We're not there yet to propel airplanes with batteries, not useful ones, anyway.
You don't have to outperform existing solutions to have a viable product. Price and other factors can easily swamp a particular performance stat. Different performance will lead to different use cases, but that is in no way the same as zero use cases.
But yep, it's not a solution for keeping our current flying habits. We will have to cut down on flying, a lot.
We have to make compromises, unless we prefer to lose the global warming battle. Humanity's benefits from cheap air travel are much less than losses from unchecked climate change.
1. Create a competing product that people prefer over air travel.
2. Artificially increase the price through taxation.
3. Artificially decrease supply through regulation.
There’s nothing on the horizon for option 1, and since we live in a democracy, democratic mechanisms are the only means you have for 2 or 3, unless you wanted to resort to something like terrorism.
Your presupposition that we can’t have cheap air travel while avoiding catastrophic man-made climate change is in no way obviously true, and your suggested solution is a utopian fantasy.
Not sure what you mean, globally there are no reductions in emissions. And you would have to phase out a lot more than just air travel. Personal cars too and overall reduce consumption like ten fold or more, basically destroy this whole capitalism-driven consumerist way of life.
This anti-capitalism stuff seems completely irrelevant too. Every economy is based on consumption, even socialist ones. The only reason the USSR didn’t have as many car owners as the USA is because their economy was in a permanent state of crisis. Market forces don’t go away when you implement socialism.
> Every economy is based on consumption
I'm talking about buying a tesla level of consumerism, that's not everyone in every economy, but relatively few and they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
> the world isn't going to end because you can't holiday in Bali
Perhaps not. But the Balinese economy would simply collapse. I’m sure the Balinese economy is of critical importance to the ~4 million people who live there. What you’ve chosen as a contrived example doesn’t even illustrate your point.
“But, what if tourism wasn’t critical to the Balinese economy, what if they had instead spend the last 50 years developing a different industry” you might say. Well, who knows. But they didn’t, and the criticality of air travel to Bali is not up for any meaningful debate.
Air travel is far too cheap, everything else follows from that.
> Air travel is far too cheap, everything else follows from that.
This is another outrageous claim. All aviation accounts for about 2% of global emissions.
The people commenting in this thread have chosen tourism, presumably because they think it’s the most frivolous source of aviation emissions. But even this is obviously critical to global economies. On top of that, the proposed solution amounts to complete economic isolationism. An idea I’m honestly surprised to see promoted on HN.
Suggesting that the world could possibly completely different from the way it actually is, and that the foundations of the global economy aren’t necessary isn’t suggesting a solution. It’s just utopian navel gazing.
This is what the IPCC is referring to when they say the climate impact is two to four times greater than from emissions alone.
This idea that all carbon emissions are terrible and must be eliminated is entirely counter productive, and entirely impossible.
We have left it too late, our only choice now is to do everything we can. There is plenty of air travel which is of marginal economic benefit that we can drop.
Planes make Australia a lot more viable, since it’s such a huge sparsely populated island that even a lot of domestic travel is better in the air. Bali and Indonesia’s various small distributed islands are much more dense, but island hopping by boat alone is also slow and unsuited to a lot of economic development.
Countries like Australia and Indonesia would take huge hits if air travel was a lot more expensive, much more so than America.
But in any case, that’s largely irrelevant to my point. This argument presupposes that the only way to prevent catastrophic man-made climate change is to put an end to air travel. That’s such an outrageous thing to claim that you can’t simply act like it’s something that’s obvious true, and that everybody should already believe.
We don't have to completely stop global air travel, but we have to make it significantly more expensive. The price to suck all the carbon out of the atmosphere again is not trivial. Long distance tourism will suffer from this.
But that aside, all aviation accounts for about 2% of global emissions, with tourism only being a portions of that. What is your basis for claiming that the only way to avoid catastrophic man-made climate change is to significantly reduce air travel? There are so many more ways to reduce emissions, with much higher ROIs, and much less economic impact. Electricity generation and land transport are so much easier to make renewable. The idea that the future of the world depends on reducing air travel is simply laughable.
Combined with the fact that the global warming pie is made up of many small slices makes it one of the most significant slices of the pie.
Which significant slice of the pie is it on this graph [0]? It’s a tiny slither of the transport one. Most of that graph is just electricity generation split into different categories.
[0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_avia...
An electric plane flying 2000 km as opposed to 15 000 km would require an even larger proportion of their take of weight as batteries, and would thus not be able to carry a lot of passengers/cargo on such a relatively short flight. It will require a fundamental breakthrough to make passenger flights of that distance economically feasible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777#Specifications [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#/medi...
Norway is sparsely populated and it has been a strategy for decades to have small airports everywhere out in the boonies.
Most flights are operated by twin-engined turboprops seating 20-80 passengers, in part doing short flights between islands in the north - an excellent use case for electrical planes.
The big question is whether one can recharge them fast enough - by swapping battery packs if need be. No airline is interested in replacing 50 turboprops with 100 electro planes to serve the same routes.