Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

There’s no way that number is correct. A 737 carries not quite 7,000 gallons of fuel, so that would imply the average American has a carbon footprint of 0.7 gallons of jet fuel per year, if you used the full capacity of a 737 to fly coast to coast. A 737 doesn’t fully drain its tanks on that trip, and smaller jets will use less.

View on HN

Hmm, yes, obviously I must have misquoted the figure -- something's wrong. Even at one US person per year, it's pretty egregious and would be hard for me to rationalize.

He said private. So 1-4 people at 400 gallons per hour.

That makes even less sense. Even if it's one person flying for 6 hours, 2400 gallons of burned kerosene is several orders of magnitude less GHG emissions than 10,000 Americans in a year.

Edit: To put numbers on it, each American emits 16,500 kg of CO2 per year, 2400 gallons of jet fuel emits 21,360 kg of CO2. So it's more like one American's emissions in a year.

>So it's more like one American's emissions in a year.

That still seems horrible to me.

I mean... it's not great. But it's only a few hundred dollars worth of carbon offsets, which is considerably less than the existing tax on the jet fuel.

And that's only one way eh? Do 1 round-trip private trip a month and suddenly that's 24-people's worth of yearly emissions.

I misread this as comparing burning 2,400 gallons of kerosene versus burning 10,000 Americans and was becoming very concerned about where you are getting you data.

I assume the private flying crowd is doing multiple flights per year. Let's say 1 a month? That'd get to 2 orders of magnitude away.

Right, so considerably less fuel than a 737 carries. I used that as a worst case and it’s still orders of magnitude short.

1-4 people aren’t flying a plane that burns 400/hour. A Citation burns 160/hour and holds a heck of a lot more than 1-4. A Cirrus jet — perfect for 1-4 passengers burns 47 gallons per hour. Even a Gulfstream V burns 370 per hour and holds 12-16 passengers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com