"Over all, air travel accounts for about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions — a far smaller share than emissions from passenger cars or power plants." 2.5% means we should focus on reducing somewhere else in the near term.
However, if you are a wealthy firstworlder businessman, air travel is likely your single biggest source of carbon emissions, aside from your car.
If you are a management consultant you probably produce more CO2 from air travel in a year than from all other CO2 sources in 5 years
Air travel is more important because of the water vapor far more than the carbon. The week following 9/11 was dramatically different. NASA recorded the change in daily temperature range. Less significantly, we had crystal clear skys where I live - for a week! Water vapor can also seed cloud formation. Air travel causes a daily cycle in this, which might just keep more heat in at night. You can look at data and see th…
> "The week following 9/11 was dramatically different. NASA recorded the change in daily temperature range. Less significantly, we had crystal clear skys where I live - for a week!" Do you have links for this?
I lived in Dallas at the time. It was eerie having a few days of No air traffic; and indeed the air was much less visible (so presumably cleaner).
If you need to travel long distances, there's little substitute for an airplane. If air travel accounts for less emissions than passenger cars, and if the top 15 polluting large container ships produce as much (noxious oxides of nitrogen and sulphur) pollution as all cars, then we need to fix shipping first. And if you look at a lot of the crap that is being shipped, it's stuff we just don't need. A lot of things are…
> If you need to travel long distances, there's little substitute for an airplane.
The emphasis here isn't on substitute, it's on "need". Not many people need to travel long distances on a regular basis; they're just made to believe they need do.
I skimmed their site and I'm yet to read the whitepaper, but I have one question that wasn't so far answered: what about transportation costs? Is this still net carbon negative when you account for the costs of moving all this rock and spreading it on the beaches?
They discuss that in their detailed proposals. There's a lot of discussion on siting and various transportation options. The math ends up working out.
Ok, thanks! I'll head on to reading the white paper then.
At least it got the segment right; ~30% of CO2 emissions are from transportation. It cracks me up when people talk about plastic and throwaway clothing as ways to cut back on carbon emissions.
People confuse two separate issues. Plastic straws and throwaway synthetic clothing are about microplastics. CO₂ emissions are about climate change. The former may or may not turn out to be a health hazard (I'm betting not that much), and may or may not affect the ecosystem negatively somehow. The latter is going to kill our civilization for sure. I think we should leave the former problem for another time, and focus…
An argument I've heard for also dealing with the former is that for some people it might be easier to approach because it is more obvious and less scary (more actionable). Once you have them onboard, you can start with the harder things. I'm not sure whether I believe that, but it's not totally implausible.
"Over all, air travel accounts for about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions — a far smaller share than emissions from passenger cars or power plants." 2.5% means we should focus on reducing somewhere else in the near term.
The idea of "focus" is only meaningful if you are resource-constrained - my 3-person team can only do 3 things at once, so they must focus.
However, when talking about world climate actions, we have 7 billion people acting. There's no need to focus. We can cut air travel AND ALSO do everything else. And in fact we need to.
There's a cavernous gap between the apocalyptic rhetoric from climate activists and the brittle, ineffective policy they actually promote. If climate activists really believed that climate change were a near-term catastrophic threat, they'd jump on the change to reduce emissions using whatever techniques and technology worked. "Geoengineering? Great! Nuclear power? Great!" --- that's what someone genuinely concerned…
I'm a climate activist, and I can't control how others act, but I'm in favor of, like you say, anything that works. The Citizens' Climate Lobby is focusing on a carbon fee and dividend. I'm new to the movement (so take what I say with a grain of salt) but I like what I see so far. We're very focused on one particular legislative approach, not because other things won't help, but because it's hard enough getting legis…
The environmental movement has a lot to answer for, for setting back progress of nuclear power by decades.
I fly fairly frequently to California from NY for work, lately after reading a few articles like this, I wonder if I should put my foot down to my manager and tell them that I'm not going to anymore until flying is less terrible for the atmosphere. I don't think I'll be fired for that, and even if I were I'd probably be able to find another job without too much trouble at this point, but I feel a bit bad for people d…
It would be great if more people did this. In my opinion, air travel is pretty low hanging fruit when it comes reducing personal carbon footprints. I'll spend some time closer to home rather than hopping across the ocean/continent for every vacation.
"Over all, air travel accounts for about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions — a far smaller share than emissions from passenger cars or power plants." 2.5% means we should focus on reducing somewhere else in the near term.
Near term, we should be slamming money into batteries and energy density of said batteries, if we want to decarbonize air-travel. Electric planes have numerous advantages, but jet fuel is just so much more energy dense than a battery at the current juncture. Hopefully by 2050, we will be able to scale up from smaller electric airplanes in the 2020-2030 timeframe, such that jet liners will be decarbonized too.
It seems to me that synthetic or plant-based carbon-neutral fuels are more feasible in the near-term, though I don't know what the current state of the art is.
In the long term, electric planes would be ideal if we can figure out energy storage (or perhaps wireless energy transmission).
If you need to travel long distances, there's little substitute for an airplane. If air travel accounts for less emissions than passenger cars, and if the top 15 polluting large container ships produce as much (noxious oxides of nitrogen and sulphur) pollution as all cars, then we need to fix shipping first. And if you look at a lot of the crap that is being shipped, it's stuff we just don't need. A lot of things are…
(And little substitute for burning hydrocarbons as airplane propellant. Energy density and stuff like fire safety really really matters in aviation.)
Totally agree that air travel is one of the last places to look for carbon savings. That said, carbon offset taxes should be applied where they are not already. The market can price this cost in and judge whether the value is there, if the incentives are structured correctly.