Flight risk: can we take the carbon out of air travel?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Nobody seems to discuss how we collectively work towards being happy with traveling less and eating more substainably.
Were people not happy before we took flights so often and ate meat for every meal? What about changes to work and social culture so frequent and global travel is no longer the norm?
The uncomfortable truth to me is that if everyone is always chasing the new next best thing, nothing we do is going to make our lifestyles substantial. We need to adapt to being happy with what we have or less rather than looking for solutions that feed into an entitlement of always wanting more.
Perhaps that is the inevitable solution.
That is actually what taxation-based solutions do. They make travel cost more, so fewer people do it.
People aren't happy about it though, so promising to remove the taxes is a way to win votes at the next election. The incentive becomes a voter bargaining chip rather than an practical long term solution.
We need a solution that actually stops a majority of people wanting to fly so much, then removing the taxation isn't a way to win votes, and consequently it remains in place as disincentive to those who do want to fly.
Take renewable energy and synthesize (non-fossil) jet fuel from atmospheric CO2, then burn that in conventional jets. We have all the key tech elements now except for scale. Tomorrow’s emissions (of CO2 anyway) are offset by today’s sequestering.
If you tax CO2 emission (and credit sequestering), this might be financially competitive. (Obviously, if you tax it enough, it would be.)
I see scaling up existing tech as far more possible/plausible than changing everyone’s desires.
Sequestering is useful but it tends to assume it doesn't matter where the CO2 is released so long as it's captured. There could be a big difference in the impact between CO2 released at ground level and CO2 released at 40,000 feet from a 747. NASA launched a satellite in 2014 to examine this exact issue - https://ocov2.jpl.nasa.gov/
Perhaps we could remove all comfort from airplanes and airports. Aluminum seats. No windows. No flight attendants. And a poster on the back of every seat saying "flying hurts the planet" (similar to the graphic warning labels on cigarettes in many countries).
The TSA seems to work quite well at doing that.
Maybe, but that hasn't really been how most other taxes have worked. Cigarettes for instance are heavily taxed, but you don't see a lot of people running on reducing those taxes.
> We need a solution that actually stops a majority of people wanting to fly so much, then removing the taxation isn't a way to win votes, and consequently it remains in place as disincentive to those who do want to fly.
It seems to me that raising the price of travel will stop people wanting to fly so much. I think the problem with flight right now is it got just cheap enough that the upper-middle class can afford to do it quite frequently. And once that happens, it starts to permeate the culture in the way that you are now seeing. If you double the cost, it will start to fade back out again.
Additionally, while leisure travel might be the most visible to a lot of people, there is a tremendous amount of business travel, and that probably makes up the majority of all air traffic. If I had to guess, i'd say 80% of that business travel is unnecessary. For instance, I work at a financial firm, and that firm employs analysts who study companies. Periodically these analysts fly out to go to "investor days" and do things like meet with company management. The marginal utility of them being physically in the same space as these people is probably quite close to zero. If the cost of flights were substantially increased, my guess is that they would stop this practice entirely, or curtail it quite a bit.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, <25% of Americans smoke cigarettes, while >75% of them have taken a flight at some point in their lives. If 75% smoked, I guarantee people would be running on eliminating cigarette taxes. I'm personally in favor of carbon taxes on flights but I'd imagine "under my administration, flying would be affordable for the middle class again" could be a pretty effective message.
Which is fine, but it punishes us for travelling rather than encouraging us not to.
Those with significant disposable income who might go on three or more leisure flights per year (e.g. one ski trip, one beach holiday, one city break) may not notice until it gets really expensive. They can often downgrade their hotel/restaurant/activity choices to compensate.
It also has the potential to just move the problem until the overall price balances out: Those who are budgeting for a week in the Balearics may choose cheaper areas like Dalaman or Burgas to offset the extra cost elsewhere.
The other thing is that it pushes up the income level at which one is too poor to travel. This is good in that because it means fewer people do it, there are fewer passenger miles undertaken overall.
However, it's a similar issue to arguments of an unfair eco burden being placed on developing countries - Those of us who have already benefitted from poisoning the world are now telling others that they have to rein in their emissions. If the richer people I mention above have to drop one of their annual foreign holidays due to the expense are still going on two more return trips than the ones who have to drop their only holiday.
All of this is a long winded way of saying that certain kinds of taxation solution can allow certain people to maintain their current lifestyle, by pricing others out of it.
Why do you think this distinction is important, though? They seem like two sides of the same coin to me.
> Those with significant disposable income who might go on three or more leisure flights per year (e.g. one ski trip, one beach holiday, one city break) may not notice until it gets really expensive. They can often downgrade their hotel/restaurant/activity choices to compensate.
Sure that's true. But as you ratchet up the tax, fewer and fewer people can afford it. And if you set the tax at its efficient point, you can use the revenue it generates to offset the carbon the planes emit.
> However, it's a similar issue to arguments of an unfair eco burden being placed on developing countries - Those of us who have already benefitted from poisoning the world are now telling others that they have to rein in their emissions. If the richer people I mention above have to drop one of their annual foreign holidays due to the expense are still going on two more return trips than the ones who have to drop their only holiday.
This is a valid criticism for things like industrial development. I don't think it applies as much to leisure activities like jet travel, though I can see an argument for it there too.
However, you can structure the tax in a progressive way. Wealthier countries pay more, and subsidize poorer countries. So they each get to use comparable amounts of jet travel, but the richer countries pay much more than the poorer countries.
> All of this is a long winded way of saying that certain kinds of taxation solution can allow certain people to maintain their current lifestyle, by pricing others out of it.
