Air travel is ecologically unsustainable.
I would hope the Corona crisis would be the perfect opportunity to wind down this archaic sector and transition that part of the economy to something more future sustainable.
I would hope the Corona crisis would be the perfect opportunity to wind down this archaic sector and transition that part of the economy to something more future sustainable.
The big realization with covid 19 however is that a lot of air travel is actually completely unnecessary. Businesses are adapting to having meetings online instead of in person and learning that they can work globally without having to bring people locally. I've now been on several projects where I worked with people on a daily basis that I never met in real life. This is becoming normal.
A long time ago, I worked in a multinational that definitely was spending a bit too much on ferrying people around the planet to attend meetings. The most extreme version of this that I witnessed was a bi-monthly "sprint" planning with 13 teams in one room flown from basically India, Europe, etc. to Chicago. And yes, this is just about the least agile form of scrum that I've ever encountered and also about as much of a waste of time and kerosene as you'd expect. Also, I've never seen that many post-its in 1 room after that meeting and hope I never have to deal with that level of corporate insanity again.
This is just based on the wh/weight ratio - lithium batteries are far heavier then oil based fuel per watt hour, and aviation is incredibly weight sensitive.
Basically if it flies cheaper, battery is going to win in the air as well. R&D done by hundreds of battery tech companies will help improve the range of already flying (or soon to fly) electrical planes to the point where the range becomes useful to somebody; or at least useful enough that the cost argument becomes decisive.
There are a few planes in the process of certification that have useful but modest range that use battery tech from a few years ago. The price of certification is that you have to pick some tech and stick with it for a few years. Successors to these planes with more recent tech would probably get about 1.5-2x the range. That's roughly what Bye Aviation and Eviation are talking about for successors to their current first generation tech. To be clear that's just swapping out tech they picked a few years ago for the kind of stuff that Tesla is talking about next month.
The fallacy in this argument is believing we need to match A320s, Boeing 787s, etc. specs to be able to match their cost per passenger. This is simply not true. Big jets get benefits out of fuel efficiency because fuel is stupendously expensive. That's literally the only reason to spend hundreds of million on a super complicated piece of technology that burns tens of thousands of $ of fuel per trip.
This is not the case for electrical planes. Bigger ones are actually less efficient and the smaller ones are ultimately going to be cheap enough that you can simply get more of those to match the passenger volume. At the list price of the Eviation Alice (900kwh, 700 miles, 9 passengers + 2 pilots) of 3.5M$, you can easily buy the 20 or so you'd need to transport the number of passengers you'd typically cram in a A320 and still save a bit of cash. Eviation is not likely to ship the kind of volumes to allow airlines to make that kind of choice any time soon. But think autonomous planes flying much further and cheaper in a few decades and you get the picture. At some point, A320s stop making sense. It's mostly a matter of volume production and certification. Battery tech improvements during the time it will take to do that will help but are far less essential and partially already a done deal. More is better though; or rather less is more in terms of cost.
So if we want to travel long distances fast there really isn't much of a realistic option. Though short flights (1 to 2h) should be replaced by rail when it makes sense (no sea to cross etc)
https://www.thelocal.se/20180313/swedens-forests-could-fuel-...
Also trains are a lot more then 40% more efficient in terms of pollution. Eurostar for example 6g per km traveled while airplane is 100g (long haul flights much worse for short ones). Though electric train powered by coal can get to around 40g per km and even worse for diesel trains.
> Aviation could consume a quarter of 1.5C carbon budget by 2050
https://www.carbonbrief.org/aviation-consume-quarter-carbon-...
However, I would dare to expect more from a long term policy perspective. There are many things that were unsustainable with our socio-economic lifestyle long before the Corona crisis. While we can not prevent the impacts on the individual people businesses, we could use the funds that are rightfully mobilized to aid them to shape a "new" economy that is more aligned with the coming climate crisis.
We did this in the past (also much too late) e.g. with the coal mining sector in Belgium. For a long time we tried to keep that activity alive just because 'jobs, jobs, jobs'. It took decades before politics was ready to stop trowing good money after bad, and create regional re-conversion funds to turn those local economies around and give them a 'new' economic activity model that did have a future.
This is why I would advocate a scenario that spend on those people/companies impacted in industries such as aviation to turn them towards to other more sustainable parts of the future economy rather than just keep poring in money to let them cling to an ever more precarious activity.
The data centre industry emits as much CO2 as aviation, see how far you get on here proposing that we need to do less computing, to save the planet!
