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The global aviation industry is only around 2% of the global CO2 emissions so i'd say it's more of a mini elephant.
by cipher_system 6y ago
The global aviation industry is only around 2% of the global CO2 emissions so i'd say it's more of a mini elephant.
- abyssin 6y agoGiven that it provides mostly luxury services, it's quite easy to get rid of these 2%. Nobody is going to suffer from not being able to take the plane to go on a vacation.
- logicchains 6y agoWho are you to know how much other people suffer from not being able to go on vacation?
- luckylion 6y agoMaybe qualifying it helps: Nobody is going to reasonably suffer from not being able to take the plane to go on a vacation.
- rini17 6y agoI already know some who did suffer (perhaps unreasonably but that's in the end irrelevant).
- luckylion 6y agoPerhaps "suffer" isn't great here, because it's used coloquially as "being affected" and to literally suffer because of something. People will be affected, absolutely. And some people might also suffer from not being able to have an international vacation. But probably not reasonably so, i.e. a reasonable person would not suffer in that situation. You can suffer unreasonably, and you're right, it's irrelevant to the question of "does suffering exist", but it's very relevant to the question of "should we do something about it as society". If it's reasonable, probably. Otherwise that's between an individual and their therapist.
- logicchains 6y ago>Nobody is going to reasonably suffer Your definition of reasonable is not universal. For many people, life is for living, not for sacrificing worldly pleasures to eke out as long an existence as possible.
- JohnBooty 6y agoThis isn't about sacrificing all worldly pleasures or even all vacations. It's about perhaps rethinking whether one needs to fly so often for one's vacations.
- sct202 6y agoA lot of people don't live on the same continent that they were born on and vacations are the only time they get to see their families.
- fogihujy 6y agoIt's not that air travel will just disappear or anything. Some areas are simply too remote to depend on anything else. However, up until about 8 months ago, there were lots of 15-30 minute flights that could be replaced with videoconferencing and (post-pandemic) train travel. Sure, you still might need to catch a plane if you're going on vacation on the other side of the globe, but you can usuall have that client meeting over Zoom, and if you're going on a trip from one European city to another then train travel is often not a bad option.
- logicchains 6y ago>It's not that air travel will just disappear or anything. The comment I was replying to was implying that recreational air travel should be banned completely.
- fogihujy 6y agoI interpreted it as getting rid off unneccesary air travel. There are multiple ways of achieving such a reduction, but not all would require a ban. A total ban of air travel is, of course, not possible.
- covidSurvivor19 6y agoMust be a leftist, they all like centralized authority that will surely know what's best for individual people. In reality, the best chooser for an individual is him/her/self owing to their unique perspective. Not going on vacation may well indeed be suffering.
- chii 6y agoSo they drive, or ship instead, and both being worse? or are you asking people to sacrifice their quality of life (i.e., _not_ take a vacation)? Because you know that won't happen.
- jnxx 6y agoNo, it is not worse, emission by driving or shipping are far lower (emissions by fast ferries are still ridiculously high but not necessary). > or are you asking people to sacrifice their quality of life Get a grip. CO2 emissions are literally about to destroy the habitable planet, including problems with food, wars, wildfires, violent storms, flooding, and on. If you think this is really less important than going on a vacation on another continent, then you need to grow up a bit.
- logicchains 6y ago>CO2 emissions are literally about to destroy the habitable planet, including problems with food, wars, wildfires, violent storms, flooding, and on. This is baseless fearmongering. Even the worst-case sea rise predictions for 2100 would have relatively minimal impact on the lifestyles of most people living in developed countries.
- wasmitnetzen 6y agoSea rise is only 1/2 point of all the ones the parent listed. Why do you ignore all the others?
