I didn't want to fly – so I took a cargo ship from Germany to Canada | Hacker News Reader

I didn't want to fly – so I took a cargo ship from Germany to Canada

theguardian.com

47 pointsnwrk20 comments

I mean....yes. Yes, your carbon footprint is smaller by travelling slower. But you need to be in an extremely priviledged position to be able to afford travelling this way, both financially and time-wise. Cross-atlantic is obviously quite extreme, but even within Europe a train is not really a viable alternative for a lot of people, when I go to visit my family the choice is either a ~£100 Ryanair ticket for a 2 hour flight, or around 40 hour long train journey that will cost at least £500 one way. I just don't have the money or the time to travel this way. I don't know what's the right answer here - I suspect it is "just don't travel then".

I agree with your main point! I want to state that upfront so that you don't think I'm arguing about the current situation, apart from addressing specifics.

You will have to add some time to flying scenario. You have to arrive early to the airport to go through security (2 hours?), you have to wait for your luggage after landing (30 minutes?), and since airports are usually located outside of the city center you have to add travel time to and from the airport (45 minutes in each direction?). In my example that's an extra 4 hours added to the 2 hours time flying.

It's still a lot less than going by train, but with train you get the convenience of being able to run onto the platform 2 minutes before departure, you end up in the city center, you pick up your luggage and leave, and you usually have more space which makes it easier to work on the train if needed.

Also, flying is extremely subsidized and tax-exempt. I just read articles (in Swedish, so I don't know if anyone wants links) claiming that air tickets should be between 50% and 95% more expensive if they had to carry their own costs, if there was a tax on airplane fuel, and so on. So the price for air tickets probably doesn't reflect their real costs, and obviously doesn't take the environmental effect into account.

But even adding the extra time and extra cost, it would still be faster and cheaper to fly than to take the train, which is unfortunate from an environmental perspective. I wish we had faster trains, and a lot more overnight trains so that you could start your travel in the evening and wake up in a new city. It wouldn't help with a 40 hour trip, because it would still be two nights with one full day on the train.

This might work for people who can work remotely on the train, but not for everyone. Start you journey on Thursday night, work Friday on the train, and arrive Saturday morning at the destination. Someone I know did this recently while traveling to a conference, and the company obviously paid for the tickets. This doesn't help when visiting family, but for work travel, train could be an option.

I have an airplane interested colleague and I asked him about environmental fuels. He said that aviation biofuel already exists, and it's just a question of adoption and scale. A carbon dioxide tax might push air companies towards biofuel, or you could have the option of green biofuel departures and let the customers decide if they think it's worth the extra cost. I'm sure my train-traveling conference goer would consider that option if it was available.

As I said, I agree with your main point that if you just look at price and travel time today, the less environmentally friendly option makes more sense. It would make more sense if the slower option was also much, much cheaper than flying, because that would encourage more people to use that option.

IIRC, bio fuels are worse than oil because it takes multiple oil barrels to come up with 1 barrel of bio oil.

Only as a reference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19562152

The whole thread may be of interest to you, it is about Sweden wanting to re-surrect night trains:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19557848

Right, imagine a world before flying existed.

People just don't go to far flung places every year. In the UK they would go to the seaside or other towns.

Having the choice to take a plane is an extremely privileged position - it's only really existed for poor people in the last 20 or 30 years.

In particular Ryanair flights to Europe for a tenner or whatever are a modern anomaly.

Ferries from the UK to Scandinavia for example have stopped running due to flights capturing the market.

He paid 2 146$ to go from Hamburg to Vancouver in 3 weeks. It would be 1 000$ more if he want his train ride from Toronto to Vancouver to have a bed to sleep during the 4 days it would takes. For 600$ he could do the same in 15 hours and then spend 1 500$ in carbon offset (2 500$ if we consider the bed).

Is it me or his solution is so much worse in every aspect? With mine it's quick, "comfortable" and carbon negative.

