4 ms·
> Cutting one's emissions by half is most likely not easy at all It is very easy if you travel by plane several times per year, even on short distances, and yo
by jnxx 6y ago
> Cutting one's emissions by half is most likely not easy at all
It is very easy if you travel by plane several times per year, even on short distances, and you just stop to do that. In fact, it is probably the most effective thing you can do to reduce your own lifetime carbon footprint. A single two-hour flight produces around 400 kilograms of CO2 per person. This is equivalent to several months of heating in a cold country.
And don't start me harping about "offsetting" carbon emissions. Carbon has been captured in the course of hundreds of millions of years. There is nothing humans can do which can store it again for the same time. Almost all carbon from a tree is released when the tree dies.
In fact, it is even worse for coal. The coal deposits which we still exploit today, against all better knowledge, have mostly been formed during the carboniferous geological period. In this period, there were NO bacteria and fungi which could decompose lignin, the main structural component of wood. In other words, the wood from trees could not decay, which was the base for the coal deposits from the carboniferous period, which still form most of the coal today. The consequence of this is that burning coal is irreversible even in the course of tens of thousands of years, because the conditions under which this coal has been formed - an absence of fungi that can decompose lignin - simply do not exist any more. We are not only doing massive damage to the next generations of human children, but we are profoundly and irreversibly changing the conditions for life on Earth.
- samatman 6y ago> There is nothing humans can do which can store it again for the same time. This is simply untrue. Grow woody biomass, and combust it in a reducing environment, and you get carbon. It's biologically inert. Bury it. It's not difficult, or impractical, and even if you mix it into soil, it will remain sequestered for centuries or millennia. It's just... charcoal. Why would we have to make coal in the way it was made in the carboniferous? Your doom posting doesn't make any sense.
- fogihujy 6y agoExactly, it might not happen naturally at the same scale anymore, but getting carbon back into the ground is definitely possible. The main issue is cost/effort.
- avar 6y agoYou're mostly wrong about the coalification process as it relates to the carboniferous. There's many different types of coal, but the one you seem to be thinking of is hard coal (anthracite). The others are lignite and bituminous coal. It's indeed the case that the comparative lack of rotting during carboniferous contributed to the available biomass to turn into coal, but that sort of coal doesn't form without heat and compression. It's got as much to do with the earth being more geologically active at the time, and more low-lying wetlands. But coal is forming today from peat -> lignite -> bituminous coal -> anthracite (then eventually graphite). E.g. Germany's electricity generation was ~30% lignite burning in 2015[1], and those deposits formed mostly during the tertiary period. So you're five to six orders of magnitude off if you think coal hasn't been forming since the carboniferous. None of which is to say that these deposits are renewable in any practical sense. We can imagine digging them all up and burning them in the next 500 years, and then having to wait around the time since the T-Rex walked the earth for meaningful regeneration. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignite#Uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignite#Uses
- devit 6y agoOften plane tickets are cheaper than any other means of transportation, even if you ignore travel time and convenience. If such a carbon reduction is desirable, then taxes on air travel need to be raised.
- perl4ever 6y agoWhy would a pound of carbon from air travel be worse than a pound of carbon from something else? If it were taxed differently, wouldn't that provide an incentive to produce more CO2, against market forces?
- devit 6y agoI mean taxes on all carbon emissions should be raised (if airlines already pay them, otherwise airlines should pay them - also "taxes" can be replaced with a cap-and-trade scheme).
- _Microft 6y agoI would really like to have fine-grained information on the distribution of emissions in a society. Nobody in my circles is flying more than at most once per year but I know someone who's flying bi-weekly over transatlantic distances (to either the US or to Asia). They certainly contribute a good deal to the average emissions that we do not.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoEven in the US only half the population will get on a plane in any one year. Climate change is a problem of the well off.