That’s hundreds of thousands of flights a day.
We could just eliminate all coal electric plants in the world and make a real impact. Then use that cleaner energy to power our electric cars.
In fact, people who actively shame others for eating meat, having vacations, and raising kids, are doing exactly that. Except, instead of optimizing the ecological impact, they optimize their own emotional return through gaining influence over others, similar to religious missionaries.
I think, for everyone who actually wants to solve the climate change problem, being honest about their goals could be a good starting point.
There are a lot of people on earth, working in parallel or asynchronously should be a lot more efficient than fixing problems synchronously one-by-one and reassessing in between?
5 years and about 10 major releases later, I can confidently tell you that convincing a large group of people to do anything, even it if pays off great for them, is a long and time-consuming process, that is often more labor-intense and risky than the engineering part.
Unfortunately being anti-nuclear is more emotionally fulfilling for people.
Also that 2.5% doesn't take into account the affect of NOx on climate or contrails.
The IPCC estimate the effect of air travel is 2 to 4 times as high as that expected just from CO2 emissions.
We could reduce the CO2 emissions of our electric by half within 10 years.
Begin moving to electric vehicles en masse within a decade.
Maybe a big 2025 goal should be a priority?
We should be doing more now so we need to do less later.
I don't think we can exclude air travel just so a few people can continue jetting around the world.
Barges are cheap and slow too but going down river and letting consistent currents do the heavy lifting with a certain regimented cargo means haste becomes irrelevant. Going against the current (or wind) then generates the energy penalty, especially with returning freight.
The main efficiency losses in airplanes are wind resistance and takeoff/landing... An airplane cannot go arbitrarily slow or it loses lift. According to industry sources, airships are about 80% more efficient. Plus as fuel space efficiency and weight is less of a problem, they can use different fuel sources for the engines, including methane or hydrogen, and electric engines too.
The usual shows top 10 including china coal, Gazprom and india coal. But i'd like to know how things are evolving.
NREL did some research about 5 years ago showing you could move ~75% of the US light vehicle fleet over to electric with no additional generation capacity, so the generation slack is there.
Problem is all of the world politicians are a corrupt scum. And this is the only reason we didnt do that already. We have means to stop polluting. We just choose not to stop.
Can anyone shed light on this?
EVs are a great fit for when demand is low at night (and you’ve got to run the generator regardless), or when there’s excessive production from renewables and you don’t want to curtail and waste that power.
But eliminating all coal plants in the world is not feasible in the short term. Germany tried it a while back. Turns out that some days are too dark to catch enough sunlight. Turns out that sometimes the wind doesn't blow.
Then you'd have to restart the coal plants again because they are reliable sources of energy.
Or we should consider going nuclear. Which makes perfect sense in regions like Europe where there is hardly any danger of earth quakes and tsunamis.
But Europe has bad memories of that because of outdated tech in eastern Europe going haywire.
It'll take another generation or so to get to the point where we can shut down coal plants.
Opposition to nuclear plants is much older than Chernobyl's catastrophe; it started at least in the early 70s, with the big protests in Wyhl, Germany.
And frankly, the way some western European states have been dealing with the plants we do have is not reassuring. Maybe the distribution of iodine pills in the German towns bordering Belgium was overkill, but it shows that those nuclear states aren't taking the concerns seriously enough.