The Airline Industry's Meltdown
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Advice: if the airline isn't flying to this destination this week, if you can't see the flight on the airport's online arrival boards or on flight tracking websites, don't buy the ticket, the flight is likely fictitious.
Afaik the flight gets "confirmed" if enough people buy the tickets. At least that's how I've seen it happen in germany.
The alternative is that they offer the regular schedules, let's say 3 flights per day, let people book, each flight end up being 2/3rd empty. Then they notify the passengers the schedule changed, but in fact they only keep one flight and redirect all passengers to the same plane.
Almost every flight time gets either changed or the flight gets cancelled, and Airbnbs get cancelled left and right as well. All of this post-confirmation. Secondary effects of these cancellations are having to rearrange schedules of connecting flights or accomodations, and thereby losing money. It's been a (first-world problem) nightmare.
As of now, my first flight looks like it might actually happen, and I've given up on pre-purchasing my second flight, choosing instead to attempt to buy the connecting flight from the airport.
Luckily I was talking to a very helpful airline employee, and (I guess?) because it was the airline trying to book the tickets (with themselves and other airlines for other legs of the trip), I wasn't charged for each booked-but-ultimately-fictitious flight.
But even the airline employee seemed mystified. What would happen is she'd find and reserve the flights in her system, read me the whole itinerary, then get to the last step and say, "oh that's weird, <other airline> isn't accepting adding you to this flight." This happened three times, with different flights / different partner airlines.
In the end the only thing which worked was to book an identical itinerary, same day of the week and times, just one week early - implying that the only "real" flight out only runs once a week.
My own booking problem and later "hack" is as follows: I think one mistake I made was to book my connecting flight (wiht another airline) within a few hours of my arrival time. In this kind of scenario, if airline A or B changes the flight time or cancels, then it messes up my flight with the other airline. Which means, in Covid times, it seems best to stay a day or two in the layover city rather than try to make everything line up before any flights have taken place.
>implying that the only "real" flight out only runs once a week
To try to figure out real flight likelihood, I had to piece together ever-changing gov't regulations about who can fly where, in regards to quarantines, with how the airlines might be responding to that news in their flight scheduling. And on top of that, pretend to book flights to figure out how full they are, then continuing to do this every other day even after my flight is booked, to get a gauge on how likely cancellation is.
Airlines know exactly what they're doing, and the governments are looking the other way. Sad.
Not always, and not just with books either. I've had this happen more times than I care for. "X items in stock". Then you order. "The delivery will be in 3 weeks". This has happened to me at book sellers (Amazon!), Bol.com, Hornbach and even at Centralpoint. Drop shippers suffer more from this than companies that really do carry their own stock.
Last year we wanted to buy a new sofa from a local dealer of Black Red White. We chose a model we liked, found it in stock, placed an order, paid for it, and awaited delivery.
Two weeks later - past the expected delivery - no sofa, no indication when it'll arrive. It took my wife one week of e-mailing and phonecalling back and forth between BRW and their local seller until we finally learned that the sofa was not actually in stock, the model is out of production, so it will be custom-manufactured for us and should arrive in few months.
Fortunately, we were able to cancel the order and get our money back. We went to a bed store 10 minutes walk from our home and bought a sofa that we could physically see and touch.
Flights are mostly empty (<20% on mine), which makes for good onboard social distancing. It also means there is no point booking in advance. The airline also offered free date changes on all tickets, which also works well considering availability.
The number of flights is certainly down, and I'd suggest avoiding routes that (as the OP mentions) are not actually operating. Have a plan B to avoid getting stranded.
The travel agent had sorted it all out while I was on the tube home, I ended up being able to catch up with the family in Singapore a day later after a flight via Düsseldorf. They earned their money that day.
If you DONT know or rarely travel, it probably IS worth effort. It's can be tricky to deal with things and know what you can/can't do in each situation.
If you think this you probably don't know what you're doing. Working with a good agency is a breeze, but there are lots of shitty ones out there.
Especially for hotel bookings 99% of the time you'd be stupid to not use a travel agent.
I've used a bunch of them for corporate travel, and at no point has it been a breeze. Knowing what fares are available on specific flights, seat assignments, etc. lets me get exactly the experience I want, without 'hoping they got me the seats I like' or anything.
For hotel bookings I don't see what advantage they have over either the basic hotel websites or calling my status hotline for assistance in tricky situations.
In all cases the travel agency removes my agency to work directly with the airlines or the hotel to fix issues.
If they're corporate travelers spending somebody else's money this is usually the case.
>I've used a bunch of them for corporate travel, and at no point has it been a breeze. Knowing what fares are available on specific flights, seat assignments, etc. lets me get exactly the experience I want, without 'hoping they got me the seats I like' or anything.
