Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If air travel accounts for less emissions than passenger cars, and if the top 15 polluting large container ships produce as much (noxious oxides of nitrogen and sulphur) pollution as all cars, then we need to fix shipping first.
And if you look at a lot of the crap that is being shipped, it's stuff we just don't need. A lot of things are replaced frequently with cheap and short-lived new things, so there's plenty of room to reduce the amount of shipping.
We should also focus on trains and electric buses to reduce the amount of car use. Some parts of the world already do. And after spending many years commuting in heavy Texas road traffic, I much prefer European train/metro/tram (and even bus) travel. Oh, and bikes and feet for the last 1-2km.
The problem with this logic is that we aren't one person looking at a bug tracker queue deciding one to tackle next. We are a civilization.
We need to fix everything all at once, as quickly as possible.
If shipping is a problem, fix it now.
If air travel is a problem, fix it now.
If grid electric is a problem, fix it now.
If automotive emissions are a problem, fix it now.
We are many; we can do much.
You don't understand what it means. I don't understand what it means.
A person can tackle a bug in a tracker.
A company can tackle a bug tracker.
A few cities' worth can tackle manufacturing the computer.
The world? We got this. All in.
If we're enough to fuck it up, we're enough to sort it out.
That's the one thought that gives me comfort around the whole climate crisis problem. We humans have screwed up the climate through absolute mountains of labour. It didn't just happen, it happened as an emergent property of all the various economic activities that humans have been doing for hundreds of years. We don't lack labour to tackle the problem, we lack direction for the labour, incentives that makes civilization as a whole change course and move in the right direction.
Totally agree that air travel is one of the last places to look for carbon savings. That said, carbon offset taxes should be applied where they are not already. The market can price this cost in and judge whether the value is there, if the incentives are structured correctly.
As with any contributor to climate change, the issue is not burning the fuel, the issue is that the fuel is bringing new carbon out of the ground into today's carbon cycle. Hydrocarbons generated in real time from carbon currently in the environment, using carbon-free energy[1], would not contribute to global warming.
The chemistry is complicated and presumably it would take a tremendous amount of energy to do so. I think I read that the Navy was exploring it for aircraft carriers--which have plenty of energy thanks to redundant nuclear power plants onboard, and obviously would benefit from being able to generate more jet fuel whenever they need it.
[1] I know there is not really such a thing yet; nuclear, wind, even solar panels take fossil fuel to make today. But in theory man-made jet fuel would decouple the end use from the generation, allowing planes to keep flying the same way they always have, while cleaner fuel generation could incrementally supplant new oil in the supply chain.
Oh yes, I was going to comment on exactly that point.
> The chemistry is complicated
That depends on which type of fuel you are talking about. If you can use Methane (AKA Natural Gas), then you could use the Sabatier reaction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction). You need CO2 (which is what we want to remove) and Hydrogen (which is the energy consuming part). Then you have to compress it (more energy).
The advantage of adding CO2 to the mix(instead of just burning hydrogen) is that it becomes much easier to store and you have decent energy density.
Of course, that's not Jet-A. If you really need that (turbines don't care too much, but logistics and storage will care), then you need to use something else. Eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
As I understand it, that's what the Navy was struggling against.
But forget about the energy costs, think about human labor costs. Because if you can reduce labor to zero and have these things be self-sufficient, then we really don't care about energy costs. Stick a bunch of these fuel facilities wherever they will fit, power them with whatever renewables are available, wait a bit, then come back to collect.
I think the first large scale application will actually come from SpaceX. They need to figure out fuel manufacturing for a Mars return trip.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofuel
[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/lessons-from-th...
People keep repeating that. Nobody cares about nitrogen and sulfur oxides on deep sea. Good luck trying to even find evidence it's locally harmful to organisms (most likely, it isn't). At the extent that people are against ship emissions, it's about what they emit at the coast, and that is a very small share of that total you cite.
Ships are quite clean of the pollutants that matter. They beat planes on CO2 emission by a huge margin.
From that publication, "About 98% of the particles emitted from diesel engines are less than 10 microns in diameter (PM10)" -> that gets into your lungs and potentially into your bloodstream.
The emphasis here isn't on substitute, it's on "need". Not many people need to travel long distances on a regular basis; they're just made to believe they need do.
Heck, come to think of it, if I ever saw a legit use for VR, it might well be substituting for business travel?
Edit: And somewhat relevantly: business class is far less fuel-efficient too, which would suggest maybe we should get rid of first and business class altogether. Heck, forcing businesses to use economy minus for travel might itself be an easy way to get rid of some unnecessary business trips!
Humans are tribal animals; we respond to communications in person better than over video conference and we tend to trust people with whom we've shared meals and drinks. Arguing that that just shouldn't be isn't likely to change anything about business behavior. I get on airplanes across oceans because it's effective. Believe me, I'd usually rather stay at home with my family and sleep in my own bed.
I'm not making moral value judgments here; I'm making economic value judgments as that drives much more behavior I think.
No chance that businesses will stop paying for people to travel. And their budgets are much bigger than individuals visiting family. Take a look at the entire private jet market - basically a very small wedge of HNWs and lots of executives flying for business.
People's expectations are malleable. It's not easy to change them, but it's necessary and it's possible. And once that happens, the game will change, and it will force you to change your tune accordingly.