Yes, that's exactly right though. At the end of the day, you either have to ban jet travel entirely, or treat it as a scarce resource. If you're not going to completely ban it, then you have to decide who gets to use it. The way we do that is with all our scarce resources is money.
Some of these solutions have small to large social impacts in part of the population (see bans on older diesel cars, for example), especially the one that is not too well off (not necessarily poor, let's say lower middle class).
One might want to implement them anyway, but the way I see it, is that some proponents act as if consequences won't exist. They need to be taken into account.
The big problem is that even those changes are hard. It is much simpler to have giant wars that cull 5-10% of the world population. In fact, we might end up with both: giant wars, and the survivors deciding they don't want more such wars and trying to fix the root cause of them.
Assuming civilization doesn't collapse wholesale, of course…
We need to change today. But it’s very hard.
(1) I think/hope technology may actually be enough.
(2) But that doesn't matter, because we're unwilling to even make the small changes that encourage better technologies.
Global war today is a good deal more serious prospect than global war in the early 20th century. Not sure you could have a global war without culling a whole lot more than 5 to 10% of people. Any war between Russia, or China, or the EU, or the US, is going to take out a very large number of people. 5% - 10% is extremely optimistic.
Instead, I see a "good life" as one where each individual is able to choose their overall lifestyle by balancing the factors that make it up: career, family, day to day culture (e.g. deep south vs. midwest, big city vs. rural), and passion (e.g. hobbies, art, athletics, writing, etc.)
People start to become unhappy when these aspects of their life become mutually exclusive. For example:
- A gay person has to live in the deep south in order to see their family.
- A worker has to build their sense of purpose/identity around their work because they can't pursue their own passions outside of work.
The problem that I see is that, at least in America, things are so spread out geographically that balancing these aspects often requires travel. Your family may live in another city so you travel a couple times a year to see them on holidays. In order to advance your career you travel to attend a conference. In order to pursue your passion you travel to learn from an experienced instructor or to participate in a competition. Etc.
The only way that I could see Americans being able to keep the parts of their life in balance while cutting down on flights is if we instead had the infrastructure and vacation days to travel via public transportation. However, I don't see a way for that to realistically happen.
They were happy, but when they got the opportunity they caught it, and they became happier.
The problem with too many environmentalists is that they consider it feasible for a large number of people to voluntarily give up their modern comfort to go back to a lifestyle their grandparents escaped from as soon as they could.
My point is: just because something is popular doesn’t mean it leads to health or happiness—especially in the long term.
Technology always tends to doing more with less rather than the austere doing less with less. Progress always should be forward, not backward.
The naysayers are more often wrong than right. The peak oil and serious over population scares or the early 70s did not pan out at all, California didn’t become a toxic wasteland, etc...
I once saw a chart with estimated per-capita energy use on a 3000 year timeline. That's when I formed this opinion. Per capita energy use never went down in human history. Unfortunately, I can't find the same chart. Here's a 60 year trend, as a poor substitute: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE
We are lucky. Solar power is viable, and is economically at a point where it is very competitive. The end is still open, but we _may_ still avoid doom.
I really don't like cheap anti-Americanism that is fashionable in some circles, but when it comes to climate change, the US is in fact the major player when it comes to GHG's. People seem to like to "both sides" the argument to be fair (which is a laudable impulse) to all sides, but a look at the actual data makes it clear the US is the main responsible party when it comes climate change. It's one of those times where extremist voices from say climate activists happens to be truer than what one thinks.
That said, of course it still has to be global. The thing is due to the actual magnitude, even if the rest of the world's consumption went to zero, the US alone would further the climate catastrophe because we produce a large fraction of it.
US and Europe, combined, have about a billion people. The world is ten times that. Naturally, part of the remaining 9 billion already live in developed economies. Most don't, however. Those that do not have our standard of living _will_ increase their energy consumption as they develop, and they will develop.
Any decrease in EU+US energy consumption, be it via efficiency gains, be it via a very doubtful voluntary decrease in quality of life, will get wiped by the rest of the world developing.
I can comfortably state this: If we do not change energy sources towards clean energy, no other measure will save us. Working other avenues is an illusion that will keep us busy while driving towards the abyss.
If the wealthiest and largest total contributor shirks its responsibility, why on Earth should anyone else lift a finger?
Conversely, once Western countries are below the per capita emissions of China, real political pressure can be applied.
Countries will do what is most efficient for them. Luckily, as solar is now cheaper than coal, it starts to look like the most efficient option is clean. Luckily, as I said before.
Because of pragmatism. Ask someone to make a significant sacrifice and they'll tell you to piss off. Hell, I'll use myself as an example: try telling my SO and I that we can no longer fly a few times a year to the alps for winter sports and I'll just be rude and laugh at you. Sure, people were happy before they had good meat available, they were also happy before polio was eradicated but now we're happier and nobody's going to sacrifice that.
It's suggestions like these "oh, people should give up a lot of things that they enjoy" that makes me look pretty unfavorably towards modern environmentalism: it's not going to happen, we need pragmatic solutions that will actually work in the real world. This is where environmental engineering comes in but God forbid someone suggest us actually making intended changes to our climate to fix problems to the current breed of environmentalists without them foaming at the mouth. Thankfully I rest easy in knowing that eventually this will be an inevitability, as soon as it becomes obvious that the idealistic path is a dead-end.
The only environmental engineering that can bring back the world our civilization is used to is sucking carbon from the air or water and sequestering it.
All the rest have rather large tradeoffs. Sunshades/aerosols? Still leaves the oceans to acidify. As well as any other negative effects of CO2 (there are some preliminary studies showing cognitive effects). Not to mention any unforeseen side effects, and also then that our survival depends in continual geoengineering with bo interruption due to war etc.
