If this ever flies and there is a kerosene carbon tax, that plane is dead.
Or without a carbon tax… 200 gallons of jet fuel makes 1 ton of CO2 and costs ~$800. Current state of the art in CO2 capture is $94/ton. For a self imposed 12% fuel surcharge they could be carbon neutral.
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¹ http://www.rff.org/blog/2017/calculating-various-fuel-prices...
https://www.iata.org/publications/economics/fuel-monitor/Pag...
I suspect at "airline" scale there is a large discount over the full service pump prices I'm seeing. This might change the percentages to 10% and 25%.
It's also possible I'm seeing the "putz price". That made up price that "no one really pays", unless you are that guy who doesn't know better and does.
It probably wouldn't significantly alter the cost of carbon neutrality, but something to bear in mind.
Current carbon tax schemes are laughable and will not be sufficient to prevent disastrous climate change. The carbon tax calculator in the article you linked only goes up to $50/ton, while the IPCC report calls for carbon prices as high as $14,300/ton by 2050. Obviously prices that high would mean a de facto ban on carbon. And that's what we need to avert disaster.
Just wanted to weigh in here a bit...
You are correct that increased emissions are definitely bad, but you may have missed how a carbon tax scheme would work in practice.
From a climate perspective, there is not much difference between being zero carbon versus carbon neutral. In other words, adding 1kg of CO2 in one place, and removing it elsewhere is effectively the same as being zero carbon.
So, while a carbon tax does create an economic incentive to avoid emitting carbon, what it really creates is a market to offset carbon. No one would pay a $10,000/ton tax when they can pay someone else $100/ton to offset the same amount of carbon from the air. The smooth ramp-up of any carbon tax allows offset price discovery without significant disruption.
Anyway, net result of a carbon tax would make having a plane be effectively carbon free, and current air travel would thus not be unsustainable.
In the airplane case, what would likely happen is that biofuels, which are inherently carbon neutral, would come to dominate (easier to let plants capture carbon and then turn them into fuel than to sequester CO2 directly from the air). However, that is irrelevant from a consumer perspective, and we'll just see an x% increase in cost as the offset market price gets baked in.
That's cap-and-trade, not a carbon tax.
Traditional cap-and-trade has a very valid criticism that it doesn't fix the problem, only limits it slightly and moves it around. If you add carbon-removers into the equation, and set things up to have 0 or even negative carbon per year, and then you actually do fix the problem.
Out of interest, may we ask - How do you reconcile your carbon emission research against other ecological considerations? Does your group use a preexisting model to map externalities / run simulations?
Many thanks (Apologies for taking the conversation out of scope slightly)
"Disgust first, ask questions later," is 180 degrees in the wrong direction for improving public discourse. I urge you to reconsider, then lead by example.
It's the lack of fuel efficiency which has killed off various other exploratory supersonic flight programmes from ever going anywhere. Ultimately to be successful they have to convince airlines the extra speed will convince passengers to pay for the extra fuel. I think that's unlikely in the near future, and Boom will have to raise a lot more to convince people otherwise.
Comparable would be Tesla raising $100,000
And even then we're still talking a smaller body - 737, 757, not so much a 777/787.
While this may eventually change, in the short term, airlines probably have less to fear about carbon taxes than any other industry.
[1] https://www.markey.senate.gov/GlobalWarming/files/LTTR/ACES/...