Kicking the price of this kind of policy down to individual consumers is a great way to just make everyone really mad and get more money from business customers who will still go on not-strictly-necessary trips.
A world with greatly reduced air travel is a more insular and less understanding world.
I don't think there is an evidence for that. It is more likely that immigration increases cultural understanding rather than travel.
In any case, emissions of travel can be greatly reduced by using other modes of transport and by making the stay in the target country longer. Such a cultural shift could actually even improve the understanding between nations.
What will the affect on immigration be if going back to the "old country" becomes significantly more difficult?
Disagree that travel doesn't matter, but even then, do you really think it being much harder to visit their home countries again will have no impact on immigration patterns?
> In any case, emissions of travel can be greatly reduced by using other modes of transport
Would love to hear how you propose to let Chinese and Indian immigrants in the states visit home sans airplanes
> by making the stay in the target country longer.
People would already take longer vacations if they could, dude. Making it harder and slower to get there isn't gonna help anything.
We know - you already made this point in the parent comment.
> sans airplanes
You've moved the goalposts from 'greatly reduced air travel' to 'sans airplanes'.
...is your point here that points can't reiterated or something?
> You've moved the goalposts from 'greatly reduced air travel' to 'sans airplanes'.
They're the one that talked about using other means of transport. I had already mentioned immigration. If you greatly reduce it by making it harder/more expensive, that impacts immigrants.
That's dubious and far more benign than the consequences of a world with climate change.
I'd rather have a connected world with climate change than a disconnected world with WW3... (and probably still climate change, because war is great for CO2 emissions)
For that matter, how many people will care about the Great Barrier Reef (etc) if there's no possibility of them ever being able to travel there?
There's a lot of ways for the world to fail here.
It's hard to disambiguate the causality, but it is probably fair to say that prior to the global information economy it took literally seeing the world to learn certain things. Of course, it also was/is fun for many, and projects power, wealth, and status.
But today with globally available information, truly frequent travelers (the ones with the most impact) arguably are really just doing it for status (and/or maybe trying to flee the inexorable inner void of the human psyche via endless novelty and distraction). More occasional travelers often pursue curated tourism experiences, and would gain more understanding from a book or even documentary.
Is there something ineffable about "smelling the Sistine chapel"? Possibly - but no more ineffable than appreciating the beauty right in your neck of the woods. Do you need to experience diversity in culture, race, and history? Absolutely - and it can be done firsthand in plenty of major cities around the world.
At least a bit of travel arguably is still good for education and appreciation. But the frequent travelers (who are oh-so-frequently tech employees), the ones who are constantly hopping on a plane to somewhere, are not really gaining anything intrinsic, and are exercising a huge footprint. And if anything, by devoting so much time and energy to travel, they tend to neglect their actual learning and education in other ways.
Let me tell you of a night in Mardid.
I headed out to see the night Madrid around midnight. Going along a crowded street, I heard someone singing. I was carrying a portable synthesizer, so I played along. Three people, carrying two guitars and a saxophone were walking in the opposite direction; they stopped, and joined in.
Eventually, the girl who was singing left; and the trio asked me if I'd join them to hear a jazz jam. Something is still happening this late, I asked. Yeah, it starts at 2:30AM.
I thought it was an open jam, but it was mostly the house/invited bands playing. Still, I managed to persuade the saxophone player to take the stage with a solo: he played it to me in the corner, where nobody could hear it, and I thought it was really good.
When the jam was over, we resumed making music until sunrise, playing at a bus stop (no buses were running that late). Random people joined in at times.
When the night was over, I left carrying with me something that I'd have trouble putting in words, much less so reading from a text written by someone else. It's an impossible task, after all, to convert a person or a memory into a string of characters losslessly.
You can learn many things from books. And then there is so much more that you can't.
The suggestion of the comment I responded to was about learning. Traveling, on its own, doesn't do anything to help people learn anything substantial. It's still ultimately a consumerism-centric activity. The travel industry has done an amazing job of convincing people otherwise.
Nothing of this sort. Most of the US shuts down at 2AM, people don't walk the streets in most cities which makes bumping into people impossible, and so on. The life and the environment is totally different here.
(I say this as someone who drove through all states West of Iowa, with the exception of North Dakota, lived in NYC, TX, CA each for years, and moved to the US from another country).
Most importantly, interacting with people from another country in their environment gives you a unique perspective both on their culture and your own. It's not about "having and experience", it's that your understanding of the world around you changes substantially.
>doesn't do anything to help people learn anything substantial
You learn how another country works. You learn what a day in life of another person is like in that country. It's the countless little things that are different that you see. It's the everyday lives that shape everyday thinking, and that's what matters the most.
In short, you learn to be in a different way, by observing people who are in a different way.
Textbooks simply won't answer the question "What is it like to be a Parisian, in 2019?".
I mean, you are making a very strong statement, with not much to back it up with. I provided a single counter-example, but I really don't know where to even start.
The logic of your argument applies verbatim to pretty much anything: "There's no point in venturing outdoors. If you really want to learn about nature, hit the library. You're just enjoying yourselves out there."
Well, no. Maybe that's what you do, but perhaps you aren't getting as much out of it.
I'll also make a strong statement: you have no idea what another country is like until you travel there. You won't have a single shared experience that will make it possible for you to relate to someone living there. Until you go there, all your knowledge is just an abstraction that you built up in your head.
To make an analogy again: you can read up on Beethoven all your life, but from hearing his music once you learn more than from reading about it.
