6 ms·

People frown on (heavy) cars nowadays. Then there is some backlash to passenger jet flights that pump (near) tax free fuel. Private jets that basically do the s

by cies 6y ago

People frown on (heavy) cars nowadays. Then there is some backlash to passenger jet flights that pump (near) tax free fuel. Private jets that basically do the same with less passengers. Now we have passenger space flight. I'm not for "climate shaming" people into "green behavior". I'm all for a fair and square pollution taxes, that every polluter has to pay. But this kind of news make even me frown...

pmiller2 6y ago
Sign me up for some climate shaming. I'm for whatever works at this point.
- cies 6y ago
  That's my problem, I expect the climate shaming approach is (1) a total waste of effort, (2) does not hurt the heavy polluters and (3) does not consider hidden pollution (plastic straws vs flowers or meat). Hence I think the only way out fair and square taxation. It's not a new idea, and thus has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ben_w 6y ago
  15 years ago I would’ve agreed 100%. Growth of green energy, and the cost reductions of the same, mean I now think this particular war is won, even if some specific metaphorical battles have yet to begin. There’s still nitrogen, phosphate, biodiversity, and antibiotics abuse to care about, but I’m confident greenhouse gases are a solved problem and that people will get rich by reducing emissions by at least half by December 2030.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    I'm going to use the car off a cliff metaphor here because I think it's appropriate. We're still in a car that's headed off the cliff. We've only just reached the point where when people want to press the accelerator harder it reliably causes widespread yelling from those convinced that hurtling off a cliff is a bad idea. We not only aren't steering away from the cliff edge, we haven't even checked the brakes work, maybe this car doesn't have brakes, and if we only finally try them after we go off the cliff I can assure you they won't help then. But yes, these days most calls to accelerate faster are getting shouted down, if you think that's enough I hope we both live long enough for you to find out how wrong that was.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      Yep exactly, so far we haven't even gotten the second derivative of what we're trying to stabilize to go in the right direction. Global carbon emissions are still rising!
      - ben_w 6y ago
        Second derivative has been negative 22 years out of the 44 I can calculate it for with this data set: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-year/ https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by... More importantly, exponential growth of the solution is much faster than the sub-exponential growth of the problem. Indeed, faster than almost everything else in the technological world — so far as I am aware, only Moore’s law and the cost of gene reading/writing have been improving faster for any length of time.
        adrianN 6y ago
        I only count 9 years with a negative change in emissions (6 of which are probably due to the oil crisis?). The number that matters for warming is the total CO2 concentration. Emissions are the first derivative, change in emissions is the second derivative.
        ben_w 6y ago
disillusioned 6y ago
This comment piqued my interest, but I don't think it's as bad as you think it is? (In the sense that any trivial usage of carbon is "bad", sure, but in relative terms this... is way less of an impact than, say, the airlines deadheading flights in the UK to not lose their gate slips for the hell of it, for instance.) >>>The Falcon 9 rocket runs on fossil fuels, namely Rocket Propellant 1 or RP-1, which is highly refined kerosene. >>>Each launch burns 29,600 gallons or 112,184 Kilograms, with each Kg of fuel releasing 3 Kg of CO2, so each launch releases 336,552 Kg of CO2. >>>A flight from London to New York City has a carbon footprint of 986 Kg, so a SpaceX launch is the equivalent of flying 341 people across the Atlantic (Jacob calculated 395). It sounds terrible, until you realize that that is about the number of people that fit into one 777-300, which can carry 45,220 gallons of fuel. So overall, one transatlantic flight of a 777 is considerably worse than a flight of the Falcon, and they do this hundreds of times a day. [1] [1] https://www.treehugger.com/spacex-launch-puts-out-much-co-flying-people-across-atlantic-4857958 https://www.treehugger.com/spacex-launch-puts-out-much-co-fl...
- tgv 6y ago
  Death by a thousand cuts.
- cies 6y ago
  45k gallons of fuel for 400 passengers vs 30k gallons of fuels for a hand full of "passengers". What am I missing? Seems space flight is a lot more polluting... My point being: I dont care how many flights of one type or the other is happening. I want to tax pollution fair and square. Same pollution tax on the petrol pump around the corner, as on the airport, as on the space center.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    And many times, airplanes have 100 passengers or less. I’ve flown on flights with only two or three dozen sometimes. I think OPs point wasn’t that it’s ok, but that, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not out of the ordinary. Is it bad, sure, but we should also be fighting back against air travel in general then. Pollution taxes are one way to do that.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
Spaceflight is fairly comparable to car racing in this matter. It's not a significant contributor, much more carbon is emitted transporting passengers/support personnel/spectators to and from the race/flight than in the race/flight itself. However, it is very high profile and has the appearance of an egregious emitter. This also means that for both industries, switching to green fuels will not have much of an impact on the bottom line but will have a huge PR impact. F1 racing is doing so, and I expect SpaceX to do so as well. Musk recently announced that they'll be generating their own liquid oxygen using green energy, and liquid oxygen is ~85% of the propellant used in a launch. SpaceX has several other reasons: - Musk cares about this stuff - RP1 and Starship's methane are highly purified variants of kerosene / natural gas respectively. Therefore they are more expensive than their feedstock, so if they start with a pure synthesized variant, they can avoid additional purifying steps. - the plan is to synthesize methane on Mars. They'll have to be doing this in large quantities on Mars, so some experience doing it on Earth is a little bit useful.
- Valgrim 6y ago
  If they can fully synthesize the methane and oxygen using carbon neutral energy sources, then they will have essentially created a carbon-neutral orbital launch platform. Realistically, it will be easier and cheaper to achieve the same goal by buying carbon offsets on the market. Let's be pessimistic. At 3400 tons of propellant per launch (not sure how much of it actually becomes CO2), and an estimated 50$ per tonne on the market, we're talking about 170 000$, so instead of 2 000 000$ per launch, we're talking about 2 170 000$ per CARBON-NEUTRAL launch. Only factoring in PR value, it's totally worth it.
  - gpm 6y ago
    They've been promising to synthesize the methane from scratch using green energy for quite awhile now, or in other words they agree.
    - skykooler 6y ago
      Which makes a fair amount of sense as they need to develop and test those technologies for synthesizing methane on Mars anyway.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
Are you seriously gatekeeping space travel?
auiya 6y ago
You're gonna want to sit down when you hear about the container shipping industry then.