The parent you're replying to is also wrong though. We can't just "use less" for two reasons.
1. We're already past some tipping points. We basically need to use zero
2. Keeping the current population alive depends on carbon use at present
We probably will geoengineer if we fail to figure out negative emissions, but I think you're far too blasé about the consequences.
We as a spices have one advantage that have brought us where we are: the advent of tool usage. And that will be the solution too. On a time frame of 100-200 years we will solve energy scarcity through various means (fusion, focused space solar arrays, rentables, etc.). Then we can build the tools to maintain our current and future lifestyle. We can produce synthetic meat / plant meat. We can start stacked farming with in-door illumination. We can capture methane in in-door stables with advanced air management techniques. We can create terraforming towers mega-structures that remove all the carbon dioxide we blew into the atmosphere and put it back into the ground or into hydrocarbon fuel tanks or something. We are really good at these kind of things, but only once it starts to really hurt.
So far it doesn't. There is the specter of hurt to come and a few early warning signs, but in aggregate we don't give a damn about it so far. When we start to burn, our plains become barren and our population is collapsing, then we will start address the actual problems and do something about them. Maybe, the optimistic version. We have the potential to do it.
Alternatively we can just bitch about it until the population is decimated and then have the remaining few survivors start a new civilization a few hundred years down the line.
Or we just annihilate ourselves because of pent up aggression about the miserable state of affair we brought ourself into. We can be very vengeful if we are cornered.
Whatever it will be, it probably will be interesting (for an outside observer).
I absolutely agree! Humankind is innovative and can move mountains when working together. It seems to take some time to make everyone aware but ultimately a lot of resources will flow into solving the climate crisis.
> Also in feudal times people lived 30 years on average and had horrible quality of life, spending most of the time with back breaking work
I don't think so.. Look for example at indigenous tribes, they don't work back-breaking 14-hour days, as far as I know. And if you consider that back in the day half of the children died before the age of 5, that leaves a comfortable live expectation of 60 years for anyone surviving childhood!
And saying “don’t fly, knuckleheads” isn’t the same as saying “don’t ski”.
The snow trains are arguably a better way to do it: you don’t have to get a stupidly early flight and you don’t face a 2+ hr coach ride to the resort. In some resorts the train leaves you ten minutes from the slopes.
That’s how we help in small ways with this, not short-sighted stubbornness but with better solutions.
Fewer skiers flying might change the economics of Nightstar too: a proper luxury sleeper train from London to the slopes. I’d genuinely prefer that to ever getting a coach again.
The grand parent poster highlighted how pragmatic solutions are more important than asking people to full stop degrade their quality of life. The parent post then argues a ‘pragmatic’ solution is taking the train to the alps while completely ignoring that a large percentage of people visiting that particular location likely does not have access solely by train.
I believe trains for regional or even continental transportation are an excellent goal. However, the train as the key to solving transportation emissions completely misses the point that we are an intercontinental species at this point. Flying is the only practical method of moving people across the seas and likely will be for the foreseeable future. Solving emissions for flying vehicles seems a far more likely scenario than getting the world, and the people spread all over it, to stop flying. Trains can only solve a portion of the equation.
This isn't a situation many pre-industrial people had to deal with, but I suspect it's increasingly common.
You can't convince large numbers of people to give up burgers (which are a cultural staple), AC in the summer, cars, and tourism, all the while coal plants still fire away. Plus it all starts to feel like shaming, which tends not to end well.
But vertical farming, cows that fart less (yes, this is a thing), housing insulation improvements, solar panels, trains, and really good public transit can all feel like replacing bad things with better things.
You can't fight human nature, but you can plant a lot of trees.
Not doing something because you can't and not doing something out of choice are two different things.
It's much harder (and annoying g) not eating cake when one sits right in front of you vs when it's not in the house and its 1am.
Changing my own lifestyle will have significant costs, of some sort, and will have no noticeable impact on the climate. There's only a real impact if lots of other people do it too. But if they do, I can get the same benefit by freeloading on them and keeping my life unchanged. Either way, I'm better off not changing.
Nevertheless, I prefer a good climate to an unchanged lifestyle. It's just that if it's an individual decision for each of us, we're all better off as freeloaders.
A carbon tax removes the freeloader option.
It's not a permanent reduction in luxuries like travel.
[0] - https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/mer.pdf
This is why I support a carbon fee & dividend, which puts a price on carbon emissions and then sends an equal share of the proceeds to all citizens:
- If the fee incentivizes people to change their lifestyles and travel less or consume less, my future (and my child's) is improved.
- If the fee incentivizes industry to replace existing technology with carbon-neutral technology that allows everyone to maintain their lifestyles without forcing me to live in a worse world, my future (and my child's) is improved.
- If people and industry both decide to continue business as usual and simply pay the additional price on carbon then, yes, global ecosystems are in for a terrible time and food becomes way more expensive and cities will have to relocate or disband etc, but at least we are all properly compensated for our share of the ensuing misery.
I think it makes sense to just whack a huge tax on flying. Right, you can't easily cross continents without flying, but I imagine the percentage of flights that are being made for super crucial stuff like say, unwell relatives, is a low percentage of the total.
So whilst we're in this transition period, tax it enough that you can offset or capture the emissions a few times over. It's a no-brainer. You don't even encounter the "but what about those in poverty" problem because flying is the quintessential luxury.
edit: I should be clear, as responders seem to misunderstand me, that the mechanism I prefer would be to tax according to emissions. I just think that flying should have a multiplier because it's primarily used for leisure or non-essential business travel.