Is this a serious assertion? You think I can learn the culture of, say, Japan, from a book as well as by actually living there for a short period and experiencing it?
This strikes me as woefully naive. Learning things from books, from a distance is fine and good, but there's no true substitute for being there, for experiencing a thing in person.
That is correct. However, the pollutants that the referenced ships produce are far more hazardous (immediately) and in greater volumes than many countries produce (in aggregate) per year. To put it in perspective...warning: this is an analogy that mixes metaphors:
Talking about CO2 emissions while Nuclear Waste is constantly being pumped into the ocean is shuffling the deck chairs.
Well, that change is already happening with the ongoing big change towards LNG as the preferred fuel for shipping.
But when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions, outside of improving energy efficiency, it seems nobody has anything even remotely viable today. That goes both for deep sea shipping and for most air travel.
The German company SkySails has been working for years on kites that can reduce fuel use on large ships. I think at some point we'll see alternative (renewable) energy taking over shipping as it is gradually taking over other domains.
1. Bikes work for the last 0-5km easily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands
2. Don't forget lightweight electric micro-cars for the disabled. i.e. like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canta_(vehicle)
but electric.
Teleconferencing now isn't what it could be. I think if it were a little bit higher-end it might eliminate a number of physical trips.
I mean, it IS doing that now on laptops all over the world, but I mean make it Telepresence instead of Teleconferencing.
Mostly the way I've seen conference rooms set up is a large flat panel (or two) high up on the wall showing a remote converence table. Sometimes there's a system for popping up individuals on their laptop usinge side-by-side images, but they are still high up on the wall.
Your video shows people "down with the rest of us", and on the smaller side of things (instead of a 3 foot wide head on the screen). It definitely has a different feel than what is common. It seems more inclusive.
Do we though? Especially in the quantities that we currently consume?
I presume you're talking absolutes, but ICE cars (particularly the more fuel efficient ones in Europe) produce less CO2 emissions per passenger mile that planes as far as I understand it, particularly cars with multiple occupancy. I live with my Spanish wife in the UK, and our family goes to see her parents in northern Spain once a year. Having done the calculations it's way better for the three of us to drive than fly.
I also don't agree with the idea that you need to fix one thing before the others - why not try to fix all of them? I don't think it's beyond our ability to tackle more than one thing at a time. The issue here is that emissions from air travel are accelerating - if we do nothing now that will just get worse.
And no, most people can't just work from literally anywhere on a ship or train. That probably isn't even workable for a remote programmer let alone a marketing manager, welder, electrician, office assistant, salesperson, etc.
I think the work argument gets pretty weak in modern society, where we have automation and most people could afford significant leisure. Sure, perhaps in capitalist reality it is different but it is still a social choice.
Ordinary steel-wheel high-speed rail can do it, though. There are many stations in the world that can move 100k pax/hour.
And of course, there is also the question of whether it is necessary to ship all the goods that we ship. For example, the Netherlands is the second largest agricultural exporter in the world. Beyond the standard farming fields, there are immense plots of greenhouses - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...
Yet, if you go to the grocery stores here, you'll find a lot of produce from Brazil and other overseas sources. That's because it's more cost effective, when total costs are not considered, to grow high quality produce here and export it, then import cheaper produce (not necessarily low quality, but just lower cost) from overseas.
Yes, lets only focus on one problem at a time, right? We are only one person after all.
That's not to say that we shouldn't invest in things like high speed rail, (because we absolutely will see quality of life improvements for North America) but I'm more excited about improvements in vehicle transportation and energy production.
MPG per passenger is the wrong unit.
Gallons per person per hour of active transport seems like a better unit to measure.
For example, say your non-hybrid car gets 30 mpg, and you average 30 miles per hour between city/highway, you're at 1 gallon per hour per passenger, assuming 1 person per car.
For air travel averaging out at 500 mph, the 100 miles per gallon per passenger equates to 5 gallons per hour per passenger.
So you would need to pack a plane with 5x the number of people that the 100 mpg number was measured at to even COME CLOSE to hitting the miles/passenger-hour of a non-hybrid car driven by a single driver.
That's a crowded plane.
But I should point out here that electric cars usually get 100mpge or better. And it's already feasible to do road trips in a Tesla. I'll be doing a (short) road trip with my first-gen Leaf.
For domestic trips, we can replace air travel with regional electric buses in the near term and electric airplanes in the mid-term. In the far-term, we can do even long-haul air travel using lithium-air batteries or very high performance lithium/sulfur or lithium metal anode batteries and extremely efficient airframes and multiple hops. That'd be faster and cheaper (at least in the US with high infrastructure costs) than high speed rail.
Right, and the mpge metric is flawed, because it assumes a (typically bad) energy mix.
5km driven in the UK is equivalent to 100km driven in Sweden.
The former sits at an average of approx. 300gCO2e/kWh. The latter at 15gCO2e/kWh.
With electric cars, the ultimate situation is that all of the carbon cost is in the production of the car/roads and maintenance thereof. Which is another issue that can be targeted and mitigated.
By contrast the only ultimate hope for a combustion powered plane or car is carbon capture.
The 'MPGe' of an electric car in a country with 90%+ renewable energy is like, 1000 or something daft like that.
This will allow money to flow to the right places.
That assumes maximum passenger load, I assume.
At maximum passenger load, my car gets 170 miles per gallon per passenger.
