ago

Air travel makes up for 2.5% of global carbon emissions. Not really worth micro optimizing a lot in those 2.5% if you asked me. At least not if you can focus efforts in energy production and cars instead.

rb666 7y ago
Ya think? "Unless market constraints are put in place, growth in aviation emissions will result in the sector's emissions amounting to all or nearly all of the annual global CO 2 emissions budget by mid-century, if climate change is to be held to a temperature increase of 2 °C or less." (from: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Environmental_impact_of_aviation https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Environmental_impact_of_aviation)
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Growth is not something that continues forever. There's already constraints on the aviation industry (lack of pilots, congested routes) that will anyway slow down the growth significantly as time goes.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  The same links says: "The central case estimate is that aviation's contribution could grow to five percent of the total contribution by 2050 if action is not taken to tackle these emissions, though the highest scenario is 15 percent." So which is it? 5%/15% or 100% by 2050?
- jupp0r 7y ago
  The article you quote validates my point by assuming other emissions can be decreased to a minimum. If all emissions we have to worry about in 2050 was air travel, that would be spectacularly good news!
- easytiger 7y ago
  once you get rid of other big thing, this now small thing becomes big, relatively speaking. Getting rid of air travel completely would give 0.03 degree tep benefit
- api 7y ago
  That assumes vast reductions in emissions from every other sector except air travel, for physical energy density reasons. Air travel alone is not sufficient to affect climate much... if we were to get rid of fossil fuels on the ground.
- rsynnott 7y ago
  That's in the scenario where fossil fuel use elsewhere is essentially eliminated; eliminating it for air travel is obviously particularly challenging.
mrpopo 7y ago
This is a pretty common fallacy that I read every few days on HN. Air transportation is a major contributor to CO2, if you limit the scope to the people who use it. It is estimated that about 80% of the world's adults have never taken a flight, and 94% of the world's adults have not taken a flight in over a year. So, the real picture is that this 2.5% of global CO2 emissions are caused by as few as 6% of the population, who also are incidentally the richest and bear a high personal carbon footprint in other domains than transportation. Also please remember that the aviation sector is growing, and therefore its global contribution to GHG emissions will grow as well in the future. Discounting the carbon footprint of the aviation sector based on today's numbers is a mistake. If you do not want to impede on your ability to travel, you shouldn't object to it for the 94% of the population that want the same thing as you, and when it becomes available to them the aviation sector's emissions will increase 15-fold.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  everyone has that one thing that they don't want to give up to help reduce emissions. I'll admit for me it's fast cars. for a lot of people on HN, it seems to be that they don't want to sacrifice travel or visiting that distant family member. I've seen people go so far as to argue that the holistic benefit of seeing other places is worth the cost in emissions. I suspect if emissions were priced into air travel, we would start to see a lot of businesses realizing that video can replace a lot of in-person meetings. we might also see people start to place more value in living close to the people they care about.
  - vidarh 7y ago
    Really we ought to price in the genuine cost of countering whatever emissions a product or service causes. My guess is that the effect that would have on demand for different product and services would surprise us, in that I don't think we understand very well where people would cut when externalities are priced in, partly because we're bad at estimating what value people put on different things, and partly because we're bad at assessing what impact different things has when e.g. factoring in supply lines.
- jupp0r 7y ago
netsharc 7y ago
What problems do we tackle if everything is just "a small percentage" of the big issue? Also, would you give up 2.5% of your net worth?
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  According to https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis..., the biggest sources are electricity and heat production, transport, and manufacturing (I suspect livestock is part of the manufacturing stat). So for CO2 emissions, switch to renewables; for methane and nitrous oxide, do something about agriculture. But please don't mention going vegan; that MIGHT only improve the situation by 0.000000001%. It can only be done if on a national scale meat production and consumption is reduced, or we find a way to capture / sequester methane / nox emissions. Factory farming shouldn't have an excuse in that regard, they keep their animals indoors anyway.
leetcrew 7y ago
when you break up carbon emissions by industry, you get a lot of buckets that make up <10% individually. you can't ignore all of them because they're too small to be worth optimizing. also, instead of focusing on optimizing emissions per mile, why not ask how many flights are actually necessary? at the same time that we invest in electric vehicles, cleaner power generation, and public transit, we might also ask if it's really necessary to vacation overseas. we might ask if video chat could replace flying to meet the board or a client.

blauditore 7y ago

Thinking about this, COVID-19 both reduces CO2 emission in terms of transport, and increases energy demand on other ends (people working from home, using more electricity). It would be interesting to see a detailed breakdown of those effects.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ekianjo 7y ago
Electricity is always produced with a large buffer (which is why you have lower electricity prices at night to encourage people to use it more, otherwise it's wasted capacity) - so I doubt there's any real increase in electricity production.
- cool_dude85 7y ago
  No, electric capacity has the built-in buffer you describe. But the main driver for ongoing GHG emissions from electricity generation is, of course, generating the electricity. I'm sure there are no formal studies yet as to whether these work from home policies are a net increase in GHG, either within the utility industry specifically (i.e., excluding savings on cars) or overall, but my gut instinct is that it will be a net increase. Distribution to where residential homes are tends to be less efficient, and it's certainly less efficient to heat, cool, and light 1000 houses all day than 1 office building.
adrianN 7y ago
I don't use more electricity at home than in the office.
- blauditore 7y ago
  But you do more video conferencing, buy/order stuff etc., which all generates energy consumption too.
rsynnott 7y ago

azernik 7y ago

Ground transportation is so much larger of an emitter that drops in commuting have a bigger effect.

mysterydip 7y ago

I'm really curious to see the data in a couple months. There should be a slowing of melting, right? I'm not sure what lag there is between emissions and temperatures. If there isn't a change in rate, what do we do then?

gambiting 7y ago

Remember that any improvement we make will immediately make the situation worse temporarily because of the aerosol masking effect. The temperatures are lower than they should be because of our emissions blocking out the sun, once the emissions improve the temperature will jump up.

geddy 7y ago

If humans continue to raise and eat massive amounts of land animals, nothing will change. The emission won't change in the slightest. Maybe a blip from less cars on the road but overall, nothing big. As someone pointed out, planes are a fraction of the source of emissions, animal agriculture is far more devastating than anything else.

austincheney 7y ago
You could cut your agricultural megafauna emissions in half by switching from cattle to bison. https://mrdrscienceteacher.wordpress.com/2019/09/21/bison-vs-cow-greenhouse-gas-emissions/ https://mrdrscienceteacher.wordpress.com/2019/09/21/bison-vs...
- geddy 7y ago
  That's interesting, but not a solution. It's inefficient to raise an animal for years and feed it plants (and have to deal with feces and other output) for a few million calories of output.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    What percentage reduction would you consider to be a solution? Since AFAICT you already moved the goalposts from "methane emissions" to "resource usage".

overcast 7y ago

Certainly air quality in major cities has dropped significantly, look at the satellite images from China. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DWBhp-oKOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DWBhp-oKOI edit, INCREASED. I'm tired yo.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> Certainly air quality in major cities has dropped significantly Your link shows the exact opposite of what you're claiming - air quality has increased significantly.
- overcast 7y ago
  too early in the morning, you know what I meant :)