My preference would be for the taxes to be used on actual carbon capture / storage / research rather than being redistributed, and in that model you need to pull more out of the top end because otherwise the poor eat fuel taxes and get nothing back.
Aside from that - sure, there are taxes on flying. Are they enough to offset or capture the carbon emissions (at a rate higher than 100% if we want this to be progressive), and is the money going towards either doing that or researching future methods of how to do that?
Why should we tax any more than required to offset or capture emissions just 1 time over?
Ideally in the long term everything would be taxed precisely according to its' externalities.
In the short term it makes sense to have a progressive system that more heavily taxes luxuries so that the poor don't get thrown under the bus (read: throw you under the bus).
For most people flying is anything but a luxury. Most people are flying in economy for business reasons that they have to do if they want to earn an income.
Companies engage in huge amounts of wasteful travel.
Business passengers are the majority of airline profits. Airlines will gladly fly economy class half empty as long as the business class seats are sold out. Hell, some airlines have the business and premium economy cabin taking up over half the plane's available square footage.
Economy class passengers are most negativity affected by the tax, yet this is unlikely to change airline behavior.
You realise there's probably millions of foreign workers in various countries around the world who move abroad to support their families and flying is the only way for them to see their families.
I think it makes sense for that tax to be progressive, at least initially.
Heating a home for a year depending on climate may produce more emissions than taking a flight. But one is much harder to avoid (particularly if you are in a precarious economic situation).
Even from a purely utilitarian point of view, it would stave off political unrest.
The problem with that is that while it does fall primarily on the rich, as they consume and therefore pollute more, it falls also on the poor and middle class, and as we’ve seen in France, this can be the basis for substantial political opposition, which if nothing else will act against our ability to price the pollution effectively.
The solution for this is to return the source fuels tax funds to the people, such that the tax is revenue neutral. The carbon dividend leaves lower income and less pollutive people better off financially, in addition to everyone being better off environmentally and health-wise, providing a natural basis for the survival of the carbon tax.
This is the approach the Citizen’s Climate Lobby is fighting for: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/ https://energyinnovationact.org/
It has the support of Presidential candidates including Booker and Buttigieg: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/2020-candidates-climate-cha...
So long as the nett overall emissions are down and decreasing it matters little. You ensure that by setting the rate of the carbon tax high enough. Perhaps an accumulating rate.
As a result, you'll increase travel via car and the net result will be increased pollution at the expense of the economy.
A bog standard 100g/km car would emit 600kg to go 6000km; a passenger flying London-New York also emits approximately the same. (Obviously you can't drive London-NY, it's an example).
Short haul, as you say, it tips in favour of the car. Multiple people and it becomes a no brainer.
Then take into account the fact that tons of journeys would simply not happen. It's common for people to jet around Europe for weekend trips. No-one would drive that.
I have a sense that US domestic flights tend to skew discussion on this.
On the other hand, if a tree can be planted to capture 1 ton of carbon for 50 cents each, then a flight from NY to Sydney can be offset with $130.[1] That's about $1 per person on a 100-person flight.
Some environmentalists claim that the social cost of carbon is $40 per ton of CO2[2]. That comes out to about $10,500 in taxes for a flight from NY to Sydney. That's basically $100 per person on a 100-person flight, enough to prevent many people from flying.
[1] 53 lbs of CO2 per mile of flight, multiplied by 9,929 miles from NY to Sydney, divided by 2000 lbs/ton, times $0.50 of offset costs per ton
I don't see how that follows. On the assumption that we don't have infinite taxes in general, every $1 raised via a tax on emissions from flying can be put in to offsetting, capture, or research which wouldn't otherwise.
> That's basically $100 per person on a 100-person flight, enough to prevent many people from flying.
It's unclear to me what you mean by this. I think you mean that it would likely reduce demand? Sure, bonus.
That’s very...optimistic of you. I wish I had the same trust in these systems.
Regardless I highly doubt there will be a global movement to kill air travel any time soon, there’s no world gov to implement this mass tax so it will have to be a few very brave souls who do it while trying to convince everyone it won’t result in a massive brain and money drain which will be multiple x bigger than the tax “return”. Not to mention lost productivity.
Asia and the US (I’m assuming EU would be the first) will suddenly sound like a far better place to live and do business, then there will be a ton of disincentives to follow suit.
Remember when France was going to do their millionaire tax? That didn’t last long once the consequences became apparent and they could be dismissed with campaign slogans.
Airlines already apply "fuel surcharges" as part of their ticketing.
Adding a, for example, EU-wide tax on outbound flights based on the distance of origin/destination, would be one way of implementing.
Getting international agreement on, for example, having it apply only to outbound flights, would mean that is not a tax on imports, that could be considered a tariff.
The income could then be spent on subsidizing the other costs of decarbonization.
It’s like fixing a leaky pipe by adding sponges. Sure, they’ll soak up the water and are cheap, but eventually you will run out of space for new sponges and have to pay for a plumber.
I'm all for building wooden houses. But I can also imagine the amount of work (=> energy consumption) needed to convert theses trees we need to plant to "offset emissions" as new houses.
Transport the workers, feed the machines to chop the trees, the machines to transport the wood, to run the lumber-mill, to transport to the construction site etc. Unfortunately for now we still have: feeding machines => energy consumption => emissions
We can argue that this energy would have been needed anyway to build new houses. However I find it dangerous to couple a carbon reduction strategy to a substantial amount of an activity involving machines (construction). Are we going to need the amount of houses at the scale of the amount of trees we need to plant? In all parts of the world concerned (we don't want to move trees across the world anymore..)?
What's to say it wont be slashed and burnt to make room for agriculture? What's to say the surplus of timber wont decrease the price and cause less trees to be planted elsewhere?