A giant, gas-guzzling Chevy Suburban gets 198 miles per gallon per passenger.
I don't think "per gallon per passenger" is a useful measure.
Freight is typically measured in cargo-ton-miles per gallon. I can't think of a reason to measure airline travel in other than passenger-miles per gallon. (You have to do it "as flown" and "as driven" for the comparison to be meaningful, but it's pretty rare for me to see anything under a 90% full flight lately with the economy booming.)
To me the point is that an airplane MPG/passenger is of the same magnitude as the MPG/passenger for an individual car. What is bad is not necessarily the plane itself, but the fact we do very long distance trips. Trains and buses can be more efficient, carbone-wise, but requires a traffic big enough to offset the carbone cost of the infrastructure needed.
"per gallon per passenger" is a useful measure for planes.
Mr. Loves-his-truck drives, at the insane most, 20 000 miles a year. That’s a round trip Thai vacation.
But if I vacation with my SUV, I’ll go 600 mi. away as an absolute maximum or about a days worth of driving. That’s 7.5 gal per person for my family of four
If I take a plane, I’ll stick to a 24 hr travel limit. Which will get me a third the way across the world, or 83 gal for every member of my family.
In scenario 1, I’m a redneck with a family in Virginia Beach.
In scenario 2 I’m an enlightened cosmopolitan in Machu Pichu
I don't think I'll be fired for that, and even if I were I'd probably be able to find another job without too much trouble at this point, but I feel a bit bad for people don't have this option.
NOTE: I realize I'm hardly a beacon of "how to save the world from climate change", but I do try and do a bit where I can; I take public transit almost exclusively and do not own a car, and I have stopped eating beef and pork. I still order a lot of stuff from China online, which is probably the next habit I should break.
You don't have to be a vegan hermit to have an impact. Eating a little less meat, foregoing one flight, and biking to work once a week is better than not doing anything and that's great.
I am vegan. Probably 10-20% of my meals end up being vegetarian (usually with a minor ingredient like trace milk in a sauce).
This is simply out of practicality - we're talking stuff like, going to a restaurant with friends and there are no vegan options.
If everyone did that 80%, the ecosystem would (as it _already has!_) change so much that 100% would be trivial.
I used to think that it's pointless to do anything because no-one will follow you.
That has been empirically proven to be complete bollocks over the past few years. Go all in. I will follow, they will follow. It's time.
However, my wife is Chinese so of course she wants to see her family once a year. That means at least four flights. However we usually take the opportunity to travel whilst we're in China which adds another two flights each.
To balance this, we usually try to holiday in the UK when we can, which of course means we don't need to fly.
I am planning to limit flying to absolute emergencies (think: my parents die and I need to get to the funeral).
I live in a country which has an almost renewable grid. Long journeys can be made by electric car, public transport (which can be electrified), trains, etc.
The highest carbon output from my lifestyle is heating the home, and the embodied emissions of products that are difficult for me to control (I think embedded CO2 on labels, or carbon pricing, etc would be a great idea).
I already fund offsetting efforts, I posted earlier[1] to crowdfund ideas on how I should spend more.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21024358
Why should we do this? Because we can. Because limitless consumption does not make a happy life.
I think that wealthy, or moderately well off, or whatever you want to call it - we people have an obligation to do this. Call it the modern noblesse oblige.
Otherwise, keep your (presumably) high-paying job and use your money on political donations.
The invisible hand is not going to solve climate change.
(Plus now you can go on emissions-free road trips.)
I think you'd have more of a point if most people were driving around subcompact beaters.
And remember the context was about someone who can already afford to fly regularly (potentially even overseas), in which case switching to an electric car--if they even require a car--is almost certainly feasible.
There are already fantastic options for EVs. Almost anyone who buys new could get one. At very least a nice plug in hybrid.
edit: Another parameter you have control over is the amount of luggage you bring. A 30kg luggage allowance is a considerable fraction of most people's weight. Sure, they will fill the plane up with other things, but at least that's not on you.
There could be a cost saving in reducing flights as well, so the issue could be framed a way the presents multiple benefits.
But on a more serious note, this article is again wrong, like so many others about climate change. Being a combination of clickbait and false assumptions, it fails to miss the point entirely that first, 2.5% are irrelevant, but also that it makes no sense whatsoever to tackle this now. The technology is just not there yet.
What we urgently NEED to do is invest HUGE amounts of money into two key technologies. One is batteries. Make them as small, lightweight and efficient as possible. Pretty much everything depends on that and there has been no notable breakthrough in like forever... Without "super" batteries, we can kiss "preventing climate change" goodbye.
Another one is sucking the carbon out of the atmosphere. And no, we DON'T need to reduce our carbon emission, one of the key mistakes people make when it comes to climate change. What we need to do is to suck out more than we put in. There is no way in hell that 200 countries in the world agree on being C02 neutral. The leading countries need to suck the shit back out, that is the only way forward.
As for all the people who preach changing the entire world by reducing emissions... I mean, I get you are very naive, but seriously: It's not gonna happen. It is cute to have girl sail through the Atlantic to make so pep talk at congress. But it is also really meaningless. This is not the way the world will change. It never has. Politicians can't agree on the color of shit within their own country, not to mention between them.
The only way to avoid catastrophe is to outpace climate change with innovation. The world is not going to sacrifice living standards until they all drown in their own filth.
