>FF aviation should be abandoned because of the climate change implications. (I'm talking specifically about overseas travel here, where electric trains are im

>FF aviation should be abandoned because of the climate change implications. (I'm talking specifically about overseas travel here, where electric trains are impossible) FF aviation currently doesn't have an alternative - we could theoretically use hydrogen or synthfuel, but 1) synthfuel is not remotely viable right now and 2) hydrogen would require major plane redesigns (and new infrastructure), so even if it turns out to be viable it'll take decades. Also, I'm not sure if it'll be viable. In terms of climate change implications, abandoning FF aviation only makes sense if we abandon all climate emissions ASAP, because FF aviation is one of the hardest forms of emissions to actually replace. Aerospace is hard, and FF aviation is already as efficient as is possible with current technology, given the sheer amount of savings an extra percent of efficiency gives the airline company. >It's extremely inefficient. Large EV gliders are workable. Aviation in general is extremely inefficient; it comes with the territory of being heavier than air but insisting on staying in it while traveling cross-continent. Large EV gliders can only cross seas by being extremely lightweight - those things don't even have pressurized cabins, let alone hundreds of passengers (hundreds of passengers means the plane is hundreds of times more profitable than a 1-person). And I'm willing to bet they travel a tad slower, to boot. If you don't care about speed, then airships are the obvious best option - they were functional back in the 1910s, and were abandoned largely because 1) aeroplanes outperformed them and were then produced in large numbers for WW2 before being subsequently sold off once the war was over, and 2) they were seen as unsafe - not unreasonably given that the 1930s aviation industry put far less emphasis on safety compared to today, but also because the Hindenburg was designed to use helium but was forced to deploy using hydrogen for geopolitical reasons*. Airships are still more expensive than aeroplanes - if only because they tend to fly much slower, and the subsequent flight duration requires paying out far more hours to flight staff - and the flight speed is a serious qualitative problem (one-week business trips aren't viable and ditto for week-long vacations), but they're technically doable. Although at that point, why bother? Why not take a cruise/cargo ship?". This is why there's no airship industry, by the way. They're too slow to compete with planes and too expensive to compete with ships/trains. *namely the US not wanting to support the mid-1930s Zeppelin company due to it being funded largely by the Nazi party and airships being associated with military usage at the time, and it probably didn't help that Zeppelins were being used for Nazi propaganda purposes at the time. >Shipping by full EV maritime shipping is on the horizon. Hybrid cargo ships are already a thing. (Aasfjell) Hybrid cargo ships don't mean much - they're just supplementing their power. Also, that thing is 5 metres wide and uses batteries; batteries are a dead end for cross-ocean shipping. Full EV maritime shipping is indeed possible and, depending on the cost of hydrogen fuel, quite viable. Although hydrogen has its own problems and isn't particularly good as a fuel (it's specific energy is great but it's energy-density is literally the worst, and it's hard and expensive to store due to needing special tanks and liquefaction or compression, and it slowly leaks away at a rate of ~1% per day so it's harder to stockpile, and it's incompatible with existing fuel infrastructure and engines, and with current tech it's expensive AF to produce renewably so we're essentially gambling that those particular technologies will improve rapidly if we invest in them). Although given how hard it is to get the shipping industry off bunker fuel, I'm not sure how we'd convince anyone to invest in a stinker like present-day hydrogen. Like, look at the above paragraph and how long that bracketed section is. >Rail shipping is extremely energy efficient. This is how most cargo should be transported. A global rail transport network should be seriously considered. Ideally we'd transport cargo by synthfuel cargo ships whenever the trip is near the coast; rail shipping in Indonesia is absurd, for example, and all imports/exports in Australia are obviously by ship. But more broadly, cargo ships are more efficient than trains, they're just not as clean because they're not electric. That said, yes rail shipping is extremely efficient and a global rail transport network should be seriously considered, and rail is how most (overland) cargo should be transported.