It sounds like you've just worked with the big shops that offer a terrible service.
>For hotel bookings I don't see what advantage they have over either the basic hotel websites or calling my status hotline for assistance in tricky situations.
Because of programs like FSPP, STARS and MO fan club you're essentially always going to get better value by booking through a travel agency the hotel has a relationship with.
>In all cases the travel agency removes my agency to work directly with the airlines or the hotel to fix issues.
In all cases the travel agency is in a far stronger negotiating position to fix any issues. If the hotel screws up something I'd much rather have my travel agent yell at them and arrange compensation for me than spend time dealing with it myself, the outcome will always be better this way because his business is worth much more to the hotel than mine.
Maybe, but that assumes that the travel agent is actually working for you. What kickbacks does the agency get from the airline/hotel? That is the longer term relationship, far longer than any one-time customer-agent relationship. The agency would probably rather drop or mistreat a customer than damage their relationship with the airline/hotel.
If they're not a big shop, they're going to have even less leverage with the vendors than I do as the valued customer. If they are a big shop with leverage, they're not going to give a shit about me.
And are you confusing 'better experience' or 'save money'? Sure, I'll definitely grant you that it might be cheaper booking through an agent, especially if you buy a package/etc.
That's not, in my experience, ever a better experience. The goal is to not suffer, not safe a few hundred bucks.
I work with a boutique agency with around 10 staff, their yearly volumes with the chains I frequent are in the tens of millions. There are lots of agencies like this, you only need a couple of billionaire clients making regular 500k bookings to have a plenty of leverage.
I always thought travel agents were bullshit until I found out about the perks offered trough the Four Seasons preferred partner program and figured I'd give it a shot for a single booking. After check-in the agent called me to make sure everything went smoothly, I pointed out a tiny issue regarding the check-in progress that I would've immediately forgotten about if not for the fabulous service recovery arranged by the agent. After that this agency has had all of my business.
Anyone flying that much does so in a very different world. Even without flashing cards or identifying yourself, airline employees and computer systems know you are valued customer, resulting in a very different user experience. This can be as extreme as you rarely ever being bumped off of flights, or as subtle as help lines pushing your cell number to the top of a wait queue. Like it or not, if you fly 100+ times a year you will get special treatment.
For example, adding ghost segments from another airline so that you can get cross-alliance IATCI without going to the desk at the airport
I've managed missed flights, getting bumped, losing my passport and various planning failures, on my own. Everything works out in the end.
The one time I used a travel agent (Flight Centre) for a trip at the beginning of the pandemic, I got screwed.
They delayed me from calling the airline during the period where they were giving out refunds, and kept telling me to just wait.
Then they refused to do anything, and directed me to speak with the airline, but by then it was too late.
Now I don't trust anyone to handle my travels but myself. They don't have your best interests at heart by a long shot.
Huge shops like flight centre certainly don't, you're nobody to them. Their business primarily consists of selling terrible package holidays to clueless people. This is not what GP meant with "a good travel agent".
The incentives are completely different for smaller agencies offering a personalized service.
Southwest Airlines, for example, has never paid commissions.
As sites like Expedia grew, many (all?) other airlines and hotels have reduced and reduced their commissions.
For some people, there's still value in saying "I want to take a trip to x" and let the travel agent work out the details. But the travel agencies now charge a fee to the customer because they get comparatively little from the businesses.
The motivation for both is the same: selling as many vacation packages as possible.
I'm really guessing with major travel agencies it works the same way as it seems to work with mobile operators in my country: you have three major networks to choose from, every one tries to screw you over as much as possible, but since everyone needs a smartphone, people just bounce around between the three in anger (or try to arbitrage deals). Viewed at scale, it's just an equilibrium.
So they'll take the money to shore up revenue and cash flow, and then customers can fight their way through their systems to get it back when the flight is cancelled. All manner of hilarity ensues. (Unless you're one of those waiting - now literally numbering millions in Europe - then it's not funny at all.)
Personally I'm not going to trust any airline with a flight booking until there's something resembling a reliable service again.
A part of me feels like "in the 21st century, why do I need a travel agent". Then again, maybe we all actually do need travel agents again.
And I suspect it's all for the same reason.
Given the 21st century air travel features navigating complex automated systems designed to gaslight you into giving them interest-free loans, it seems like an agent is exactly what is called for.
I expect the value of SME-assistance in a number of areas is going to increase, not shrink.