Anytime anybody says anything about the social cost of carbon being greater than $0.50 per ton, I just tune them out.
They also burn down or are harvested quite regularly.
That said, I'm not educated on the topic well enough to say whether this argument applies to carbon sequestration.
You cannot use a an active mine for this technique, you have to let the stone lie and weather.
Of course, the more we can scale back greenhouse gas emission the less we'll need to extract, so IMO it only makes sense to come at the problem from both sides.
That being said, I believe carbon capture proposals don't typically involve unburning the carbon - just capturing it and storing it. So the energy situation isn't as bad as your calculations.
But imagine if you could have an electricity powered machine that takes out C02 and turns it into solid dense carbon? That is pretty much the opposite of a coal burning power station. With today's technology it would be much simpler to reduce coal burning than taking C02 out of the air.
BTW China alone is building a new coal-burning power station every two weeks. https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2019/03/28/china-new-coal-p...
I'm just confused why those are the two must have technologies, which don't yet exist, and not others, which also have yet to exist on the scale we need.
Without another breakthrough in battery technology solar and wind will never be more than the token effort they are today.
There's no way you're getting people to downgrade their present for some stranger's future without good incentives.
Once you have that, not just CO2 capture but many other similar problmes are quite easy to solve without having to put pressure on people to change the way of their live.
You can even periodically turn part of the captured CO2 into jet fuel, effectively making all planes battery powered (with Earth's atmosphere being the battery).
you're the naive one, not whoever you're calling out here.
Not with that attitude. To elaborate: it's not black & white. You can definitely have a positive impact reducing emissions.
I look at the street outside my office and simply can't picture us deploying enough carbon capture machines to offset how much we're pumping into the air. I hope I'm wrong.
It would be funny, if it weren't tragic, how "manhattan project" and "moonshot" are the bywords for absurdly expensive government projects. Both these things were peanuts compared to the staggering amounts that politicians routinely fart away on practically overnight whims, for dubious and very likely corrupt reasons:
Manhattan project: $23 billion
Trump's wall: $22 billion
Moonshot: $288 billion
2008 bailouts: $700 billion
All US fusion research investment ever: ~$30 billion
Iraq war: $2 trillion
Its almost certainly for the leading countries to cut emissions and coerce the noncompliers into compliance.
First: how much mass (i.e. kg or tons) of C0_2 is emitted per year?
Second: what is the total mass of concrete produced per year worldwide?
(This is only an exercise to give parent poster an idea of the scale btw)
Instead of asking questions, why don't you tell us why we couldn't possibly sequester that much carbon annually? How big is the divide between what we could do and what needs to be done?
(I must say the idea of sequestering carbon seems emotionally appealing to me because it turns the problem into something much more tangible. You're not going to get people to cut their CO₂ emissions enough to matter without pushing for a strong emission taxing (which I'm also a fan of). Lowering your living standards doesn't feel like it's accomplishing much vs. the pain involved. Sequestering CO₂ would turn the problem into a numbers game, "how many tons is our country pulling out of the atmosphere, and where do we throw the money to get that number up?".)
First, we would need to double global electricity generation to a first approximation. The laws of thermodynamics make this non-negotiable. Very few power generation technologies not based on fossil fuels can scale like that. Nuclear power plants, realistically, and thousands of them in very short order.
Second, the chemicals used in industrial sequestration produce hazardous byproducts on a scale similar to the CO2 being sequestered, byproducts like hydrochloric acid. Today, this is easy to handle because we produce truly trivial quantities of the chemicals required for sequestration. Not only is there no industrial capacity to produce the required chemicals, nor an obvious way to scale them, there is also no plan for disposing of the billions of tons of caustic chemicals that would be thrown off as a side-effect of their manufacture. It doesn’t do us any good to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere if we end up turning the planet into a superfund site. Nobody accounts for hazardous byproducts of the proposed technology supply chains, which will be produced on similar scales.
As I’ve noted previously, we can reduce this to a much simpler sub-problem that is easy to reason about: what would be required to produce enough potassium hydroxide to sequester 37 billion tons of CO2 per year? All the required facts and figures are public knowledge and relatively basic science. The amount of electricity required per ton is widely documented, as are the chemical inputs and byproducts. And then, once you’ve realized the extent to which that asymptotically approaches impossible, do the same kinds of calculations on the upstream supply chain for the inputs to that process, which is also public information. It falls apart very, very quickly.
Current state-of-the-art has the following equation[1]:
6CO2 + 6H20 + (photons) → C6H12O6 + 6O2
(sorry, I couldn't help myself, the setup was too good) But seriously, I doubt we can beat plants in terms of carbon sequestration efficiency.
[1] https://sciencing.com/photosynthesis-equation-6962557.html
- Stop destroying forests (such as Amazon) which are a huge carbon sink for cows which are a carbon source.
- Build more buildings out of wood (wood buildings are carbon sinks) instead of concrete (carbon source)
- All building lumber should be self-sustaining (i.e. replant trees you used to build)
- Stop over fishing and allow oceans to grow unchecked (all living things sequester carbon while they are alive... the ocean is potentially the biggest carbon sink of all and could have several magnitudes more fish and plankton life sequestering billions of tons of carbon)
- Supplement all of the above with man-made carbon sequestration tech
Doesn’t it violate the first law of thermodynamics or something like that?