The way to sequester carbon with trees is to cut them down when they're grown, and bury them somewhere where there's no air and no one will touch them for thousands of years, or otherwise store them in perpetuity while preventing decay or burning.
It's not impossible that we could grow a huge number of trees, and bury the resulting wood in a mountain-side to offset burning coal - but the amount of wood we'd need to bury might be prohibitively large.
(We've buried much worse things than wood :) ).
I don't think there are many trans-Pacific flights with just 100 people on board.
The last flight I took on Singapore Air was around 350 people. So the tax would be about $30 per person. Certainly not enough to prevent people from flying.
Emirates has A380's with 615 people on board. That's just $17 per passenger.
That’s fine. The point isn’t the dictate what people do. It’s to offset their negative externalities.
The issue with offsetting is that it's not actually enough. The idea is basically to help less developed economies grow in a more sustainable way.
But we could delete the entire developing world and still be emitting too much, so capture and/or reduction are necessary, yes.
Planting trees (and removing the carbon they capture from the carbon cycle, e.g. by turning them into biochar) probably doesn't scale to the amount of carbon we release.
If you start your argument with an extremified and overly emotional premise, then sure, you can make just about any point you want.
While yes, generally driving generates less carbon than flying, If you have fewer than 3 people in your car however, flying puts out less carbon.
I think there is a good argument for a fixed rate taxation however that makes shorthaul (less than 300 mile) flights wildly unprofitable, thus pushing people into other forms of transportation (ideally train or bus - but probably car)
If we reduce the number of people doing a thing, then by definition, the rich will be the last ones left doing it, because that's what makes them rich, yes.
> If you have fewer than 3 people in your car however, flying puts out less carbon.
As far as I can tell this isn't the case. It probably depends on whether you're talking about massive American cars or a 100g/CO2 car that's more common in Europe though.
But yeah, people won't make those journeys. It really took off recently (oho) and should just go away again. We don't need Ryanair flights around Europe for student budgets.
I'll point out, we don't have as many short range flights as Europe does, and no equivalent to Ryan Air here.
It isn't just about choosing to take a pleasure vacation or not, but seeing close family and friends that often aren't in the same state.
If flying cost twice as much, then people would, at the limit, be able to fly half as often as they do now.
If they valued their vacation more than other stuff they could just do it anyway, assuming we're talking about the same "middle class" (e.g. not the poor that spend to their max).
But yeah, the whole point is to reduce luxury travel. Jetset vacations are a luxury. We might be able to make them cheap and clean in the future, right now offsetting has a real cost.
The current shinkansen reaches 200mph, with in-development versions going faster.
Distance from NYC to LA is 2790 miles (by highway; the straight-line distance is shorter). That’s a bit under 14 hours at 200mph.
That’s pretty much the worst case; most people aren’t flying cross-country on a regular basis, and regional flights (e.g. Columbus to Chicago) are a big business.
Obviously real trains would be slower than peak shinkansen speeds, but like most train opponents, you are severely exaggerating your argument.
In terms of passenger km/l, air flight is very efficient, so spreading the tax proportionally across the passengers would not be a major impost on existing prices.
Really? I'm livid I pay much more tax than those with a net worth much higher than mine. Real estate has all the tax benefits in my country, while gainful employment is punished.
It's broken in the UK as well. Capital gains taxes are tiny as compared to income. :P
Taxing income or capital gains in the first place was a mistake.
I’m actually surprised by this since I assumed 99% of people are ok with progressive taxation. I believe the real argument lies in how progressive it is, as the extreme limit leads to the wealthy paying 99% of the taxes. I think currently the 1% pay 50% of the taxes in the US so the sliding scale it more towards progressivism anyways. You could argue how much more you can squeeze vs. the repercussions of such.
Everyone always has these grand market distorting schemes and they inevitably fail at the real goal.
To be fair though, it might actually be possible to found the international carbon commission in a technocratic way, obviously without any way to enforce anything at the start, but a sort of small founding group that serves to organize the first year/first years of meetings, building the physical place, managing funding from the benevolent technocrats, etc.
wrong age? this seems to be the age of splitting, not coming together.
People do not want their electric bill to jump ten (or more) folds just because wind production went down and now the gas turbine is burning, and they definitively do not want brownouts. Industries like steel and other high energy users is particular allergic to variance in power availability and price, and without tariffs it is practically impossible to demand it in a global economy.
Food prices would go up as rural living is directly impacted by carbon taxes. It used to be that the largest portion of a persons income went to pay for food. Today it is a rather small portion. Asking people to pay the carbon tax through increased food prices is a very hard proposition, and without tariffs it is practically impossible in a global economy.
Then we have urbanization where increased costs to personal transportation means a population that relies more on mass transit systems. That mean in order to keep people from moving to cities we need a significant investment into building out the railway system, which is the opposite what most countries has done in the last 50-80 years. That investment means raised taxes on top of the carbon tax. It also mean a increased strain on the infrastructure inside cities when density will increase while new infrastructure is being built, which mean more taxes.
Then we have international trade (air and sea transport) which is governed through international treaties. To be fair this is likely the easiest place to do a carbon tax as it would only effect all imports and exports and operate as a equal tariff for everyone, but getting people to agree to it it is a significant bigger hill than the Paris Agreement.
Kind of. Actually many high energy users like steel industry are often the primary clients of demand-response agreements with their suppliers. If it's in the contract and helps offset their energy costs then some variance isn't necessarily bad for their business.
I think discussions could get more constructive if proponents of CO2 tax did get conscious of the epycal change they are talking about.
What does epycal mean? (Or what word did you mean?) Google failed me.
