5 ms·

I agree it looks nice, but dressing up an airport in sustainable materials won't materially change the fact that a flight Boston - NYC (one-way!) blasts through

• gosub100 2y ago
  the same people telling me to save on my carbon emission are the ones who are ok with free trade to have stuff made thousands of miles away (in jurisdictions with very lax environmental laws) that could be made right here and employ blue-collar workers. Those container ships arrive full and leave empty. What's the CO2eq of that?
  • burkaman 2y ago
    Those are not the same people.
    • ericmcer 2y ago
      It is the same people unfortunately. People who want to reduce the global carbon footprint should be rejoicing about tariffs and returning manufacturing to America. The two party system forces people to hold conflicting values though. Both sides have belief systems that are full of inconsistencies.
  • ianburrell 2y ago
    Cargo ships are the most efficient form of transport. They use scale of big ships carrying lots of cargo. It takes about the same amount of CO2 to carry container across the Pacific as to truck it across the country. Producing it here or there doesn't make much difference. If anything, it is more efficient to produce in China cause they have higher percent of renewable electricity.
• bamboozled 2y ago
  Yeah, take a look at this then… https://celebrityprivatejettracker.com/leaderboard/#gr https://celebrityprivatejettracker.com/leaderboard/#gr
• AlgorithmicTime 2y ago
  [dead]
• tsudonym 2y ago
  I'm extremely pro-rail but Portland is not the city to bash for short haul domestic flights. Amtrak Cascades is very popular for trips to Seattle.
  • anon291 2y ago
    To put it in context: Cascades is popular because it magically takes the same amount of time (~3 hours), has no traffic, costs less than a tank of gas, and puts you into downtown seattle without having to park and potentially have your car stolen. That is to say.. people will take trains as long as they're truthfully better. We should work on making them better. Even the lovely people of Portland, as concerned as we are about the environment, don't take the train out of the goodness of their hearts.
• returningfory2 2y ago
  I think it's a little bit misleading to casually drop a "yearly budget" like this, as if this is something we're currently following. In the US the average car emits 4.6t of CO2 per year [1]. If you really think we need to be following this yearly budget the implications on our society (including basically a ban on most car trips being currently taken) are extremely drastic. [1] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle#:~:text=typical%20passenger%20vehicle%3F-,A%20typical%20passenger%20vehicle%20emits%20about%204.6%20metric%20tons%20of,8%2C887%20grams%20of%20CO2 https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t....
• Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Not to mention, besides the wood material being, well, wood... it's a relatively small amount when you think about it, and the amount of processing involved which basically turn it into a different material altogether outweighs any sustainability. Plus, with all the glues / epoxies / whatever they use, that wood-based material isn't going to be degradable at all. It puts me in mind of "bamboo" products, which also relies on a lot of glues and processing to make it a wood analog.
  • amelius 2y ago
    Well the fact that it doesn't degrade means the carbon stays trapped.
  • wkat4242 2y ago
    > Plus, with all the glues / epoxies / whatever they use, that wood-based material isn't going to be degradable at all. That's kinda the point though. You don't want it degrading in situ. That's why we treat wood. In a situation indoors like here it will suffer less but still.. I used to live in a wooden house and the maintenance was a PITA. Having to repaint every 5 years or so. And that was wood that was treated already.
• dig1 2y ago
  Sadly, it's true. In my opinion, this is the hypocrisy of the modern 'green' agenda - we endlessly discuss pollution, yet we cling to the comforts of modern life, many of which cause even greater harm.
  • returningfory2 2y ago
    We can have it both ways. In ~50 years in the US, 99% of cars will be electric and 99% of electricity generation will be carbon negative. We can keep our comforts of modern life, like cars, while not damaging the planet. I accept there is not a story for air travel, yet.
    • kjkjadksj 2y ago
      Air travel industry is investing into a biofuel future
  • ianburrell 2y ago
    Modern comforts like electricity, cars, heating, and cooling. Those are most of the CO2 that people produce. It is dumb to give up modern comforts when we know how to make them green by making electricity renewable and electrifying everything. Changing habits like reducing driving and increasing transit would help. Some things will be hard, like airplanes and concrete. I agree somewhat that there is lots of distractions. There is a lot of talk about plastic and recycling that really has little to do with climate change.
