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Airplanes are not as bad for the climate as the activists want you to believe. Overall they're only a few percent of emissions. Much much more is from other tra

Airplanes are not as bad for the climate as the activists want you to believe. Overall they're only a few percent of emissions. Much much more is from other transport (shipping, cars), industry and residential use. Somehow there is an overly large focus on airplane pollution, but mathematically that focus really doesn't make much sense.

ForHackernews 7y ago
My understanding is that research suggests airplane emissions make a disproportionate contribution to the climate crisis because they are released at high altitude, but I'm not an expert. Also, it seems intuitively obvious that moving N kg by plane is vastly less efficient than other forms of transport like rail or ocean shipping. We should be doing fewer energy-inefficient things and more efficient things.
- makerofspoons 7y ago
  Also, only the world's richest (who have by far the largest carbon footprints) fly today. The comparatively small sliver of emissions it is today will balloon as the world gets richer.
- t0mas88 7y ago
  Rail is more environmentally friendly than air, but it lacks capacity and it's not very fast. Ocean is much worse for the environment than air, because emissions from shipping aren't regulated and they burn the worst of the worst while happily dumping waste overboard once in international waters. At least air has global rules on clean operation set by IATA since a few years.
yongjik 7y ago
"A few percent" of global emissions is positively massive. According to wikipedia, Germany's economy (GDP $3.863T) is only about 4% of global economy (GDP $87.265T). Would you call Germany's economy insignificant? More interestingly, there are only three nations (the US, China, Japan) with higher GDP. So, by the same criterion, we could argue that only these three countries have any significant economy (total $40.733T), and the rest can be ignored. But then we will be ignoring more than half of global economy! It's clearly a logical fallacy. * Numbers taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

ForHackernews 7y ago

My understanding is that research suggests airplane emissions make a disproportionate contribution to the climate crisis because they are released at high altitude, but I'm not an expert. Also, it seems intuitively obvious that moving N kg by plane is vastly less efficient than other forms of transport like rail or ocean shipping. We should be doing fewer energy-inefficient things and more efficient things.

makerofspoons 7y ago
Also, only the world's richest (who have by far the largest carbon footprints) fly today. The comparatively small sliver of emissions it is today will balloon as the world gets richer.
t0mas88 7y ago
Rail is more environmentally friendly than air, but it lacks capacity and it's not very fast. Ocean is much worse for the environment than air, because emissions from shipping aren't regulated and they burn the worst of the worst while happily dumping waste overboard once in international waters. At least air has global rules on clean operation set by IATA since a few years.

yongjik 7y ago

"A few percent" of global emissions is positively massive. According to wikipedia, Germany's economy (GDP $3.863T) is only about 4% of global economy (GDP $87.265T). Would you call Germany's economy insignificant? More interestingly, there are only three nations (the US, China, Japan) with higher GDP. So, by the same criterion, we could argue that only these three countries have any significant economy (total $40.733T), and the rest can be ignored. But then we will be ignoring more than half of global economy! It's clearly a logical fallacy. * Numbers taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...