Fast forward one and a half decade, today I, frankly, have more disposable income than free time. I'm tired of self-service bullshit (and companies always love to complicate things to create upselling opportunities). I avoid doing things through websites or apps. E-mails are better, because once the other side replies, it means a human has acknowledged my request so I get to ensure they understand it right, and if they screw up, they can't blame it on "the system". Phone calls are the best, because dealing with a human on the line is much faster than dealing with confusing websites and broken apps.
And now I finally understand why travel agencies, all-inclusive holidays, concierges, secretaries, etc. all exist. It's for people who are at the stage in their careers where they have enough disposable income to use it to save time and frustration. Relying on digital self-service isn't a sign that you're an awesome self-reliant tech-whizz (like I thought in my teenage years). It's a sign you're not rich enough to pay someone else to deal with it.
So, good being the operative word here as Travel Agents are prone to going bankrupt right now.
I'm not kidding. They got all my international flights refunded and booked flights that I thought were impossible. Paid for itself with each booking that needed expert attention.
Also if you've paid them and they cancel, guess who can use your money to try and survive for a few weeks more. Or even longer since they can give you a voucher.
Of course, those high-value fliers have reduced their use of air travel in the same way everyone else has, so a lot of flights are basically "virtual" and will never actually fly unless they meet some particular threshold of value to the airline. If that's the actual case, then what airlines should be looking into is bringing back standby ticketing.
I would always wait until everyone boarded, then move up to comfort plus or whatever it was called. On my last flight the attendant told me to move back since it wasn't fair for the suckers, no offense, that paid for it.
I offered to pay a nominal amount for the seat. The attendant pulled up the little register stick and said it would be $75. I said no thanks and moved back to my empty row about 3 rows back.
I guess some airlines do it differently.
I was caught in a chain of delayed flights on 12th September 2018. Once I made it home my wife persuaded me to file a compensation claim, as we're entitled to do.
Two years later I've still not received a penny. It's not a lot of money, but I'm gonna keep chasing it until they pay up just as a matter of stubbornness now.
(Mostly I'd have been "meh, flights get delayed sometimes". But it was a rough series of flights with a two year old child and that made everything much more difficult for us.)
Whoa, thanks for your comment. I thought I was going crazy. Booked two different flights, one ticket was cancelled after 5 days, one just after 2h. Both without any explanation. I was wondered whether my credit card is blacklisted.
And true, now I'm not hoping to get my money back for weeks, maybe even months.
Seconded. I learnt this lesson the hard way. Fortunately the interaction with the airline (KLM) was surprisingly pleasant and I was rebooked on an alternate flight from their partner airline (Air France). I monitored that new flight’s schedule like a hawk. Only when I boarded the final leg of the journey was I sure of reaching the destination.
With kids in tow and all the paperwork it’s extremely painful fly now a days. I guess this just about rules out all the tourist travelers for next one year at least. And with business travelers getting used to Zoom I really don’t know how will airlines recover to pre-COVID levels, if at all.
This hit home.
770000 litres of jet kerosene translate to 2100 tons of CO_2 emissions[0]. That's the emissions of more than 200 average Germans or 50% of the emissions of over 400 people. Cutting one's emissions by half is most likely not easy at all, so maybe even more people would be required for an equivalent reduction in emissions.
Now: if someone at an airline thinks that the inflight magazine feels cheap now and that it should be printed on better paper again, it would wipe out any emission savings that hundreds of people could ever hope to achieve personally. Makes one feels a bit helpless, doesn't it?
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosin (Look for "Kohlendioxidemissionen bei Verbrennung").
Edit: the point I wanted to make is that a willy-nilly decision of someone with sufficient influence can have way more effect that intentional decisions of average people could ever have.
(coming soon to your local district)
Why do you need a toilet for that? I understand there are disabilities that may call for it. But in the 10-15 years I made that flight regularly, I never saw someone use the toilet an extreme amount. It was more for convenience. I have to assume that those short-haul flights could save a ton of fuel by eliminating toilets.
But I also have a young(ish) bladder and young(ish) digestive system. So maybe I'm just too self-centered.
Accommodations for other people's physical needs is a pretty serious Chesterton's Fence situation.
Possibility of plane unable to take off at the scheduled time but holding on the runway to make the next available slot.
The problem with cutting some things out is that, even though it might not be utilized 95% of the time, that 5% when you need it, you really need it.
Similar to the backup generator for your data center and justifying it along with the maintenance and tests that go along with it to your boss.
My worry with the direction that engineering is moving, lean, is that we are reducing our safeties below a good level. I see the philosophy moving to other areas, such as finance, creating a race to the bottoms where everyone is leveraged as much as possible. Then when a crisis hits, everyone is unable to survive and we have to turn to government bailouts.