This is a point most media conveniently forget. Recently there was one that explained a train from Amsterdam to Barcelona costs € 350, takes 2 days and generates 45kg CO2. A plane costs € 100 (or less), takes 2 hours, and generates 200kg CO2.

The option they forgot was a CO2 compensated flight, it costs € 110 (still 240 less than the train), takes only 2 hours and results in net 0kg CO2.

How do you compensate for the CO2 released? Do you contribute to some kind of CO2 removal project? Not being sarcastic or anything I just genuinely don't know how to compensate for CO2.

When I pay to compensate my CO2 emission, it goes into tree planting project.

Yes, most airlines offer this option. There are two ways, one is buying the CO2 rights from someone else (that doesn't have a net positive effect on the world, don't do this if you really want to contribute something) the other is donating money to projects specifically to reduce CO2. Mostly that's tree planting projects, in areas that have had deforestation in the past.

There are a few organizations that audit these projects to guarantee they're actually planting trees and planting the right amount etc.

If we had a CO2 tax, flying would be more expensive (which it should be, obviously).

> ships rarely have room for more than a dozen passengers

Reason is that you need a ship's doctor if there are more than 12 passengers.

There is no mention of the type of fuel the cargo ship burned while outside of port (bunker fuel, anyone?). The three citations at the end of the article simply reference generic sites, not specific information.

Possibly something awful, but irrelevant for the passenger on the scale of moving a 100,000 tonne ship, so we should consider that issue separately.

Couldn't we make the same argument for an airliner:

X cubic meters of CO2 divided by 200 odd passagers in an airliner.

Vs.

Y cubic meters of NOx/SO2/CO2 divided by that person and however purchased the freight goods in the container.

We could argue that the cargo ship would sail irrespective of that passenger, but we could equally make the same reasoning for people buying last minute seats that would otherwise fly empty.

Without doing the maths this risks making very fortunate people feel good about themselves and distracts from corporation practices that are orders of magnitude more harmful.

Again I do not have the numbers but what is the carbon impact of halting all german flights versus decomissioning all german coal plants?

> We could argue that the cargo ship would sail irrespective of that passenger, but we could equally make the same reasoning for people buying last minute seats that would otherwise fly empty.

Sure but the cargo ship business isn't moving passenger. If they always fill all the passengers rooms, they won't decide to bring more ships into the equation. Whether there's 0 passenger or 15, the ship will still go through that same amount of fuel.

Someone else did gave some good example of energy usage that a passenger will cause, like the water he will consume will need to be desalinated, or if he get sick and that require diverting a ship.

The carbon calculations seems questionable. The author should include all energy used on board the ship, which is entirely from fossil fuels. The energy required to desalinate seawater for drinking/washing was probably greater than a flight.

Also, an additional, unnecessary person on the ship is slightly increasing the risk of diverting the ship because of a medical emergency. Imagine how much carbon would be burned if this massive ship had to turn around to drop off a sick passenger.

Cargo ships are unregulated and burn the lowest grade oil called bunker fuel. These ships can emit the equivalent sulfur emissions of 19 million ICE vehicles.[1]

[1]https://www.cadmatic.com/resource/articles/does-one-ship-pol...

Not as of January 01 - there's a new regulation this year that imposes a sulfur cap on fuel burned by cargo ships [1]. Most ships must now burn more expensive and cleaner fuels. Some ships - mostly larger ones - still burn HSFO but they can only do so because they've installed "scrubbers" which clean the emissions to reduce the amount of sulfur emitted into the atmosphere.

It's an open question whether scrubbers are really helping or just a diversion from purchasing higher quality fuel, but it's only economical to install scrubbers on the very big ships and so the large majority of the ~50,000 strong merchant marine fleet don't have them installed.

[1] https://ihsmarkit.com/topic/imo-2020-regulation.html

Seems like offsetting would be easier?

That's one of those economically sensible things that normal people dont seem to like though.

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