The tax would have to be slowly introduced over period of many years. It is necessary for economy and various industries to adjust. New industry of scrubbing co2 needs funds and time to develop.
All of your examples look like one issue to me, which is people unwilling to change their lifestyle and sacrifice their luxuries.
The only way out of this mess is to use less resources, which means consume less, travel less, have fewer children, etc. Carbon tax or dictatorial orders, the root of the problem is people don’t want to consume less, and our children and their children will pay the price due to us not wanting to pay it now.
I agree with you this is a very important issue. But it's far too easy to underestimate the "stubborness" of people to keep living fine!
To put down some numbers, Americans spend just 6.4% of their household income on food. Around 1950 they spent about 20%. It not that Americans eat one fifth as much as they used to (if anything the claim is that people eat more today), so the life style change is both that people need to pay more and eat less.
Similar if we talk about railway budget, the US government spend today about 0.00156% in proportion to the budget of 1950. It basically stopped investing into the railway infrastructure. Naturally the proportion of the population (and industry) that use the railway system has also gone down, through not as extreme as the budget.
The root of the problem is that people don't want to pay more to get less, and then also consume less at the same time. They also don't want to pay more taxes in order to invest heavily in infrastructure that take half a century before people see the benefits.
Confirm that it's 1/640th of the 1950 budget?! That seems insane. (Is it perhaps 1/6.4 [0.156% or 0.00156x] instead?)
The Federal Railroad Administration alone has a budget over $1.5BB. Does that mean we were spending the equivalent of almost a trillion of today's dollars a year (~25% of receipts) on rail in 1950? That seems several orders of magnitude wrong.
The numbers I read was that since 1950 the railway infrastructure budget has only increased by 30%. US budget in 1950 was around 70 billions, while 2018 it is 7 trillions. (https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/fed_spending_1950USbn)
The proportional funding should thus have went down by basically the same amount as the government spending went up. I might very well be wrong, and The Federal Railroad Administration was created in 1966 so I am not sure exactly which part of the government paid for railway before that point, and the 30% claim could of course be wrong. Department of Transportation has had a increase in funding by about 10x from 1970 to 2008, but I could not find exact numbers for the Federal Railroad Administration.
Literally all of these have cheap, trivial fixes that would reopen markets closed by the perverse subsidization we have now.
> People do not want their electric bill to jump ten (or more) folds
Power companies already offer budget billing to deal with the seasonal variation. It's trivial to extend this to some level of weather prediction. In fact there's already source variation taken into account. Even if the increased volatility causes the order of magnitude price changes, there is already a market for electric price smoothing through batteries and energy storage. Just look what Tesla did for this exact issue in Australia.
>Food prices would go up as rural living is directly impacted by carbon taxes.
I'm not sure how you're figuring this. If anything, food prices would decrease because we'd find more efficient local distribution techniques. Since rural areas is where the foo dis grown, that's where it would be the cheapest. In fact we not only already have more local distribution channels - we have federal infrastructure around it: https://www.ams.usda.gov/local-food-directories/farmersmarke.... Moreover, there's already a growing free market for this: https://fortune.com/2015/08/21/local-food-movement-business/.
> increased costs to personal transportation means a population that relies more on mass transit systems. That mean in order to keep people from moving to cities we need a significant investment into building out the railway system
I'm not following this argument. Increased reliance on mass transit would overall make everything cheaper, AVOIDing massive investments in both railroads and increased highway capacity.
I also don't follow your last point. Tariffs don't require treaties and are probably the best place to solve this in the beginning. As more nations enact their own carbon tariffs, we could begin to have a real discussion on international agreements.
So that's $600+ for an NY-SF round trip - in decades time. Currently we would have no flights at all.
Also take in mind the problem might be solved in a different way, for example people switching to high speed trains for shorter rides, business meetings conducted remotely or people choosing more local travel destinations or alternative ways to spend free time.
The important part is to factor in all costs of products and services into their price, keeping environment clean included.
There was a multi-part show I saw on BBC Four about a year ago that explained that Europe's train network isn't the result of some kind of visionary urban planning or anything altruistic. It's because European nations have such a long history of fighting one another. And in the early part of the last century, the continent went on a rail-building frenzy because of WWI.
The United States have only gone to beating each other up once, and that was before trains were viable as large-scale tools of war. Perhaps if the Civil War was delayed by a couple of decades, things might be different.
Of course, there are many other factors, but this is one that I find interesting and almost never explored.
Use of rail in the America conflict prefigured its application the war of 1870 and of course WWI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_railroads_in_the_A...
I would guess that geography and the demographics of the American west are as much to blame as the relative lack of continental conflict in the rail era.
The city also dug a new tunnel for cars. They decided the best use of the old tunnel was to fill it with rubble. Meanwhile, Seattle has some of the worst congestion in the country.
I have no idea what goes on in the planning meetings for this stuff.
There has been some talk of reviving some sleeper trains, but so far I haven't seen any new sleeper routes. Of course, Europe is a big place, but as far as I can tell, not much has improved over the last decade. If anything, cheap airfare has been on the rise and rail has been declining.
Don't get me wrong, I love trains, and I would like nothing more than a fast and cheap inter-European rail network worthy of the name.
Vienna-Milano for 2 in a cabin with no one else is 190 EUR each way or 240 if you want an en-suite toilet/shower and takes 19 hours. Or you could fly (1 hour 20 minutes) for 50 EUR return per person.
So for the 380 EUR you save, you can go the evening before and spend an extra night in a 5-star hotel room in Milano, even accounting for transportation from the airport.
Also, if we really had bullet trains that could do 200+ MPH, you could have cross-country express trains that take less than 24 hours, so it wouldn't even have to be multiple days.