Lean philosophy has recently been targeting healthcare, as a way to reduce cost and reduce adverse outcome while improving quality. While I do think this is important, looking at what is going on in the middle of a pandemic. Is a contributing factor of hospitals running out of masks and ventilators due to lean inventory management practices?
I read a lot a about food wast and how we over produce, it seems logical that there will be a push for lean practices there as well. I could see it being made as a strategy to reduce the amount of CO2 as well as farm land. But conversely, with climate change and the risk of crop failure, is that a good idea?
As for the rest - I am completely, and 100% over lean philosophy/training/gurus. That has been a major focus in higher education in recent years.
And it has just led to top-down, money based decisions instead of student focused discussions and choices.
I am with you, I think we are just removing safety from areas that may not be appropriate to remove them from.
100% with you here. Especially the ones preaching 'optimizing' your personal life by getting rid of any capacity beyond what you use in your daily life. Once you peel back the glossy cover they almost always, in real terms, translate to "save money by mooching off your friends' equipment and work space".
In other words asking grown-up people to just “keep it in” doesn’t work, just ask Tottenham player Eric Dier for the latest example (am on mobile, too lazy to link, but a quick web search should give you the whole story).
https://japantoday.com/category/features/ana-asks-passengers...
"All Nippon Airways is taking its weight-saving efforts to new heights, asking passengers on some of its flights to visit the restroom before flying."
hell at work that is one thing they want to get back in office for is face to face. they have mandated cameras for all managers working remote and looking to do the same for other workers. Still there are teams that are doing one day face to face meetings.
Passenger luggage is targeted partly because it is pure cost, but also it’s a price discrimination mechanism.
I guess you could alleviate the embarrassment factor by making it a total passenger + baggage max so people could weigh themselves AND their carryons at home before they arrive to confirm and offset anything.
Interesting idea though!
Maybe you buy "x kg plus or minus 5 kg" and they weigh you and penalize/refund if it's changed since buying the ticket.
Ha, good one.
I think the backlash to them charging extra if you and your total bags comes in “overweight” would be too high to work. Even if people weren’t offended, you wouldn’t really be able to have a good idea how much extra you’d be hit with until you were at the gate. But if they did some sort of discount refund or maybe a voucher for future flights, that might work. Start weighing the checked bags and noting the exact weight (instead of just over-under 50 lbs) and then stepping on a scale with your carryon luggage (with no outward display) and totaling them. If you are under the average, you get a voucher credited to your account on a sliding scale by how much you are under. If you are over the average or you choose not to be weighed, nothing changes and you have only paid the full fare like normal.
If we are serious about cutting CO2(-equivalent) emissions, we must tax all emittors equally. Airlines should not be able to escape it, or we will keep seeing this kind of oddities in that high pollution industry.
*addendum: apparently Canada has implemented or is planning to implement a carbon tax on aviation fuel.
(I only want to cover the liquids, not coal or wood)
It is very easy if you travel by plane several times per year, even on short distances, and you just stop to do that. In fact, it is probably the most effective thing you can do to reduce your own lifetime carbon footprint. A single two-hour flight produces around 400 kilograms of CO2 per person. This is equivalent to several months of heating in a cold country.
And don't start me harping about "offsetting" carbon emissions. Carbon has been captured in the course of hundreds of millions of years. There is nothing humans can do which can store it again for the same time. Almost all carbon from a tree is released when the tree dies.
In fact, it is even worse for coal. The coal deposits which we still exploit today, against all better knowledge, have mostly been formed during the carboniferous geological period. In this period, there were NO bacteria and fungi which could decompose lignin, the main structural component of wood. In other words, the wood from trees could not decay, which was the base for the coal deposits from the carboniferous period, which still form most of the coal today. The consequence of this is that burning coal is irreversible even in the course of tens of thousands of years, because the conditions under which this coal has been formed - an absence of fungi that can decompose lignin - simply do not exist any more. We are not only doing massive damage to the next generations of human children, but we are profoundly and irreversibly changing the conditions for life on Earth.
This is simply untrue.
Grow woody biomass, and combust it in a reducing environment, and you get carbon. It's biologically inert. Bury it.
It's not difficult, or impractical, and even if you mix it into soil, it will remain sequestered for centuries or millennia.
It's just... charcoal. Why would we have to make coal in the way it was made in the carboniferous? Your doom posting doesn't make any sense.
It's indeed the case that the comparative lack of rotting during carboniferous contributed to the available biomass to turn into coal, but that sort of coal doesn't form without heat and compression. It's got as much to do with the earth being more geologically active at the time, and more low-lying wetlands.
But coal is forming today from peat -> lignite -> bituminous coal -> anthracite (then eventually graphite). E.g. Germany's electricity generation was ~30% lignite burning in 2015[1], and those deposits formed mostly during the tertiary period.