- electricviolet 6y agoWhy do you only care about the lifestyles of people living in developed countries? Also, even if we decide that we don't care about 4/5 of the world, increased flooding and wildfires are already affecting hundreds of thousands of people each year in North America.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoYou don't have to take a flight or drive your own car to take a vacation. I've been spending all my holidays in Greece in the last 10 years or so and I've taken a flight there maybe one or twice (and once was to attend a funeral when time was pressing). Otherwise I travel by land and sea, train and boat, no cars or planes whatsoever. I live in the UK, so it's a two- or three-days journey if you do it head-over-heels but it can take a lot longer if done at a leisure (which I usually do). I spend time visiting towns and cities in France and Italy that are out of my way, and still do that without driving. In any case, taking a holiday or going abroad doesn't mean taking a flight, or driving. And I really doubt that taking a boat trip produces more CO₂ per capita than taking a flight, given that many more people will typically board a ferry boat, than board an airliner going the same distance.
- thedrbrian 6y agoWhat a depressing future you envision.
- abyssin 6y agoClimate change sure isn't going to be fun, whether we manage to stay under the 2 °C target or not. But I don't think we should spend too much time lamenting about it. Instead, we can find ways to lower our CO2 emissions, even if it means lowering our luxurious standards of living – flying is a luxury.
- fulafel 6y agoIf reducing air travel seems a depressing consequence of the climate crisis, it's going to get way more depressing. This is a good tradeoff to mitigate much worse things.
- KSteffensen 6y agoWhich is what the epidemic is highlighting and why the industry is so worried.
- ThePadawan 6y agoHow much of the aviation industry is cargo vs passengers anyway?
- onion2k 6y agoThat's true of every industry. It's all 1% here and 2% there. We can't ignore something just because it's 'small' in regard to the total.
- logicchains 6y ago>That's true of every industry. It's all 1% here and 2% there. We can't ignore something just because it's 'small' in regard to the total. And if we apply that logic to every industry, we end up driving people's standards of living back centuries.
- chopin 6y agoIf we do nothing that's going to happen anyway.
- logicchains 6y agoNot within the next couple hundred years, even going by the worst case climate change predictions.
- jeromegv 6y agoYou have to applaud people that spent decades telling us that climate change didn't exist, only to switch their stance to "well it's too late, there's nothing we can do now" once the evidence of climate change became too obvious in our day to day.
- alvah 6y ago"once the evidence of climate change became too obvious in our day to day." Citation?
- onion2k 6y agoWe're talking about flying. You don't need to go back very far (less than 50 years) to get to a point where the majority of people in western countries never took a flight. We're absolutely not talking about resetting life to what it was like in the 1700s. We might possibly be talking about going back to what it was like in the 1980s, where flights where mostly for the very wealthy or something people did 4 or 5 times in their lifetime, but it's more likely it'd be nothing as dramatic as that.
- rocqua 6y agoWhat percentage of the economy is it though? What percentage of human time is spent on airlines
- hannob 6y agoI'd say 2% is a whole lot for a single industry, but there's a few more things that make this concerning. It's an industry that has been growing a lot. It is an industry that is very unevenly used by the world population (many people don't fly at all). And it's an industry that barely has any idea how to fix its emission problem. (H2 will likely only work in short range and is still decades away, synfuels is extremely inefficient.)
- missedthecue 6y agoYou may be surprised to learn that cement production alone makes up 8% of global carbon emissions. Steel production is 5% by itself.
- hannob 6y agoNo, not surprised, well aware of that. We should really get started developing alternatives. Cement is a tough one, probably the toughest industry sector at all. For steel the swedish companies SSAB+LKAB have a very ambitious plan using hydrogen. I hope they succeed doing that. That said and as othes have noted: Aviation is 2% of CO2, but a much larger share of overall emissions. I was surprised to recently learn that this is scientifically underresearched (particularly effects on cloud formation) and it may be everything between 4 and 7%.
- lm28469 6y ago> CO2 Come on, do you think CO2 is the nastiest thing planes reject ? Also, plane pollution happens at high altitude, which surely has a different impact than at sea level.
- tuatoru 6y agoYes, it's worse.
