Hacker News Reader

Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

If you need to travel long distances, there's little substitute for an airplane.

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.

View on HN

> ... then we need to fix shipping first.

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.

Right. 7 billion people is an unfathomable amount.

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.

> 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.

To be fair, we didn't have to understand the climate to break it.

Fair enough, but unless are organized, we often feel like individuals with little power.

(And little substitute for burning hydrocarbons as airplane propellant. Energy density and stuff like fire safety really really matters in aviation.)

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.

An area of research that I don't hear much about is creating hydrocarbon fuels for applications that really need them, like airplanes. Essentially, using hydrocarbons as a chemical battery instead of an out-of-the-ground energy source.

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.

> An area of research that I don't hear much about is creating hydrocarbon fuels for applications that really need them, like airplanes. Essentially, using hydrocarbons as a chemical battery instead of an out-of-the-ground energy source.

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.

Biofuels are certainly a thing - over 100 billion liters were produced last year [0]. For a while, it looked like there were credible avenues to using algae to produce jet fuel, and there were even test flights. Unfortunately, pumping fuel out of the ground is really, really cheap, and most of these companies went under or pivoted [1] (a gallon of algae-produced omega-3 oil or cooking oil is worth far more than a gallon of algae-produced Jet-A).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofuel

[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/lessons-from-th...

> noxious oxides of nitrogen and sulphur

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.

There's a great number of humans that live in coastal areas affected by shipping pollution. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1440801/

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.

Shipping pollution is not completely unconcerning, but suggesting that it is a bigger concern than cars is just staggeringly wrong.

> If you need to travel long distances, there's little substitute for an airplane.

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.

Price in the carbon and let consumers decide if they still need the travel. I expect a carbon offset tax wouldn't actually decrease air travel that much -- there's so much business travel that needs doing -- but it probably would slow down growth.

Definitely tax it, but I actually view a lot of the business travel as unnecessary compared to consumer travel, and that's what I'd want to get rid of first with a tax. I'm far more sympathetic to people trying to see their dying uncles or attend their sister's wedding or visiting their parents once a year than, say, professionals "needing" to attend conferences or whatever.

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!

Vastly more business travel is done for sales or sales-support purposes than attending conference purposes.

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.

Well, to be blunt, so what? That sucks for sales stuff, it's not like I said conferences are the only things that need to change. Maybe the practices there need to change there just like for conferences and other stuff. Nobody said it's easy or nice or effective or whatever for humans to do long distance. Just that you need to start sacrificing somewhere and I sure as heck find it more reasonable and humane to start at business sales trips than family visits.

"So what?" Incentives. If subgroup A doesn't travel for sales, subgroup B who travels will likely outcompete them by more than the cost of the travel, or subgroup C who is large enough to have many local offices will outcompete A, making it harder for new entrants to a market to compete and concentrating business activities in select cities (which is great if you're rich enough to live in those prosperous cities).

I'm not making moral value judgments here; I'm making economic value judgments as that drives much more behavior I think.

Whatever you do, either some subgroup will find a way to take advantage of it, or you'll find a way to mess with taxes and incentives and prices enough to mostly compensate for the side effects. That's not a counterargument for a solution, it's already a given in the problem statement. If you find some magical way to avoid any and all collateral economic damage, I'm all for it, but I don't see why people should just wait for others to come up with miracles that may never come just because some businesses will inevitably win and others will inevitably lose.

As someone in sales, I think I would be EXTREMELY supportive of all of my competition deciding to do the eco conscious thing, and declining to fly to clients. It'd be great.

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.

Yeah, it'd be great, until your clients stop viewing it as a noble thing and start seeing it as a disgusting and wasteful thing. Then your competition will be happier than you.

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.

I'll happily take the opposite side of that bet.

The opposite side of that bet? So you won't change your tune and you'll happily continue to do this even after your clients find it disgusting? Be my guest I guess...

It needs to be viewed as distasteful as holding sales meetings in a strip club.

I have friends who have done this this year. Good luck with that.

Of course you are right. That's why a certificate trade is needed, to maintain a level the playing field between you and your competitors.

I agree with you there big time. You can virtually attend a conference. FaceTime with grandma from her deathbed is not an acceptable alternative.

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.

There are individual consumers that commute via plane in the UK. This shouldn't be the case and these aren't most people.

I don't really support arbitrary penalties on certain classes of travelers or banning, e.g., business class. Note that the corresponding inefficiency would be priced in to the carbon offset tax and business and first class travelers would still be paying their larger portion of the carbon externality.

People traveling, the tourism that is so often bemoaned, is a huge part of the connections between countries, a huge part of diversity and understanding.

A world with greatly reduced air travel is a more insular and less understanding world.

> 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.

> It is more likely that immigration increases cultural understanding rather than travel.

What will the affect on immigration be if going back to the "old country" becomes significantly more difficult?

U.S. and Canada had huge influx of immigrants from Europe in 19th and 20th century, when air travel didn't exist. It seems to me to be a basis of strong ties of these countries with Europe rather than other countries.

> I don't think there is an evidence for that. It is more likely that immigration increases cultural understanding rather than travel.

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.

> Disagree that travel doesn't matter

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'.

> We know - you already made this point in the parent comment.

...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.

> A world with greatly reduced air travel is a more insular and less understanding world.

That's dubious and far more benign than the consequences of a world with climate change.

