Show HN: Find the most climate friendly meeting location • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Find the most climate friendly meeting location

#81

Post by glaucon » Sun, Mar 12, 2023, 3:56 AM UTC

mplanchard wrote: post #44

e12e wrote: post #2

Does this account for number of people and trains/boat etc? [ed: on mobile so can't launch the app]

You can add an airport multiple times to account for multiple people coming from the same place.

When I do that it doesn't make any difference to the Total CO2. I just did Glasgow/London and then added an extra Glasgow and the total didn't change. In any case, as I've mentioned elsewhere, the CO2 seems to be based on the entire aircraft rather than per passenger, whether or not this is a good idea depends on the intention of the person looking at the tool.

Re: Show HN: Find the most climate friendly meeting location

#82

Post by h10h10h10 » Sun, Mar 12, 2023, 3:57 AM UTC

Dalewyn wrote: post #79

The correct answer is on the internet: Using Zoom, Discord, Skype, Teams, Facetime, or whatever your favored medium of internet video communications is. In this day and age, particularly in the wake of covid lockdowns, meetings in the flesh are a waste of time and money, let alone the resources; and I say that as someone who doesn't subscribe to environmentalism. You need to talk to someone? Radio and telephones solv…

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Re: Show HN: Find the most climate friendly meeting location

#83

Post by glaucon » Sun, Mar 12, 2023, 3:58 AM UTC

Total CO2 seems to be for the flight, rather than per passenger ? That might be a good idea or a bad idea but, for me, it would seem to be more suited to private jets rather than scheduled flights ? I'm really not sure, it's for the writer to say.

Re: Show HN: Find the most climate friendly meeting location

#84

Post by jameshart » Sun, Mar 12, 2023, 4:07 AM UTC

seabass-labrax wrote: post #69

wiml wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The carbon cost of a flight isn't a linear function of its distance, though — takeoff is much more expensive than cruise, and on long flights there's the cost of hauling the fuel itself, rocket-equation style. (Presumably the data underlying this website accounts for all that.)

Indeed; furthermore, some air traffic control regions have adopted a direct routing strategy, replacing the conventional routing strategy of published airways. This means that a flight from, say, Prague to Bucharest should be ever so slightly more efficient than the equivalent distance from London to Venice because of the direct routing.

All of which complexity just means that air travel carbon costs are a slightly more complex noneuclidean metric than just ‘spherical geometry’.

But you should still be able to define a metric over the graph of airports which is based on costs.

And what Fermat points tell us is that even in well behaved metric spaces like the plane there can be cases where minimizing distance means going to a node other than one of the starting point. So in more complex spaces it seems likely that that remains the case.

Which was all the op was asking.

Re: Show HN: Find the most climate friendly meeting location

#85

Post by micromacrofoot » Sun, Mar 12, 2023, 3:48 PM UTC

chroma wrote: post #65

micromacrofoot wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I refuse to fly to corporate meetings due to climate impact, and I have a few colleagues that do the same, so I don’t think this is universally true. I would respect a company that didn’t.

Depending on how you measure it, aircraft account for 1.9-3.5% of greenhouse gas emissions.[1] The biggest source is electricity and heating, followed by ground transportation.[2] Compared to almost all other sources, air travel is a rounding error. 1. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation 2. https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

I also produce more electricity than I use with solar panels (including heat) and drive an ev less than 2500 miles a year… so I’m an extreme case. This isn’t realistic for everyone because of how the world is built, but the hardest part was saving for the upfront investment (I’ll start generating profit from solar once I’m 7 years in, probably less now because I haven’t recalculated faster than expected inflation).

While not everyone can manage this due to upfront costs, a lot more people could do this, but simply don’t.