- jnxx 6y agoIt is 2% of mostly completely needless carbon emissions which are produced exclusively by the richest 1% of Earths population. Considering the distribution of benefits for very few and costs for all, it is an entirely predatory technology. If the airline industry goes completely bust, I am sorry for the people who worked there, and all in to give them another meaningful job, but at the same time it would be a very good thing for humanity as a whole.
- logicchains 6y ago>It is 2% of mostly completely needless carbon emissions which are produced exclusively by the richest 1% of Earths population. This is completely untrue. One of the biggest sources of airline travel is Chinese domestic tourism, far from the richest 1%. >but at the same time it would be a very good thing for humanity as a whole How incredibly arrogant of you to think you speak for all of humanity. Clearly a huge number of humans value air travel, due to their extensive use of it, please explain to me how you know better than all of them about what's good for them?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- NationalPark 6y agoSurely it's even more arrogant to assume that individual preferences and a market that doesn't price externalities will somehow avoid the existential threat of climate change. Or do you not "believe" in that?
- cwhiz 6y agoLegitimately, have you ever been on a commercial flight? It’s not full of rich people cramped into tiny seats, I’ll tell you that much.
- Isinlor 6y agoIf you have been on a commercial flight in the past 3 years you are very likely (50%+ chance) in the 5% of the richest people on Earth. If you are just on hackernews you are very likely (50%+ chance) in the 5% of the richest people on Earth. If you make $33,500 a year, you are among the richest 5% in the world. [0] The threshold for an individual to enter the global top 10% in 2012 was about PPP$15,600 per capita household income, or PPP$62,000 for a family of four. [1] The threshold for an individual to enter the global top 1% in 2012 is about PPP$50,000 per capita household income, or PPP$200,000 for a family of four. [1] [0] http://www.worldwealthcalculator.org/ http://www.worldwealthcalculator.org/ [1] http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/771271476908686029/Segal.pdf http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/771271476908686029/Segal.pdf
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoAnd yet, avoiding a single transatlantic flight is enough to reduce an individual's CO₂ emissions by about 1.5 tonnes, or 2/3s of the reduction from living car-free (~2 tonnes) and is generally the third most effective way to reduce individual CO₂ emissions (behind having one fewer child and living car free and ahead of buying green energy, buying a more efficient car, siwtching to an electirc car or no car at all and eating a plant-based diet, in that order). I underline: that's one flight. See Figure 1 here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/meta https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/...
- labawi 6y ago> 2/3s of the reduction from living car-free The number you're quoting is car-free for a year, so 1 return flight ~ 8 months of car use.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoYes, I should have made it clear - the numbers are for the reduction of individual CO₂ emissions in a year and 8 months is indeed 2/3s of a year.
- tripzilch 6y agoIf only all the industries we have to make big changes to, were as big as 2%, we'd only have to do it for ~50 of them.
- baron_harkonnen 6y agoWe need to get to 0% emissions, cutting all air-travel and getting 2% knocked off in a single move is pretty good. Consider this view: I'm currently trying to reduce my monthly expenditures, especially subscription services I no longer use. A service that was 2% of my monthly expenditures would be a pretty good savings for cutting a single service.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fulafel 6y ago2% is way understating the climate effects, it's ~5 % [1] [2]. Also, it's been growing fast. [1] pop sci: https://www.dw.com/en/to-fly-or-not-to-fly-the-environmental-cost-of-air-travel/a-42090155 https://www.dw.com/en/to-fly-or-not-to-fly-the-environmental... [2] source: https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/aviation/index.php?idp=83 https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/aviation/index.php?...
- dougmwne 6y agoIt's part of a long line of perception management that shifts the burden of climate change off of the industries that are responsible for the problem (Oil and Gas, agriculture) and away from governmental solutions (carbon tax high enough to fund carbon neutrality, green industry incentives) and onto the individual (recycling, veganism, staycations, biking). I am at a point where I find all climate change solutions that focus on voluntary individual behavior to be laughably dishonest. Tragedy of the commons has been well understood for centuries. International governmental cooperation and regulation is the ONLY chance we have at addressing this issue, full stop. The rest is magical thinking.