I've taken that train as well and while it's nice for routes of around that distance, I'm not sure how it would be beneficial if you had to sit on it for days. That wouldn't be much of a sleeper trip.
No transport is free of movement or vibration, cars most especially. Far more get car and air sick than train sick. So unless you're advocating never travelling at all, I'm not sure what point you're making.
From my experience of all, train is probably the most comfortable of the lot, with the best seating, most desk space - you get a proper table and even a mains point. You don't get forced to breathe dry low oxygen air, and avoid the nasty taste of road fumes.
Biggest negative is the relative cost of train compared to all the other forms of transport, which speaks more of relative subsidy than inherent costs.
There might be other reasons to take trains over airplanes, but "so I can comfortably work on it" is a very questionable one.
You can add hours of buffer time if you want (if you're flying to do an organ transplant, maybe that's a good idea); most people can take a 0.5% chance of missing their flight. (I've literally never missed one, though I've been a few minutes away from doing so a couple times, usually because of my own error, once because of unexpectedly long security lines, even for TSA Pre.)
Personally I've never had issue working on trains, and the many friends who use trains regularly seem to do work well enough too.
I haven't experienced any issues with vibration or overwhelming sleepiness and haven't ever heard anyone complain about these things.
The other passengers and background noise are no less distracting than an open plan office, and it could even be much quieter if you have a cabin with just a few other passengers.
A good reliable internet connection is crucial, I agree. I think it should be manageable with proper planning.
Lots of people walk up and down the cars on long trips. You have to walk to get to the dining car, bathroom etc. It's certainly easier and more pleasant to walk and stretch on a train than a plane or a bus.
This isn’t a useful perspective for the majority of people
Assuming two week-long vacations, though, you'd easily spend more than half the time in transit.
Doesn't the US still have pretty cheap long distance bus services? Certainly ~15-20 years ago when I was bumming around North America I could get almost anywhere for less than $100 if I wasn't too much in a hurry.
Air doesn't need regular maintenance and has a much higher capacity. There are also several competing airlines on most routes pushing the price down.
I have no idea about the relative maintenance cost between a train and an airplane, but I suspect they're within the same order of magnitude (but I could be very wrong)
You pay much less for the porters and stewards. You spend much less on feeding the passengers and attending to their other needs. Your passengers will tolerate being packed closer together.
3 of the air routes that cover this journey are in the top 11 busiest domestic routes in the world (#3 Sapporo to Tokyo-Haneda;#4 Fukuoka to Tokyo-Haneda;#11 Tokyo-Haneda to Osaka-Itami).
The highest ranking US domestic route is #30 (JFK-LAX), though by distance it's almost 3X (2827.2 miles).
I wouldn't at all agree with that. I live in SF and can get door-to-door to a friend's house in San Diego in 3 hours. I can do similar things for LA, Vegas, Portland, and Seattle if I like.
Even when I fly cross-country to visit family (near DC), yes, the flight out is a waste of a day (unless I take a red-eye and hope I can sleep), but the flight back is just 3 hours after adjusting for the time zone change. I can take an early flight out in the morning and still put in a full day of work, or have a full day visiting and fly back after dinner.
I really don't want to spend several days just on travel, were I to take a train. I would consider that a waste of valuable time that I could be spending at my destination. I might enjoy a long multi-day train ride as a vacation (once every few years, perhaps), but not when my plan is just to get from point A to point B.
I'll usually take the train from DC to NYC, or NYC to Boston, when I'm out east visiting friends, but I recently looked at doing DC to Boston direct, and was disappointed to see that I'd burn 7 hours on a train for only $20 less than a much shorter flight. And some of the trains were more expensive than the flight!
Takes about a half hour from SF to SFO by car or BART. You need to get to the airport an hour before boarding. Boarding takes half an hour. That’s two hours. Flight time to SAN is about 1.5 hours. So now we’re at 3.5 hours, without counting commute time to your friend’s house.
And that’s pretty much optimal, in my experience. Maybe you can shave a half hour off, but unless you live next to the airport, you’ll miss as many flights as you catch if you try it regularly.
”Even when I fly cross-country...the flight back is just three hours after adjusting for time-zone change.”
Now you’re just making things up. Quick google tells me that’s a five-hour flight, not counting the lead time, taxi, etc.
Feel free to see my other reply in the thread. It takes me 15 mins to get to SFO by car (sure, if I lived in, say, the Marina, it would take longer; but I don't, so it doesn't), and I generally get to the airport 40 minutes before takeoff (arrive an hour before boarding? People do that? I don't even do that for an international flight), so in general I walk up to the gate just as boarding is starting. I usually time it so I'll arrive at the airport about 10 mins before boarding starts, which gives me plenty of time to get through the TSA Pre line (usually Terminal 3 for me, which tends to be pretty quick unless you pick your flights for peak times).
> Now you’re just making things up. Quick google tells me that’s a five-hour flight, not counting the lead time, taxi, etc.
I think you misunderstood. Yes, it's a 5-6 hour flight, as you say. If I leave DCA or IAD at 6am Eastern time, I arrive at SFO at 8-9am Pacific time, and have a full day ahead of me. Or I can have dinner at my sister's place, head to the airport, leave DCA/IAD on a 9pm flight, and be home a little after midnight, at which point I go to bed and have a normal day the next day. That's what I mean when I say "adjusting for the time-zone change".
And sure, there's more on either end for airport transit and boarding, but... so what? If I do the morning flight, I have an early morning, certainly -- I need to leave my sister's house by 4:30am -- but I can close my eyes for a bit on the plane, and it's not so bad when I land. Will I be a little more tired than usual come evening? Sure, but maybe I just go to bed a couple hours earlier.