I didn’t even mention the cost of desktop computing running all that shitty JavaScript. Probably at least as much CO2 again from just the ads.
There, I've made an equally unnuanced statement, now what?
I don't think things are that black and white. A moderate amount of air travel is not unsustainable per se, I would think.
Nothing is moderate about our current day consumption and extraction, and moderation is not compatible with our current socio-economic "growth or death" model.
Thankfully, birth rates rapidly decline as nations develop. It's a problem that fixes itself. But it is a problem.
Airtravel is a very heavily subsidised sector. As is train-travel and other public transport, but (I'm not expert, so this is merely hearsay) apparently airtravel is heavier subsidised than public transport.
He literally used the expression "to wind down":
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wind-dow...
"if a business, situation, activity, etc. winds down, or is wound down, it gradually ends"
So I think he meant there should be no more air travel at all.
If you're looking for subsidies, check out the way jet fuel is taxed (usually at far lower rates than regular fuel) or implement a consistent emissions scheme. Not that either is likely for a while given the ongoing carnage in the industry.
Which is not to say there aren't other subsidies for air travel, for example in keeping open the minor airports at which low-cost airlines often land. And money for manufacturers.
I'm not sure if this is a sarcastic comment but I'll bite: because it's a net loss for everyone in the long term ? I know many people stop at "will it make us richer ?" step but there are other things to consider. We're not in the 1800s anymore, we know about pollution and its long term effects for a while now.
On top of that tourism might bring short term money but it's built on completely unstable funnels that can collapse at any point (cue covid), then you're left with regions of the world which lost the majority of their industries to tourism and are incapable of surviving or adapting when they're hit by the slightest hardship.
Everybody chips in for subsidies, then AirBNB hosts reap the profit and raise rent for locals. Yay!
> Air travel is ecologically unsustainable.
Too much air travel is ecologically unsustainable. But then again, that's more or less a tautology.
What is interesting it to work out how much air travel is sustainable.
> This archaic sector and transition that part of the economy to something more future sustainable.
Sounds good to me. What is that something?
All-electric high-speed rail?
Minimum standards for aircraft emissions?
CO2 tax on airline tickets - possibly a cap-and-trade system where every person in a country get N-many carbon credits they can trade in a free market to people that want to fly more-often?
A problem any of this introduces is that (modern) airline travel still has comparable CO2-per-passenger-mile values compared to driving by car[1], so it’s not fair to say that flying is worst (nor the best) way to travel,]. I understand that, I’m general, we should still prefer people fly to Disney World in the summer than drive - or take a cruise ship - as shipping has the worst emissions-per-passenger-mile due to heavy use of “bunker fuel”.
[1]According to Wikipedia’s page on aircraft economy. Ctrl+F for “comparison to ground transport”.
Most Dutch couldn't care less about KLM-Air France since it stopped being the national airline (nostalgia aside, KLM-Air France is just another big international airline). A large part of this group just wants cheap tickets to sunny holiday locations, and usually fly with price-fighters like EasyJet (not KLM-Air France).
Some more commercially minded folk do feel that we need a strong KLM-Air France and have its hub of Schiphol airport grow to act as the engine block of our economy.
Then there is the non-negligible number of Dutch who would like to look forward to a future that is more sustainable than what we have now, and who feel that we could really do with a little less flying overall. Also that the boost-to-the-economy argument is tenuous at best. The opposition to opening Lelystad Airport as an annex for mainport Schiphol is proof that this is not just a fringe group of NIMBY's.
Follow the money did an article on KLM. Giving money to KLM is like throwing your money away, it such a poor investment. It's worse than just donating. Instead of that you could also e.g. invest that money in the off-gas transition. Meaning, insulate houses. That would help the economy, help the ecological goals, etc. Instead, KLM gets money but in a weird way, all kinds of unrealistic conditions.
It's interesting how it doesn't make sense to give KLM money either ecological wise, nor economical. Still, they get billions.
The fact that Schiphol is a major hub helps make us a bigger player in international trade. It helps setting up main offices here (which bring in decent tax, and maybe some jobs too).
In general, on this issue, I trust the VVD to get the economic side somewhat correct. They are pretty smart people, and not totally evil. And they care a lot about the economic side. So I tend to believe them when they say 'this will be good for the economy'. Especially when they come up with an underlying mechanism that seems quite plausible to me.
> Green Party supporters 'most likely' to fly long-haul
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/Green-Party-supporte...
No. Air travel is about 5% of GHG emissions. A lot of the remaining 95% can be gotten rid of without giving up any quality of life. We can keep air travel, no problem.