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Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

nytimes.com

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Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#201

Post by saalweachter »

blunte wrote: post #136

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…

> ... then we need to fix shipping first.

The problem with this logic is that we aren't one person looking at a bug tracker queue deciding one to tackle next. We are a civilization.

We need to fix everything all at once, as quickly as possible.

If shipping is a problem, fix it now.

If air travel is a problem, fix it now.

If grid electric is a problem, fix it now.

If automotive emissions are a problem, fix it now.

We are many; we can do much.

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#202

Post by sokoloff »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #124
_Microft wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's two questions for you which are not hard to answer but, frankly, I do not expect to read the answers here. Why? Because it would show how utterly wrong the suggestion of carbon sequestration for solving this problem was. First: how much mass (i.e. kg or tons) of C0_2 is emitted per year? Second: what is the total mass of concrete produced per year worldwide? (This is only an exercise to give parent poster an i…

Re your first question, quick googling suggests some 37 billion tons of CO₂ per year. So sure, that's a lot. But then again, not that lot. Instead of asking questions, why don't you tell us why we couldn't possibly sequester that much carbon annually? How big is the divide between what we could do and what needs to be done? (I must say the idea of sequestering carbon seems emotionally appealing to me because it turns…

It seems to me like we need to do both: tax carbon (ideally globally, but even if half the developed countries do it, it's huge) AND use that tax money to work on research and deployment of carbon sequestration or carbon to fuel conversion.

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#203

Post by alexhutcheson »

ahelwer wrote: post #17

It is an interesting exercise to ask people to imagine a world without air travel. Where you can't just appear halfway around the world at the drop of a hat. Travel again becomes the domain of boats & trains. To almost anyone you talk to, banning air travel sounds completely ridiculous. In reality it wouldn't be enough by itself. It's on the lower end of action that is required.

Substituting to travel by boat would almost definitely increase carbon output, unless you mean sailboats. Carbon output is the integral of emissions/hour over time, and a comparable boat trip could take weeks.

High speed rail is also not as great as people think - true HSR uses a pretty huge amount of electricity, which has to come from somewhere. Conventional (aka medium-speed) rail on electrified tracks is probably the sweet spot for efficiency, but the travel times aren't going to make most people happy.

More realistically, the solution in a world where carbon is "properly" priced would be that people travel a lot less overall.

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#204

Post by Robotbeat »

nateburke wrote: post #193
Lramseyer wrote: post #168

One thing that's very important to keep in mind when looking at air travel emissions is how fuel efficient planes actually are. The math works out to around 100 miles per gallon per passenger. And at an underwhelming 2.5% of global emissions, I can't really put it in the category of "low hanging fruit." That's not to say that we shouldn't invest in things like high speed rail, (because we absolutely will see quality…

Yes, while 100 mpg per passenger is roughly 2x the best hybrid car, the presence of air travel as an option, especially in a business context allows individuals to accrue many orders of magnitude _more miles_. MPG per passenger is the wrong unit. Gallons per person per hour of active transport seems like a better unit to measure. For example, say your non-hybrid car gets 30 mpg, and you average 30 miles per hour betw…

Passenger-hour is not an appropriate metric here. passenger-miles is.

But I should point out here that electric cars usually get 100mpge or better. And it's already feasible to do road trips in a Tesla. I'll be doing a (short) road trip with my first-gen Leaf.

For domestic trips, we can replace air travel with regional electric buses in the near term and electric airplanes in the mid-term. In the far-term, we can do even long-haul air travel using lithium-air batteries or very high performance lithium/sulfur or lithium metal anode batteries and extremely efficient airframes and multiple hops. That'd be faster and cheaper (at least in the US with high infrastructure costs) than high speed rail.

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#205

Post by sokoloff »

mveety wrote: post #20
martamoreno2 wrote: post #8

2.5% eh? We should all immediately stop flying... This is outrageous. Just imagine, 2.5%!! But on a more serious note, this article is again wrong, like so many others about climate change. Being a combination of clickbait and false assumptions, it fails to miss the point entirely that first, 2.5% are irrelevant, but also that it makes no sense whatsoever to tackle this now. The technology is just not there yet. What…

Also if we suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere we could turn it into petrochemicals and fuel which would help with making existing things carbon neutral.

That's the most viable path to sustainable aviation (rather than electrifying the fleet).

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#206

Post by tunesmith »

martamoreno2 wrote: post #8

2.5% eh? We should all immediately stop flying... This is outrageous. Just imagine, 2.5%!! But on a more serious note, this article is again wrong, like so many others about climate change. Being a combination of clickbait and false assumptions, it fails to miss the point entirely that first, 2.5% are irrelevant, but also that it makes no sense whatsoever to tackle this now. The technology is just not there yet. What…

Why are you arguing "A instead of B" when we can do "A and B"?

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#208

Post by dr_dshiv »

jnwatson wrote: post #160
tobib wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you learned nothing from the movie "Snowpiercer"?

The silly dystopian arguments against climate engineering are facile. Do you think the first attempt will be done at global scale? No, it will be done first at small scale, and then larger and larger. There is no reasonable scenario in which we would be surprised by the impact of climate engineering.

Especially when using techniques like marine cloud brightening.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening

Imagine if cruise ships and cargo ships had snow machine jets on the back, lofting prepped salt water into the air, to seed clouds.

The problem is that this is geoengineering which means career suicide for interested scientists. At the moment.

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#209

Post by munk-a »

holler wrote: post #56
munk-a wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually believe this, could you maybe expand on for what interactions you think personal presence is still necessary and adds real value?

the visceral human experience brought about by the complex interaction of each sense combining together. For example when when you're standing on a cliff overlooking the majestic ocean, eyes absorbing the light as it reflects off the water and the sky, listening to the waves as they crash against the rocks, smelling the distinct salty coastal essence, and observing the cool wind flowing about your limbs. This complex…

Hrm, I had read the start of the thread a bit differently and assumed more within the realm of business... I do absolutely agree that vacation travel is worth it, but I'm less convinced that a sales dude who flies from city to city every other day is actually needed and can't be replaced with telepresence.

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#210

Post by Robotbeat »

tylerpachal wrote: post #148
tombert wrote: post #86

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.

I think getting an electric car is even lower hanging. No change in lifestyle, a similar total cost of ownership, but a factor of 2.5-3x lower emissions with even the current grid (and effectively zero emissions in the future grid we'll need anyway).

(Plus now you can go on emissions-free road trips.)

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