So you're five to six orders of magnitude off if you think coal hasn't been forming since the carboniferous.
None of which is to say that these deposits are renewable in any practical sense. We can imagine digging them all up and burning them in the next 500 years, and then having to wait around the time since the T-Rex walked the earth for meaningful regeneration.
If such a carbon reduction is desirable, then taxes on air travel need to be raised.
Out of 15,000,000,000 litres that they did use.
Their fuel costs were $5.649 billion.
They reduced the cost to $5.649 billion.
They reduced their fuel usage from 15 billion litres to 15 billion litres.
They justified some high-paid execs salary.
Not so much.
It makes me feel like just putting the right economic incentives in place, will rapidly lead to savings no one imagined possible before.
As you point out, motivating individuals to reduce their carbon footprint is incredibly inefficient, as it is very difficult for individuals to make much difference if the goods and services they consume are not also optimized to become more carbon efficient.
But if 770000 liters of kerosene can be saved by making the inflight magazine lighter, can you imagine what other low hanging fruit are out there, if incentivized by the right kind of carbon taxes and other incentives? Businesses can very rapidly adapt and make changes with outsize impact like this, far more than individuals can.
If you're an Italian speaker, this can be very funny and ironic.
Doing something "ad cazzum" means, generally, that you've just done it without even the slightest hint of thinking before acting.
(Speaking as a non-native speaker of both languages and having spent a lot more time in an English-speaking country than in Italy).
If you know some Italian, then you'll know that words are pronounced the way they're spelled. If what you know is English, there's no reason to think the zz in pizza and the zz in cazzum are pronounced the same way.
But I'm also a low-grade language nerd. It drives me nuts when I see Latin-to-English loan words with inappropriate declinations, or fancy-sounding technical/medical terms formed by combining Latin and Greek word fragments [0]. So maybe my attention to correct pronunciation is atypical.
[0] I'm not claiming that I'm actually correct in all these cases; just that I go nuts at what I perceive to be bad treatment of loan words.
But then again, some people may think pizza is American and not make the link.
You could be right. My experience is mostly from the New England area, near areas with a lot of first-third generation Italian immigrants.
* I've heard great things about pizza in Rome, but I've never been there.
How very dare you. With only 56 rules applied in order, you can easily predict the pronunciation of a word from its spelling 85% of the time.
I'm still taken by surprise by how English words I've read often but haven't heard spoken are actually spoken by native English speakers. My classic example is the word "nonchalant", which I always assumed would be pronounced in what is to me an English accent, as "non-CHAH-lahnt" but is actually pronounced in a French accent as "non-chah-LAWn".
I probably still do this.
I bet a whole lot of Americans are the same way. They just pronounce it correctly out of inertia, and not some elementary understanding of Italian.
GDSs, for those not aware, offer airlines anything from booking/pricing/interoperation services to full IT outsourcing.
These companies basically take a small fee out of every operation done by either Online Travel Agencies (OTA) or the airline itself.
Even before the pandemic airlines were already pissed at these monsters (Travelport and Amadeus being the biggest contenders) that arguably they created, but now with the razor thin margins of airline travel, GDSs are either gonna take a big cut on their already reduced revenue, or the boot.
For Amadeus, virtually all contractors (at least 1000 in one site, multiple thousands worldwide) have been dismissed overnight, and most hired staff are working reduced hours. I can only assume it's been the same for Travelport.
http://www.investincotedazur.com/en/tca-directory/155765/ama...
That paragraph didn't age well.
Roughly 30-40% of the workforce were consultants, so you can make the numbers. It's the wrong time if you wanted to look for a job in the area, estimates show there are about 1500 engineers without a mission or job, aggregated from all companies in Sophia.
The fact that Air France has a site there too helped drive up the numbers, a senior manager I know is working 1 day per week till the end of the year, so you can imagine what happened below him.
Your definition of reasonable is not universal. For many people, life is for living, not for sacrificing worldly pleasures to eke out as long an existence as possible.
It's about perhaps rethinking whether one needs to fly so often for one's vacations.
However, up until about 8 months ago, there were lots of 15-30 minute flights that could be replaced with videoconferencing and (post-pandemic) train travel. Sure, you still might need to catch a plane if you're going on vacation on the other side of the globe, but you can usuall have that client meeting over Zoom, and if you're going on a trip from one European city to another then train travel is often not a bad option.
The comment I was replying to was implying that recreational air travel should be banned completely.
A total ban of air travel is, of course, not possible.
In reality, the best chooser for an individual is him/her/self owing to their unique perspective. Not going on vacation may well indeed be suffering.