  • TulliusCicero 2y ago
    Personally I'd love to take more trains instead of planes, and bike more instead of driving, but the system (at least in the US) just isn't set up for that. Train travel is expensive and sparse and slow, biking most places is uncomfortable and unsafe due to crappy infrastructure.
    • surfingdino 2y ago
      I agree. Trains are often a more efficient, more comfortable, and greener way to travel. I would love to be able to take them more often on weekends here in the UK, but they are expensive to the point of costing more than air travel, which makes no sense.
• Perz1val 2y ago
  The carbon emission is not a problem, the imbalance is. When we burn fossil fuels, we use carbon that was stored by dead plants being buried. We take carbon from the ground and dump it in the atmosphere. Plants take carbon from the atmosphere. If were to bury the equivalent amount of wood, we would be equal. Buried wood is not useful, but building from it also locks the carbon somewhere else that isn't an atmosphere. So... there actually is a finite number of wooden airports that completely offsets airplane carbon emissions.
  • katangafor 2y ago
    Does burying wood actually work? I'm assuming it's a little more complicated than literally burying it, cause wouldn't it decay and release carbon at some point anyway?
    • devilbunny 2y ago
      Without oxygen, any decay is going to be incredibly slow. They're still pulling usable timber from trees that sank in rivers after being cut in the southeastern US 200 years ago. It's not cheap, but if you want some real old-growth oak, it's a viable source. And that's not a completely anaerobic environment.
      • williamdclt 2y ago
        200y is not really an incredibly long time at all
        • devilbunny 2y ago
          No, it's not, but that's without any noticeable decay. A tree that's been felled in that environment and left above ground will rot very quickly.
    • Arrath 2y ago
      As most of the heavy construction and earth moving equipment you'd use to bury the wood will be burning diesel and releasing carbon the entire time, you enter some new Tyranny of the Rocket/Wagon equation.
• the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
  It is however looking much nicer. For that reason alone I would love to see more projects like this.
  • ddtaylor 2y ago
    Sometimes, dressing up a problem can breed apathy and desensitize people to harsh realities.
• wkat4242 2y ago
  It boggles my mind why the US doesn't simply offer high-speed trains for easy distances like those. That whole Northeast is just screaming for it with easily managable distances. Boston, NYC, Philly, Baltimore, DC.. All easily high-speed-trainable. Boston to Portland too, for that matter. Instead of spending 1 hour queueing at the airport, spend one hour on the train and you're there.
  • matthewowen 2y ago
    Boston to Portland, OR? The city discussed in the article? It's 3000 miles! I would personally love to live in a world where you can go 200mph on a train and do it in 15 hours but I wouldn't call it easy.
    • returningfory2 2y ago
      I'm guessing they meant Portland Maine, but yeah confusing given the article being discussed. :)
      • wkat4242 2y ago
        Oh yeah I saw Portland on the map, thought was was the one discussed :) It was the one in Maine indeed
  • exegete 2y ago
    It’s being planned, but projects like these are never certain: https://secretnyc.co/high-speed-train-nyc-to-boston/ https://secretnyc.co/high-speed-train-nyc-to-boston/
    • matthewowen 2y ago
      My understanding is that the problems of NYC -> Boston high speed rail are purely political, and basically come down to CT resistance to change The current track alignment is not conducive to high speed travel, and CT as a state has no interest in supporting a new alignment that is conducive because they would likely get _negative_ value out of it: as it stands, Acela trains pretty much all stop in New Haven and Stamford: why wouldn't they? If you go with a high speed link that aims to speed up Boston <> New York travel, it's more likely that you have trains that skip those stops, because additional stops are much more expensive for HSR from a speeding up and slowing down perspective, from a percentage of time added to trip perspective, and for an inefficient alignment perspective. In my view this is kind of a microcosm of the political problems of the geographically small states of the north east: states like CT/RI/DE especially have very narrow and niche concerns but because of their geographical position have effective veto power over regionally important things like "how expensive are the tolls to drive between New York and DC?" and "can you have HSR between new york and boston?"