5 ms·
Modern airliner travel is about as or more co2-efficient as riding a bus.
by hoseja 2y ago
Modern airliner travel is about as or more co2-efficient as riding a bus.
- unsigner 2y agoI don’t regularly take buses to the other side of Europe to eat some gelato and gawk at cathedrals for a weekend. A lot of people use cheap airlines as cheap entertainment.
- dagw 2y agodon’t regularly take buses to the other side of Europe They used to. When I was growing up, way before budget airlines, buses used to be the way you traveled around Europe for cheap.
- acdha 2y agoDefinitely - and it’s nowhere near the carbon emissions so I think what happened is that they saw someone else’s data (hopefully inadvertently) comparing a mostly full long haul flight (148gm CO2/passenger/kilometer) to a city bus (97g) rather than the long-distance buses you mentioned which are far more efficient since they don’t stop frequently (27g). https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
- nurbl 2y agoPossible, but taking the bus halfway around the world would also produce a lot of emissions.
- rob74 2y agoIf the airplanes are completely full (which, despite all attempts by Ryanair to scare away their customers, they apparently still are). But this fails to account for "induced demand": if flights would be more expensive or less convenient, people wouldn't fly on weekend trips/holidays, visiting relatives in faraway countries etc. as frequently as they do now.
- hoseja 2y agoSo you are against human flourishing. I see.
- Mashimo 2y agoIt's the first time I hear about that. Do you by any chance have more information? Or keywords where I can find more?
- acdha 2y agoI haven’t seen any figures supporting that - do you have a citation? https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint has data from 2022 for passenger-kilometers in the UK: Domestic flight 246 g Diesel car 171 g Petrol car 170 g Short-haul flight 151 g Long-haul flight 148 g Motorbike 114 g Bus (average) 97 g Bus (local London) 79 g Plug-in hybrid 68 g Electric car 47 g National rail 35 g Tram 29 g London Underground 28 g Coach (bus) 27 g Ferry (foot passenger) 19 g Eurostar (to Paris) 4 g So the only way that could be true would be if the bus was significantly emptier than the plane so the same emissions were amortized over an order of magnitude fewer passengers. Moreover, this ignores the future: there’s a straightforward path to electrifying a bus which has been deployed in production for years but no proven alternative for planes.