In any case, taking a holiday or going abroad doesn't mean taking a flight, or driving. And I really doubt that taking a boat trip produces more CO₂ per capita than taking a flight, given that many more people will typically board a ferry boat, than board an airliner going the same distance.
The purpose of travelling for holiday is not always sightseeing. Sometimes (for me, most of the time) it's about what's at the destination and what you do when you get there. For example, a sporting event, a particular sporting or leisure activity etc.
On the other hand, I've also travelled by bus (no good trains) to go to a conference in Plovdiv, Bulgaria and I'd have also travelled my usual way to conferences in Athens and Rhodes this year, that got cancelled because of Covid. Like I say above, you can do this kind of thing at a leisurly pace, or you can do it fast.
But I think the real problem is that travelling like that limits your range. I was offered an exchange position in China but travelling there by land would have taken me a week or so, so I declined.
But I can accept that my options are curtailed this way. Air travel has spoiled us in that we take it for granted that we can travel to the other end of the world in a few hours any time we like (if we can afford it), but this luxury has cost us greatly in terms of environmental damage. So, personally, I don't accept that going at a sporting event or leisure activity trumps the need to reduce emissions from air travel.
So, to rephrase my original comment, above, taking a holiday doesn't mean you have to go around the world for it. You can holiday closer to home. So I won't get to see the Fiji islands? I can live with that. We're not going to get out of the mess we've done and still enjoy our way of life, one way or another (the "other" being that eventually climate change will make our current way of life unfeasible anyway; for example, Fiji will sink under the sea).
When I was a kid we were too poor to afford vacations out of the country, we drove to the nearest seaside every 2 or 3 years, during summer, with no AC, and I still had loads of fun. You don't have to go to _exotic_destination_234_ to enjoy your vacations.
People won't be able to drive from Berlin to Barcelona for the weekend in 3 hours for $50 (round trip), nor book a cruise from London to NY in 6 hours for $400. It doesn't take much to imagine how the world would look like actually, since coronavirus made most touristic places either very inconvenient or impossible to visit most people stay local and discovered that their region is just as beautiful as others.
These "what will people do without all these cheap vacation destinations" comment reek of entitlement
And if we apply that logic to every industry, we end up driving people's standards of living back centuries.
Right?
We don't know how to fly in a sustainable way, nor is flying necessary.
This is why it is really important to ask questions about what we really need, and if we're at all interested in human survival in the future, we need make serious decision to scale down the economy soon.
Of course I'm not very optimistic that this will happen.
That assumes that the only way to reduce CO2 is to halt the industry, and that is not true for most industries. The problem is that most industries have no cost associated with CO2 emissions. So they have no profit incentive to reduce those emissions. Simply adding in the full cost of operation, including CO2, would drive industry to innovate more efficient technology, reduce CO2 waste, and yes, some industries would be revealed as being too costly in CO2 production to be viable at the current levels of use.
There are many industrial processed that are horribly inefficient and wasteful, but the cost of that inefficiency is not paid by the company, so switching would only hurt profit margins. Any company competing would be at a massive price disadvantage. If the full cost fell on the company, consumers would quickly buy products and services that used efficient tech and reduced waste, because those would be the cheaper options.
Most industries are not CO2 producers because it is required to maintain that standard of living. I pay for my garbage to be collected and properly disposed of, but if I could just dump it in my neighbor’s yard for free, I could save money. Forcing me to pay for it myself keeps us all from having our yard filled with garbage.
All IPCC targets assume getting to 0 emissions relatively soon. If we can't take economic hits to get there, then we'll take a fantastically more wild economic hit once we miss those goals.
I suggest you spend some time researching a bit what happens with each degree C we get to. It's far worse then just rising sea-levels.
>Our survey of the climate record from station data reveals many global TW exceedances of 31° and 33°C and two stations that have already reported multiple daily maximum TW values above 35°C. These conditions, nearing or beyond prolonged human physiological tolerance, have mostly occurred only for 1- to 2-hours’ duration (fig. S2).
[...]
>Steep and statistically significant upward trends in extreme TW frequency (exceedances of 27°, 29°, 31°, and 33°C) and magnitude are present across weather stations globally (Fig. 2). Each frequency trend represents more than a doubling of occurrences of the corresponding threshold between 1979 and 2017.
[...]
>The southern Persian Gulf shoreline and northern South Asia are home to millions of people, situating them on the front lines of exposure to TW extremes at the edge of and outside the range of natural variability in which our physiology evolved (36).
I feel like air conditioning millions (and soon, billions) of people will be more than a rounding error of GNP. Indeed, economic activity may be... slightly curtailed... in countries where going outside results in death.