>A Canadian company, called Carbon Engineering, has published peer-reviewed findings, which show the process (carbon capture) can now be done for less than $100 per ton. This is a major improvement on current estimates of $600 per ton.[1]
>In 2016, Hollub became the first female CEO of a major international oil company. ... Hollub’s leadership has brought about a change in thinking. She realized that the company’s carbon-capture expertise could be used not just to make profits for shareholders but also to do climate good. That’s why Hollub is confident that Oxy can become carbon neutral, and why she was sitting at a table in Edinburgh, Scotland in November 2018 with Carbon Engineering’s Oldham. As of this year, Carbon Engineering has raised about $100 million, including about $15 million of government funds. Carbon also counts oil major Chevron and mining giant BHP as investors[2]
>Crystalline nets harvest water from desert air, turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel ... a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, reported that he and his colleagues have created a solar-powered device that could provide water for millions in water-stressed regions. At its heart is a porous crystalline material, known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), that acts like a sponge: It sucks water vapor out of air, even in the desert, and then releases it as liquid water. ... By mixing and matching the metals and linkers, researchers found they could tailor the pores to capture gas molecules, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide (CO2).[3]
>Net Power, a startup that built the world’s first zero-emissions fossil-fuel power plant in Texas. Earlier this year, Net Power fired up a $150-million power plant that burns natural gas but has the ability to capture 100% of its carbon emissions.[4]
[1] http://www.climateaction.org/news/breakthrough-made-in-lower...
[2]https://qz.com/1638096/the-story-behind-the-worlds-first-lar...
[3]https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/crystalline-nets-har...
[4]https://qz.com/1456378/occidental-petroleum-is-now-an-invest...
2.5% means we should focus on reducing somewhere else in the near term.
"It doesn't matter what Norway does because we're less than 1% of global emission" "It doesn't matter with air travel because it's only 2.5% of emissions" "It doesn't matter with coal power in Germany, because overall it's not that much"
If the rest of the world has that attitude, it won't matter if China and the US (often cited as the ones that matter) get to zero, as that's still not enough.
CO2 emissions is death by a 1000 papercuts, we need to tackle them all
So yes, let's bring aviation under carbon tax and/or cap and trade schemes, then people can decide how much they're willing to pay for these emissions compared to other sector emissions. I would guess travel is something people value and would be willing to pay for, until there are better solutions available
Note: I say this as someone that travel quite a bit for work and leisure - I would definitely be penalized if I have to pay for my emissions
The week following 9/11 was dramatically different. NASA recorded the change in daily temperature range. Less significantly, we had crystal clear skys where I live - for a week!
Water vapor can also seed cloud formation. Air travel causes a daily cycle in this, which might just keep more heat in at night.
You can look at data and see the temperature rise along with energy use (CO2). But to compare it with the rise in air travel is also informative. IIRC there is even an uptick of both during WWII.
But y'all can keep screaming 'bout CO2 till the cows come home. It may be that we really need coal fired airplanes that dont emit water vapor, just more CO2.
Do you have links for this?
The research by Hong and his colleagues, published in Geophysical Research Letters, follows other studies arguing that the September 2001 temperature variations can be explained by the clear, dry weather on the crucial days4, and that climate-modelling results do not support the contrail effects claimed by Travis's group5.
I contend the clear dry weather was a consequence of the lack of planes. It sounds the one of the original authors does too.
All I know is the weather here was beautiful. And very uncharacteristically so. Unfortunately nobody is going to repeat the experiment by grounding the entire fleet for 3 days just to test it.
https://www.int-res.com/articles/cr2002/cr2004/26/c026p001.p...
doi:10.1175/1520-0442(2004)017<1671:cctac>2.0.co;2
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442%28200...
I'd think the vapor trails would also reflect the suns heat so help cool the day time temperatures.
When the op says, "we should focus on…" I assume he's talking about policy, technology, etc., not individual concessions.
The best argument I can imagine for encouraging individual concessions is that, if the campaign to do so is massively successful, it might create a new norm, which will increase public awareness, which will increase public support for new policies and participation in the development of new technologies. But imo that's an unnecessarily roundabout course to chart.
I agree that flights are perhaps not the most urgent issue. But encouraging people to fly more is still wrong. When possible, we should avoid flights.
I’m not saying that is or isn’t my perspective, just pointing out that it is a perspective that may hold some validity.
But I do think it's very easy to get sucked into a mindset of, "Let's shame individuals into making sacrifices," without actually doing the math on whether or not that's an effective approach.
Roughly half the takeoff weight of an airliner is fuel. The fuel burned on a continental-distance (3000+ km / 2000+ mile) flight is roughly equal to the passenger's weight. CO2 emissions by mass exceed the mass of the fuel by a factor of three, as you're adding the mass of the oxygen that's added, far more than the hydrogen that's split off.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-emission-fuels-d_1085...
For a 747, roughly, takeoff, climb and descent require a fixed share of fuel, 7840 kg, and take about 250km (30.1 kg/km), cruise, another 10.1 kg/km. Shorter flights are comparatively worse, but what gets you in long-haul flights is simply the total distance: about 12,000 km for each leg of that Shanghai-NYC trip. And that's allocated across about 420 passengers.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/how-many-cars...