The original assertion was "[you lose] a day when flying, even for short trips", which is just patently false.
Assuming both you and your friend live in the actual, respective airport terminals.
Otherwise, your numbers just don't jibe with the reality of typical fight and check-in times (let alone the time cost of, you know, actually getting to and from the airport).
15 mins to the airport (I live close to a freeway entrance), 10 mins to the gate, 40 min wait time till takeoff, 90 mins in the air, 10 mins out to the curb, 15 mins to my friend's house near Hillcrest.
Sure, if I'm traveling at the height of rush hour, the car trips to and from the airport will be longer, but the solution is to... not do that.
Cross-country express trips could be done in less than a day.
Even when the money's there, you still have: NIMBYs, corruption/incompetence among officials and contractors, and (ironically) vague environmental laws with loose standing rules that cause any infrastructure project to end up in court. Among other things.
I'd like to see the full breakdown, I suspect the story may be interesting.
This will continue till a new superior technology replaces it. Why do we over-use every new thing, this is clear failure of policies. Carbon won't come down unless we have policies in place.
All the research I'm aware of, up to and including Google's synfuel startup, struggle with cost-effectiveness though.
CO2 from seawater may be more energy-efficient than from air, but either way, scaling cost-effectively hasn't happened.
"Climate crisis: the unsustainable use of online video”: Our new report on the environmental impact of ICT"
https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-onl...
Price of energy is not a thing. We pay for the conversion and its transport but not itself. So it does not provide the adequate signal for the management of the supply or its side effects
The developed world is only part of the problem and a majority of the developed world is too poor to prioritize issues of climate and the impact of transportation.
A more important question is if and when the masses will either bend to authoritarian calls for drastic cultural and political change, or retain their individual rights and count on existing political and scientific structures.
https://back-on-track.eu/ending-the-tax-exemption-on-aviatio...
Maybe they would warrant a HN submission of their own, since it is something interesting to discuss.
The proposals are well-written, and concerns an EU-wide fuel tax on kerosene, and a carbon tax.
curl https://api.cloverly.com/2019-03-beta/estimates/flight -X POST -d '{"airports": ["bhm", "atl", "sfo"]}' -H "Content-type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer public_key:47800ea0ee541b4c"
It strikes me as a "symbolically motivated" meme as opposed to a practical issue since air traffic is seen more as a luxury.
The US airship programme, based on helium, not hydrogen, still saw both the Macon and Ohio lost in high winds and/or storms. Britain's Airship One fared poorly as well, though it relied on hydrogen.
Stuff that flies through the air has intrinsic issues with mass, and lifting bodies require tremendous volumes.
Lucky, because it uses more carbon to be accompanied by a yacht crew who then take flights home when you finally get to America. I was all set to travel everywhere by yacht until I discovered that downside.
Without high speed rail, reducing air travel just puts more cars on the interstates.
It's not "multiple" problems. There's just one: Where do you get energy?
Trying to change the fuel (not energy) source of an airplane is the most useless of all the things that should be changed.
Remember: The place the fuel is burned makes no difference, what matters is how you sourced the energy, so why go for expensive and complicated hydrogen for airplanes, when the EXACT SAME energy can be used on land?
The focus you are suggesting is in play, afaik.
For aircraft two things we could do is invest heavily in high speed rail for high volume short to medium flight corridors and electrified aircraft for short low volume ones. And accept that for the foreseeable future we're going to burn jet fuel for transatlantic and pacific flights.
The numbers don't add up.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings...
We use mind-boggling amounts of fuels, and although aviation is a small fraction of the total, a small fraction of a very large number remains a very large number.
The US produces about 300 million tons of municipal solid waste per year, 360 million tons of corn, 130 million tons of hay. These are only some of the biomass streams in the US economy.
It's not at all out of the question that the entire US jet fuel consumption could be produced with biomass-derived carbonaceous materials. The energy yield could be increased with extra hydrogen input, so carbohydrates could undergo hydrodeoxygenation (as in the Virent process, which can produce a drop-in replacement for current jet fuel).
In 1900, the US ran a largely biofuel-powered transportation network, especially for local "last-mile" deliveries, utilising horses, which can eat minimally processed feeds. About a quarter of all grain production went to horse feed, and in fact a segment of opposition to adoption of automobiles were farmers who feared grain demand would fall.
Henry Ford looked at an agriculturally-based fuel supply, based on methanol. That might have worked at the time, for a population of roughly 100 million, and widely scattered automobile ownership. It simply doesn't scale now.
The Boeing study claimed to be among the biggest breakthroughs in aviation biofuel in years, but fails to pencil out. I ran numbers on numerous other biofuel crops. None, save algael biofuels (which present phenomenal practical issues) pass the basic quantity checks, even for just aviation fuel.
Your supplemental hydrogen has to come from somewhere, that's not free.
Producing kerosene-equivalent fuels isn't all that much of a problem chemically, the processes are understood. It's scaling the processes.
Yes, the hydrogen has to come from somewhere. This does not violate any laws of physics or economics.
[1] https://www.transportenvironment.org/news/aviation-2-3-times...
[1] https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/clouds/question.jsp
Widespread flying for vacation or business is a luxury that people quickly abandon when they can't pay their mortgage or payroll.
Recession is capitalism's solution for reducing CO2 emissions.
Calm down, Satan. Reduced seat pitch was the major reason that prompted me to start flying Business Class on short hauls and First Class on long hauls, producing considerably more CO2 than an Economy Class passenger.
Also: Seat pitch already has been shrunken considerably in the last years.