> 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?

You're worried about CO2 emissions resulting from war? You do realize the role climate change itself can play in migration, refugees, wars, catastrophes..? You need to be worried about climate change resulting in war...

Climate change might also result in war! But I think cutting people off from other countries makes it a lot easier to categorize populations as 'other' and thus ok to go to war with.

There's a lot of ways for the world to fail here.

The idea "travel == enlightenment and understanding" is sadly far from the reality. It once was true, insomuch as the privilege to travel was correlated with wealth which was correlated with education - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour

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.

Ticking off the number of countries you've visited is hardly a benevolent hobby. You can learn the history, culture, language, traditions, etc. of any country by opening a book, if that's really what you're interested in.

Yeah right, because nobody who travels to a country reads up on the history, culture and traditions. Traveling and reading, after all, are mutually exclusive. /s

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.

That's, no doubt, an amazing experience. And there's likely countless wonderful experiences you have had / could have right in your home city.

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.

> And there's likely countless wonderful experiences you have had / could have right in your home city.

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.

Beethoven? You mean the deaf man who couldn’t hear many of his own greatest hits? The man who died in the early 1800’s, before audio recording, and whose music we can listen to because it was written down? Good analogy ;-)

> You can learn the history, culture, language, traditions, etc. of any country by opening a book

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.

I strongly suspect an average student who studied Japanese in college knows more about Japan than an average tourist who went to Japan for a week or two, yes.

Im Canadian, I’ve read and researched a lot. I thought I knew my country but then I drove across it and realized how little I knew. Experiencing a place, people and culture is imho impossible without being there and present.

You seem to have conflated CO2 with other pollutants. All the world's shipping taken together amounts to only 3% of the carbon emission inventory. It certainly is not the case that 15 ships emit more carbon than all cars.

Where does the 3% figure come from? It's not clear to me that we have or are even trying to get accurate sea-based emissions inventory.

You can get a very good inventory just from sales of petroleum-based fuel to the shipping industry. Nobody buys diesel or LNG except to burn it.

This article: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2017/03/11/g...

> It certainly is not the case that 15 ships emit more carbon than all cars.

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.

I don't follow what you're saying. Is it that other emissions than CO2 are more important to fight?

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.

There's always sailing, although it's a bit laborious, and fission has a good record at sea :-)

There is some progress in applying wind power to shipping (other than the traditional fixed sails) - https://www.ship-technology.com/projects/msbelugaskysails/

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.

> Oh, and bikes and feet for the last 1-2km.

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.

I remember reading years and years ago that teleconferencing would really change once we put a panel at the end of a conference table with life size images of the participants.

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.

We actually had these in our office at HP. https://youtu.be/TC4sNztp8dk They were quite well used by execs, but those of us at the bottom end probably only a couple of times for virtual team meetings. They were very expensive, to get the high end video (think 2008). As soon as you have one or two remote attendees though the point of it goes away. After the demerger, building shuffles, they were decommissioned

This is an interesting layout.

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.

All of these can be fixed with carbon taxes going towards a carbon offset program. At the end of the day we still need cheap plastic shit so just fully price in the externalities

> At the end of the day we still need cheap plastic shit

Do we though? Especially in the quantities that we currently consume?

we'll find that out once it is correctly priced with a carbon tax

"If air travel accounts for less emissions than passenger cars..."

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.

Actually, there are substitutes. People who need to travel (and most of them don't) can just use trains or ships, and make the overall stay longer (decreasing overall number of trips). It was already possible more than 100 years ago, and it would be much less of a problem in today's digital economy.

There's only so much time each day, and a plane gets you to your destination so much faster. Trains? Maybe for shorter trips like NYC to Philadelphia or DC, but NYC to Seattle? A train going 150mph would take 19 hours for that trip not counting stops. It would probably be more than 30 hours with stops, and significantly longer if the train can't average 150 mph. The flight is 6 hours gate to gate. You can't beat the speed of modern air travel, its just so much better than any other alternative.

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.

You can't beat the speed of the Concorde either, and it was too expensive commercially. Perhaps if we correctly externalize carbon fuels, people will en-masse choose trains rather than airplanes.

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.

Trains are an option, but ships seem equally bad or worse than planes for transporting people

Surprised I haven't seen anyone mention Hyperloop yet. I think if any of the major Hyperloop companies are able to realize their vision then traveling city center to city center by Hyperloop would be a much preferable substitute to air travel for most intercontinental travel.

Even if Hypeloop worked, which hasn't been demonstrated, its nameplate capacity is close to zero. It can optimistically replace one highway lane. It cannot possibly displace air travel unless you have dozens of tubes. Each of the Bay Area's three airports averages about 3-4x the passengers that a hypeloop might be capable of moving, and that's averaged over the whole year. Peak day/hour air travel can never be replaced with hypeloop.

Ordinary steel-wheel high-speed rail can do it, though. There are many stations in the world that can move 100k pax/hour.

Shipping is the single most efficient way to move anything, followed by trains.

That entirely depends on how you define efficient. In pure immediate financial cost, yes - because the negative consequences of shipping are not borne by the shipping companies or their immediate customers.

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.

No, it’s the most efficient in liters of fuel per hundred kilometers of distance traveled.

> when we need to fix shipping first.

Yes, lets only focus on one problem at a time, right? We are only one person after all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com