Back-of-the-envelope estimates: At Shanghai-NYC distances, that's 34,300 kg of fuel vs. about 420 * 100 kg/passenger total allowance (rough numbers), or roughly 3x the fuel mass per passenger, per leg, or 9x the CO2 emissions mass. That works out to about 1.8 tonnes based on my figures and maths, which is lower than your parent, but probably assumes too large a plane and too many passengers for a long-distance flight.
But yes: tonnes of CO2 emissions per passenger for round-trip international travel is about right.
That's sounds very low for fuel burn at that distance for a 747. The 747-8 carries over 191,000kg of fuel, yet has a maximum range of only 14,320km.
As an aside, I wonder if using "carbon" as shorthand for "carbon dioxide" does more harm than good.
The "carbon" vs. "fuel" vs. "CO2 emissions" terminology is legitimate -- these are all different real aspects of the phenomenon. Playing fast and loose between these, or simply confusing the terms (see also kW vs. kWh confusion in energy discussions) is far too common. I specifically called which of these I was using and how they're related.
Much of this would benefit by more use of tables and graphs and sensible comparisons, so that people are at least familiar with appearances. Understanding might or might not follow, but the journalistic practice of "tell a story around numbers without using numbers or pictures" seems to me actively harmful.
Someone I know got denied boarding a flight on employee standby (~free ticket, family member works for the airline) because they needed the weight for cargo.
You'd think with this limit a leaner airline would come out with per-kg passenger surcharges?
On the ground, we're starting to have "entirely green days" for electricity - and say new cars that use it.
Look at this like optimizing a program. If you do a profile and one function takes up 80% of the profile and everything else is a tiny fraction, sure, focus on that hot spot. But if you have many many slow functions and none is a clear hotspot, they all need attention, even the 2.5% one.
Of course we have to be smart about our efforts, but it's time we stopped passing the buck around.
There are options to make fuels from other sources - but every time someone brings this up we get the oil shrills screaming about why use food for fuel, or their tired old energy neutral studies that haven't changed their numbers in 20 years.
In the long term, electric planes would be ideal if we can figure out energy storage (or perhaps wireless energy transmission).
With the flow battery using synthetic fuel you produce & atmospheric oxygen to produce energy & CO2. Which will then get captured again by your synthetic fuel factory.
Win win. :)
If you are a management consultant you probably produce more CO2 from air travel in a year than from all other CO2 sources in 5 years
This is global data per sector. The rest of the page is fantastically insightful, too.
However, when talking about world climate actions, we have 7 billion people acting. There's no need to focus. We can cut air travel AND ALSO do everything else. And in fact we need to.
More migration - the smartest researchers in photovoltaics can move to a city where they can make a bigger impact, and still visit their families. Even without migrating, researchers can collaborate across continents.
Increases economic productivity - when production stops at a nuclear plant, you can fly in parts/personnel quickly.
Economic development - if you couldn't fly in technical experts to China, how could you source components from there? Imagine how expensive lithium batteries would be if all components were made in western (expensive) countries. Teslas are fairly expensive, and they already source many parts from China.
The solutions for climate change requires technology and money. Why kill the economy with draconian measures? We need this economy to produce the solutions.
This can make them more rational and less prone to manipulation & hysteria than if they never left the town or country they were born in.
It cracks me up when people talk about plastic and throwaway clothing as ways to cut back on carbon emissions.
However, if someone tries to take my car before those alternatives are in place, we're going to have a problem. My problem will be getting to work. The transport authority's problem will be obtaining money from a hostile and/or evaporated tax base.
We build a better world by working together, not by raiding each other and hoping that somehow, in the aftermath, the mass fixes itself.
I use and love public transit and would love to see downtown car free zones that help encourage transit usage and phase out the need to have a car - I wouldn't love to see everyone's car instantly impounded.
1. The alternative's include things they can own and control. This is really important in rural or suburban areas. It's also important for a lot of businesses. 2. The alternative's are handled in a cost effective rollout manner.
Basically, the solutions need to be in the public interest with them in mind. Not sure how that factors into startup and VC thinking these days.
I would imagine that eco friendly public transit systems could cut down on emissions, cut overall costs, and cut congestion in cities. That seems like a good place to target as low hanging fruit.
For many in US just the idea of sharing a space with strangers is revolting. Same applies to dense living.
And that brings another question: how would you have effective public transit system in suburban sprawl?
So while the claim is 2.5% of global co2 emissions, in terms of impact it's more like ~6.7%.
And growing, largely just so people can take selfies in different places, which are then used to promote more travel via social media.
We need to tax fuel used for international air travel. The Chicago Convention [1] may have made sense in establishing the industry but we're well past that point now. Make this high-speed, high-impact transportation method high-cost so it's used less frivolously.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_(travel)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Convention_on_Internat...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_inject...
Do you think the first attempt will be done at global scale? No, it will be done first at small scale, and then larger and larger.
There is no reasonable scenario in which we would be surprised by the impact of climate engineering.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
Imagine if cruise ships and cargo ships had snow machine jets on the back, lofting prepped salt water into the air, to seed clouds.
The problem is that this is geoengineering which means career suicide for interested scientists. At the moment.
Maybe I'm unaware of relevant history, maybe I'm being too cynical.
To almost anyone you talk to, banning air travel sounds completely ridiculous. In reality it wouldn't be enough by itself. It's on the lower end of action that is required.