by cies 6y ago

pmiller2 6y ago

Sign me up for some climate shaming. I'm for whatever works at this point.

cies 6y ago
That's my problem, I expect the climate shaming approach is (1) a total waste of effort, (2) does not hurt the heavy polluters and (3) does not consider hidden pollution (plastic straws vs flowers or meat). Hence I think the only way out fair and square taxation. It's not a new idea, and thus has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ben_w 6y ago
15 years ago I would’ve agreed 100%. Growth of green energy, and the cost reductions of the same, mean I now think this particular war is won, even if some specific metaphorical battles have yet to begin. There’s still nitrogen, phosphate, biodiversity, and antibiotics abuse to care about, but I’m confident greenhouse gases are a solved problem and that people will get rich by reducing emissions by at least half by December 2030.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  I'm going to use the car off a cliff metaphor here because I think it's appropriate. We're still in a car that's headed off the cliff. We've only just reached the point where when people want to press the accelerator harder it reliably causes widespread yelling from those convinced that hurtling off a cliff is a bad idea. We not only aren't steering away from the cliff edge, we haven't even checked the brakes work, maybe this car doesn't have brakes, and if we only finally try them after we go off the cliff I can assure you they won't help then. But yes, these days most calls to accelerate faster are getting shouted down, if you think that's enough I hope we both live long enough for you to find out how wrong that was.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Yep exactly, so far we haven't even gotten the second derivative of what we're trying to stabilize to go in the right direction. Global carbon emissions are still rising!
    - ben_w 6y ago
      Second derivative has been negative 22 years out of the 44 I can calculate it for with this data set: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-year/ https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by... More importantly, exponential growth of the solution is much faster than the sub-exponential growth of the problem. Indeed, faster than almost everything else in the technological world — so far as I am aware, only Moore’s law and the cost of gene reading/writing have been improving faster for any length of time.
      - adrianN 6y ago
        I only count 9 years with a negative change in emissions (6 of which are probably due to the oil crisis?). The number that matters for warming is the total CO2 concentration. Emissions are the first derivative, change in emissions is the second derivative.
        ben_w 6y ago