If we get to 6C, which is a very real possibility given the fairly large number of positive feedback and history of rapid climate events on the planet, human extinction is a potential outcome.
But I suspect that's really no evidence or argument that would convince you that things won't be pretty much fine, which is why I'm personally more convinced then ever that we will likely see that 6C.
It nimbly skips over what will happen to get them there. India is the second most populated country in the world. Pakistan is fifth. Between them, they need to move hundreds of millions of people before the end of the century.
Directly north of them are China and Russia. China and Russia both have very restrictive immigration policies, and are one-party authoritarian states.
All four of these countries have nuclear weapons.
As far as agriculture is concerned, the IPCC says that rising temperatures will be good for farming (within a certain limit, 2-3c I believe). Carbon after all is an input to photosynthesis.
What percentage of human time is spent on airlines
It's an industry that has been growing a lot. It is an industry that is very unevenly used by the world population (many people don't fly at all). And it's an industry that barely has any idea how to fix its emission problem. (H2 will likely only work in short range and is still decades away, synfuels is extremely inefficient.)
We should really get started developing alternatives. Cement is a tough one, probably the toughest industry sector at all. For steel the swedish companies SSAB+LKAB have a very ambitious plan using hydrogen. I hope they succeed doing that.
That said and as othes have noted: Aviation is 2% of CO2, but a much larger share of overall emissions. I was surprised to recently learn that this is scientifically underresearched (particularly effects on cloud formation) and it may be everything between 4 and 7%.
Come on, do you think CO2 is the nastiest thing planes reject ? Also, plane pollution happens at high altitude, which surely has a different impact than at sea level.
If the airline industry goes completely bust, I am sorry for the people who worked there, and all in to give them another meaningful job, but at the same time it would be a very good thing for humanity as a whole.
This is completely untrue. One of the biggest sources of airline travel is Chinese domestic tourism, far from the richest 1%.
>but at the same time it would be a very good thing for humanity as a whole
How incredibly arrogant of you to think you speak for all of humanity. Clearly a huge number of humans value air travel, due to their extensive use of it, please explain to me how you know better than all of them about what's good for them?
It’s not full of rich people cramped into tiny seats, I’ll tell you that much.
If you make $33,500 a year, you are among the richest 5% in the world. [0]
The threshold for an individual to enter the global top 10% in 2012 was about PPP$15,600 per capita household income, or PPP$62,000 for a family of four. [1]
The threshold for an individual to enter the global top 1% in 2012 is about PPP$50,000 per capita household income, or PPP$200,000 for a family of four. [1]
[0] http://www.worldwealthcalculator.org/
[1] http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/771271476908686029/Segal.pdf
In some ways half of us dying would be good for humanity as a whole. Let's try to balance the humanity with the individual benefit a bit. Otherwise we'll get to absurd conclusions.
I am sorry for the people who worked there, and all in to give them another meaningful job
You can't. Some want that job. Some can't get other, e.g. countries living off tourism. It's a big, global industry feeding millions.
Easy to say working on a computer.
You mean countries like Greece which destroyed their local industries, and eco systems, in favor of tourism and can't go back ? People have been warning about these things for decades. If you build your entire economy on a flimsy and unsustainable business model you'll lose at some point.
It doesn't really matter if it feeds millions or not, the unsustainability will make it crash sooner or later, the longer you let it go the harder it'll be.
I underline: that's one flight.
See Figure 1 here:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/...
The number you're quoting is car-free for a year, so 1 return flight ~ 8 months of car use.
Consider this view: I'm currently trying to reduce my monthly expenditures, especially subscription services I no longer use. A service that was 2% of my monthly expenditures would be a pretty good savings for cutting a single service.
[1] pop sci: https://www.dw.com/en/to-fly-or-not-to-fly-the-environmental...
[2] source: https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/aviation/index.php?...
people will continue to want to fly. Climate crisis or not. I don't see, unless there's electric or hydrogen-fuel planes, how this can be resolved.
If we've learned one thing this year it is that we can totally do a lot of things if we take a crisis seriously.
The economic devastation of coronavirus is just getting started for airlines. The lack of demand for jet fuel is going to have serious cascading effects throughout the oil and gas industry.
My concern with an "airlines bailout" is that it is just going to prop up the industry for another quarter or two, when I don't believe that demand for air travel will return to pre-pandemic levels any time soon. So what if instead, we just allow the airlines to lay off tens of thousands of people and the money we would have spent bailing out the business side + workers just goes to the workers instead? It could even include job training or something else to help those that want to change industries. Then as demand returns many of these laid off workers can be rehired.
I don't know if this would work, but I feel like if we talking about propping up all the airlines then it's something we will be doing for several years.