If you're someone who never flies, or flies once every year or two, it's not really a big deal at all. On the rare occasion I travel transcontinental I would need to set aside 3 days each way for travel instead of one, which would be inconvenient but not really a huge problem. Even if my transoceanic freight exclusively went by boat, it wouldn't be a big difference in my life. I already don't care about having the latest electronic gadgets as soon as they can be delivered from their factories.
Even two weeks to cruise across the Atlantic and a month across the Pacific (if you ignore the emissions of cruise ships for a moment) isn't really a deal-breaker on your once-in-a-lifetime vacation to another continent, either as part of your elaborate honeymoon or as part of your retirement.
The more accurate question is how does everyone respond if the cost of flying doubles?
How many business trips can be handled by VC? How many personal trips provide similar value being taken closer to home?
High speed rail is also not as great as people think - true HSR uses a pretty huge amount of electricity, which has to come from somewhere. Conventional (aka medium-speed) rail on electrified tracks is probably the sweet spot for efficiency, but the travel times aren't going to make most people happy.
More realistically, the solution in a world where carbon is "properly" priced would be that people travel a lot less overall.
A cost number without a benefit number is completely useless for real analysis.
If I fly the same distance it takes me 3 hours, and I pay 100 euros.
Heres the kicker, it costs me 100 euro to buy CO2 compensation and make the flight CO2 neutral, and whenever me and my spouse fly we always pay twice that so that we are actually carbon negative.
So everytime we fly we reduce the earths CO2 by one flight and still have 200 euros more in our bank account.
There’s only so much room to plant trees, though. It’s effectively a limited carbon sink.
Their website lists some CO2 compensation projects.
When people tell me they love to travel. I reply why? It's usually I want to get away or I'm sick of where I am now in my life. Try to understand this feeling deeper and think about how you can better structure your life to appreciate the moment and where you choose to build yourself and your community. People also sometimes describe travel as a sort of escape. It's important to try and understand that feeling deeper. Why do you need to escape from your life as it is now?
the question if the distance you travel doesn't have substitute. like many business people travel just to meet, which has zero carbon alternative - video call.
I'd actually prefer if air travel was more expensive. It's become expected that you fly groups of people across the continent to business meetings, and some people make regular flights.
What, the "solution" is going to be blimp travel, boat travel, undersea super train travel...
Maybe we should make air travel so expensive that only the rich can use it!
Medium and heavy truck emissions are UP 89.5 percent in the same period but aviation is the crisis. Passenger cars up 20%.
Let's look at Tg emissions in 2017 Aviation: 174.8 On road vehicles 1,558.6
Source: https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P100WUHR.pdf page 2
So to avoid the Jevons Paradox, we need actually zero emissions aircraft. Battery-electric or possibly hydrogen are the main contenders, here.
Battery-electric in the near term is limited to about 1000km, maybe 2000km range. That's technically enough to do transatlantic crossings if you stop by Greenland and Iceland or possibly the Azores. And you could do transpacific by following the Aleutians. Pretty much the hardest place to visit is actually Hawaii. But for domestic flights, battery-electric is actually a superior option to high speed rail in the US. Typical HSR routes in the US are only about 300 miles or so, well within range of existing electric battery tech that could be adapted to airplanes, and even a fully subsonic, Mach 0.5 propeller-drive electric airplane would be much faster than even the fastest practical HSR. And operating at high altitude (with far lower air density) would mean that the electric aircraft would be more efficient than a hypothetical Mach 0.5 high speed train. But all of this will require probably non-traditional aircraft makers. The duopoly is culturally unprepared for the kind of radical engineering necessary to make a 1000km battery electric aircraft feasible (almost sailplane-like efficiency, combined with very high battery mass fraction, combined with extremely efficient battery packaging, state of the art structural mass, and transition to higher performance chemistry where possible).
Liquid hydrogen is also a possibility for electric air travel. Compressed room temperature hydrogen is hardly more energy-dense than battery-electric, though, so you're going to have to go at least cryogenic, if not liquid, for hydrogen storage. Liquid hydrogen wouldn't be too bad in this application since the time of storage wouldn't be too long, and the scale would be large enough (if used in a widebody aircraft) that boil-off may not be too much of a problem (besides, you need a constant feed of hydrogen anyway). But a big problem is the fact that anthropogenic high altitude water vapor is maybe even worse (by a factor of 2) for climate change than CO2, so you'd probably want to condense the output. That means using fuel cells and then storing the condensed water on board and doing occasional low altitude dumps (it may even be feasible to store the water for the entire trip, dumping only right before you land) or perhaps freezing the condensate into pellets (small enough to not pose a lethal hazard but large enough to not evaporate on the way down) and then dropping them along the way. So long-haul air is a major challenge.
So many people are just getting to obtain some of their travel dreams and now they have to stop :(
Instead, climate activists promote a very narrow Utopian vision and work against everything that falls outside this vision. These activists don't really care about the environment: they're using climate activism as a pretext for advancing some Utopian project and putting themselves in charge of how we all live. These people are discrediting all climate science in the eyes of regular people.
The Citizens' Climate Lobby is focusing on a carbon fee and dividend. I'm new to the movement (so take what I say with a grain of salt) but I like what I see so far. We're very focused on one particular legislative approach, not because other things won't help, but because it's hard enough getting legislation like H.R. 763 through congress already, and distractions dilute our precious time and energy. So the CCL is pushing on just this one bill, which we think is the most effective approach for us.
But I'd love to see people work on everything and everything. I just think it's probably most effective for most organizations to focus on a relatively narrow area.