disillusioned 6y ago

This comment piqued my interest, but I don't think it's as bad as you think it is? (In the sense that any trivial usage of carbon is "bad", sure, but in relative terms this... is way less of an impact than, say, the airlines deadheading flights in the UK to not lose their gate slips for the hell of it, for instance.) >>>The Falcon 9 rocket runs on fossil fuels, namely Rocket Propellant 1 or RP-1, which is highly refined kerosene. >>>Each launch burns 29,600 gallons or 112,184 Kilograms, with each Kg of fuel releasing 3 Kg of CO2, so each launch releases 336,552 Kg of CO2. >>>A flight from London to New York City has a carbon footprint of 986 Kg, so a SpaceX launch is the equivalent of flying 341 people across the Atlantic (Jacob calculated 395). It sounds terrible, until you realize that that is about the number of people that fit into one 777-300, which can carry 45,220 gallons of fuel. So overall, one transatlantic flight of a 777 is considerably worse than a flight of the Falcon, and they do this hundreds of times a day. [1] [1] https://www.treehugger.com/spacex-launch-puts-out-much-co-flying-people-across-atlantic-4857958 https://www.treehugger.com/spacex-launch-puts-out-much-co-fl...

tgv 6y ago
Death by a thousand cuts.
cies 6y ago
45k gallons of fuel for 400 passengers vs 30k gallons of fuels for a hand full of "passengers". What am I missing? Seems space flight is a lot more polluting... My point being: I dont care how many flights of one type or the other is happening. I want to tax pollution fair and square. Same pollution tax on the petrol pump around the corner, as on the airport, as on the space center.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  And many times, airplanes have 100 passengers or less. I’ve flown on flights with only two or three dozen sometimes. I think OPs point wasn’t that it’s ok, but that, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not out of the ordinary. Is it bad, sure, but we should also be fighting back against air travel in general then. Pollution taxes are one way to do that.

bryanlarsen 6y ago

Spaceflight is fairly comparable to car racing in this matter. It's not a significant contributor, much more carbon is emitted transporting passengers/support personnel/spectators to and from the race/flight than in the race/flight itself. However, it is very high profile and has the appearance of an egregious emitter. This also means that for both industries, switching to green fuels will not have much of an impact on the bottom line but will have a huge PR impact. F1 racing is doing so, and I expect SpaceX to do so as well. Musk recently announced that they'll be generating their own liquid oxygen using green energy, and liquid oxygen is ~85% of the propellant used in a launch. SpaceX has several other reasons: - Musk cares about this stuff - RP1 and Starship's methane are highly purified variants of kerosene / natural gas respectively. Therefore they are more expensive than their feedstock, so if they start with a pure synthesized variant, they can avoid additional purifying steps. - the plan is to synthesize methane on Mars. They'll have to be doing this in large quantities on Mars, so some experience doing it on Earth is a little bit useful.

Valgrim 6y ago
If they can fully synthesize the methane and oxygen using carbon neutral energy sources, then they will have essentially created a carbon-neutral orbital launch platform. Realistically, it will be easier and cheaper to achieve the same goal by buying carbon offsets on the market. Let's be pessimistic. At 3400 tons of propellant per launch (not sure how much of it actually becomes CO2), and an estimated 50$ per tonne on the market, we're talking about 170 000$, so instead of 2 000 000$ per launch, we're talking about 2 170 000$ per CARBON-NEUTRAL launch. Only factoring in PR value, it's totally worth it.
- gpm 6y ago
  They've been promising to synthesize the methane from scratch using green energy for quite awhile now, or in other words they agree.
  - skykooler 6y ago
    Which makes a fair amount of sense as they need to develop and test those technologies for synthesizing methane on Mars anyway.

Dirlewanger 6y ago

Are you seriously gatekeeping space travel?

auiya 6y ago

You're gonna want to sit down when you hear about the container shipping industry then.