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Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

nytimes.com

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Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#251

Post by einpoklum »

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…

> Oh, and bikes and feet for the last 1-2km.

1. Bikes work for the last 0-5km easily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands

2. Don't forget lightweight electric micro-cars for the disabled. i.e. like this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canta_(vehicle)

but electric.

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#252

Post by the_gastropod »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #243
the_gastropod wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ticking off the number of countries you've visited is hardly a benevolent hobby. You can learn the history, culture, language, traditions, etc. of any country by opening a book, if that's really what you're interested in.

> You can learn the history, culture, language, traditions, etc. of any country by opening a book Is this a serious assertion? You think I can learn the culture of, say, Japan, from a book as well as by actually living there for a short period and experiencing it? This strikes me as woefully naive. Learning things from books, from a distance is fine and good, but there's no true substitute for being there , for exper…

I strongly suspect an average student who studied Japanese in college knows more about Japan than an average tourist who went to Japan for a week or two, yes.

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#253

Post by jbattle »

ScottBurson wrote: post #97
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…

I don't know about carbon capture, but I do think we should be researching sulfur aerosols and iron fertilization. See Oliver Morton's excellent book The Planet Remade .

I'm betting on sulfur aerosols. The energy requirements are modest, the impact is apparently relatively reversible, the side effects seem less potentially catastrophic than iron fertilization.

I look at the street outside my office and simply can't picture us deploying enough carbon capture machines to offset how much we're pumping into the air. I hope I'm wrong.

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#254

Post by esotericn »

Robotbeat wrote: post #204
nateburke wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> electric cars usually get 100mpge or better

Right, and the mpge metric is flawed, because it assumes a (typically bad) energy mix.

5km driven in the UK is equivalent to 100km driven in Sweden.

The former sits at an average of approx. 300gCO2e/kWh. The latter at 15gCO2e/kWh.

With electric cars, the ultimate situation is that all of the carbon cost is in the production of the car/roads and maintenance thereof. Which is another issue that can be targeted and mitigated.

By contrast the only ultimate hope for a combustion powered plane or car is carbon capture.

The 'MPGe' of an electric car in a country with 90%+ renewable energy is like, 1000 or something daft like that.

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#255

Post by Vomzor »

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…

Some links to prove carbon capture is not just some fairy tale.

>A Canadian company, called Carbon Engineering, has published peer-reviewed findings, which show the process (carbon capture) can now be done for less than $100 per ton. This is a major improvement on current estimates of $600 per ton.[1]

>In 2016, Hollub became the first female CEO of a major international oil company. ... Hollub’s leadership has brought about a change in thinking. She realized that the company’s carbon-capture expertise could be used not just to make profits for shareholders but also to do climate good. That’s why Hollub is confident that Oxy can become carbon neutral, and why she was sitting at a table in Edinburgh, Scotland in November 2018 with Carbon Engineering’s Oldham. As of this year, Carbon Engineering has raised about $100 million, including about $15 million of government funds. Carbon also counts oil major Chevron and mining giant BHP as investors[2]

>Crystalline nets harvest water from desert air, turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel ... a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, reported that he and his colleagues have created a solar-powered device that could provide water for millions in water-stressed regions. At its heart is a porous crystalline material, known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), that acts like a sponge: It sucks water vapor out of air, even in the desert, and then releases it as liquid water. ... By mixing and matching the metals and linkers, researchers found they could tailor the pores to capture gas molecules, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide (CO2).[3]

>Net Power, a startup that built the world’s first zero-emissions fossil-fuel power plant in Texas. Earlier this year, Net Power fired up a $150-million power plant that burns natural gas but has the ability to capture 100% of its carbon emissions.[4]

[1] http://www.climateaction.org/news/breakthrough-made-in-lower...

[2]https://qz.com/1638096/the-story-behind-the-worlds-first-lar...

[3]https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/crystalline-nets-har...

[4]https://qz.com/1456378/occidental-petroleum-is-now-an-invest...

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#256

Post by katbyte »

the_gastropod wrote: post #252
TulliusCicero wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can learn the history, culture, language, traditions, etc. of any country by opening a book Is this a serious assertion? You think I can learn the culture of, say, Japan, from a book as well as by actually living there for a short period and experiencing it? This strikes me as woefully naive. Learning things from books, from a distance is fine and good, but there's no true substitute for being there , for exper…

I strongly suspect an average student who studied Japanese in college knows more about Japan than an average tourist who went to Japan for a week or two, yes.

Im Canadian, I’ve read and researched a lot. I thought I knew my country but then I drove across it and realized how little I knew. Experiencing a place, people and culture is imho impossible without being there and present.

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#257

Post by mehrdadn »

seem_2211 wrote: post #250
mehrdadn wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be blunt, so what? That sucks for sales stuff, it's not like I said conferences are the only things that need to change. Maybe the practices there need to change there just like for conferences and other stuff. Nobody said it's easy or nice or effective or whatever for humans to do long distance. Just that you need to start sacrificing somewhere and I sure as heck find it more reasonable and humane to start…

As someone in sales, I think I would be EXTREMELY supportive of all of my competition deciding to do the eco conscious thing, and declining to fly to clients. It'd be great. No chance that businesses will stop paying for people to travel. And their budgets are much bigger than individuals visiting family. Take a look at the entire private jet market - basically a very small wedge of HNWs and lots of executives flying…

Yeah, it'd be great, until your clients stop viewing it as a noble thing and start seeing it as a disgusting and wasteful thing. Then your competition will be happier than you.

People's expectations are malleable. It's not easy to change them, but it's necessary and it's possible. And once that happens, the game will change, and it will force you to change your tune accordingly.

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#258

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

> noxious oxides of nitrogen and sulphur

People keep repeating that. Nobody cares about nitrogen and sulfur oxides on deep sea. Good luck trying to even find evidence it's locally harmful to organisms (most likely, it isn't). At the extent that people are against ship emissions, it's about what they emit at the coast, and that is a very small share of that total you cite.

Ships are quite clean of the pollutants that matter. They beat planes on CO2 emission by a huge margin.

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#259

Post by abootstrapper »

Robotbeat wrote: post #210
tylerpachal wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Low hanging fruit, assuming you can afford to purchase a new car. Soooo, not so low hanging for a lot of people.

Re: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions

#260

Post by abootstrapper »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #167
kaybe wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't stop completely that easily reducing would also be a good start and maybe easier to achieve. edit: Another parameter you have control over is the amount of luggage you bring. A 30kg luggage allowance is a considerable fraction of most people's weight. Sure, they will fill the plane up with other things, but at least that's not on you.

Another option would be to obtain approval for expensing carbon offsets for unavoidable flights.

That’s a great idea to pitch. It has the side benefit of incentivizing less travel due to increased expense.
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