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Comment by pwarner | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't we focus on taking it out of most other things first? Solve electricity and land based transport first and figure out sea and air later? I not read the article so down vote they explain why we should focus on this when we are so far from solving other easier problems.

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We can solve multiple problems at a time. This just reads as really defensive. Like it or not, air travel DOES have a big carbon footprint, and arguably most of it is unnecessary (we fly people across the country to help manage PowerPoint presentations). We’re going to have to solve it at some point, so why not now?

Yes. More realistically, we could take lots of the air travel out of life. Looking back at all my years of work-related flying, there's very little that could not have been accomplished remotely. Especially with current videoconferencing capabilities.

When leisure travelers don't fly, they drive. Having clean, efficient ground transportation is required to reap the benefit of reducing air travel. (If you cut off all avenues to seeing Grandma at Christmas besides FaceTime, you'll get voted out of office).

Let’s solve both of these problems then, which it seems like people are doing. Plus, we already know how to solve ground transport, we just refuse to actually do it (renewables, public transit, dense development, etc). Air travel is more challenging given the massive amount of energy required.

Public transit and dense development can reduce the necessity of renting a car or hiring a cab when you arrive in another city, but that's not where the energy goes in long distance travel.

Without high speed rail, reducing air travel just puts more cars on the interstates.

> We can solve multiple problems at a time

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?

I don't think we have to restrict ourselves to implementing policies serially. My thought it some industries are going to have to reduce their CO2 footprint 30% and others will need to reduce 90%. Whatever is doable.

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.

I agree about the air transport, but sea transport might be one of those low hanging fruits because it doesn't have any direct effect on individuals. I have no idea what could replace bunker fuel as an energy source, but if something did, no one would notice.

Because we need to be carbon neutral soon and so far we have no solution, even theoretical, apart from synthetic fuels. So, we better start ASAP to find a solution.

The focus you are suggesting is in play, afaik.

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