This. Let the airlines go bankrupt but help the workers directly. If demand does come back some savvy entrepreneurs will be able to pick up the airline assets for a cheap price and get them back into business again in a few years.
This is 100% correct. Even if a vaccine were to be approved by the end of this year, it will take until mid/late next year before most of the developed world has received it. In the meantime, companies continue to find new ways of working remotely (I'm a tech consultant and have spent most of the last 20 years flying every week on Monday and back on Thursday, haven't flown since mid March). Extending the CARES Act airline bailout for another 3-6 months is not going to solve the problem, and continuously extending it for another 12+ months is not viable and a complete waste of money. The government should be figuring out other ways of redirecting resources idled by the pandemic, not propping up zombie companies forever.
Aircraft, just like cars, are designed to be continuously flown and running, not sitting around.
It's a good read, but mostly states the obvious.
One real question - which plane makers will survive? Unless air travel rises to higher levels than before the epidemic, there are enough spare aircraft around for a few years of no new purchases. COMAC will be supplying the China market soon, along with their client states. Airbus is subsidized. Boeing might not make it.
Unless airlines decide they need to downsize their aircraft and demand shifts to smaller/regional jets
COMAC will do China. Airbus will do Europe Boeing will do USA + is super strong on its military branch
Airbus + Boeing will share the rest of the world
https://www.airbus.com/space/launchers-deterrence/ariane-6.h...
On the other hand, Boeing does make a lot more revenue than Airbus on military contracts [2]. It seems to be around 34%, and double the amount at ~$26bn for Boeing vs ~$12bn for Airbus.
[1] https://www.airbus.com/investors/financial-results-and-annua...
[2] https://investors.boeing.com/investors/financial-reports/def...
There's also yesterday's speech by French president Macron, saying that Europe needs "to end military dependence on US" [1]. There's no other company in Europe than can better achieve that goal other than Airbus (especially today, when air superiority is paramount in almost any conflict, see the present war between Armenia and Azerbaijan)
[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/macron-calls-on-europe-t...
That might be your personal view but that's clearly opposite of both the numbers and the company's history. They made themselves on airliners.
>its CEO is selected by the French and German governments combined
Yes Airbus is controlled politically, although much less than in the past since states sold a lot of their stock, but that has nothing to do with having military activities.
Orange is controlled by the French state, and yet they don't do military activities. Airbus is controlled by 4 states, but it's not particularly linked to their minority of military activities.
> French president Macron, saying that Europe needs "to end military dependence on US" [1]. There's no other company in Europe than can better achieve that goal other than Airbus
Actually France bases most of its military aeronautics on Dassault, not Airbus. Airbus actually has very little military activity in France, it's mostly in Germany, Spain, and the UK.
COMAC is still learning. Probably the airliner after this one will be good. It took Airbus 21 years to get a good airliner out the door.
Just like the military industrial complex needs ongoing work to maintain it's domain knowledge and tooling, will the maintenance teams responsible for these aircraft end up losing key people, infrastructure and key knowledge during the shutdown?
"...a ton of kids would be excited as hell..." works just as well, and wouldn't be in danger of making anyone feel excluded.
This is minor, no one instance will change things, but the cumulative effect is a society where women are vastly under-represented in areas like tech/STEM, or men are under-represented in child care.
Unless you understood that and are suggesting that women are actually less able to be pilots?
Disregarding all politics, it's a statistical fact females are excluded from lots of activities early in their life due to giving various activities gender specific contexts. And this is a thing.
And vice versa for boys. So it's not okay to say often "this is girls|boys stuff" until people reach puberty when gender specific contexts actually start to matter.
And a ton of kids are excited. We went several times Technik Museum Sinsheim and once to Speyer and our daughter (4-5 at the time) loved peeking around in the planes.
Bicycles too need maintenance, but it's so ridiculously insignificant compared to cars (at least my bike) that we can round to 0!
Actually machines don't inherently pollute. Ones which do, only pollute because they're operating off of or on something which pollutes (e.g. the burning of fossil fuels).
Pollute can mean anything that increases entropy.
Pollution can mean anything that alters the environment, and that certainly includes any human activity.
Pollution can mean anything that increases the probability that the parameters of the environment that allow human life will change. This can include human activity in sufficient amounts that cause environmental damage. Simples example is too many people existing, and their waste causing issues with water sources and then having to build sewage facilities and dealing with the side effects of that.
The point is that everything affects everything, and there is no “pure” solution. Causing pollution of one type might help mitigate pollution of another type, and the trade offs are impossible to completely analyze.
Obviously some pollution (emissions from fossil fuels) are easy to figure out and blame. But the benefits of those are also incalculable, such as increased life expectancy due to ability to travel, plastics to reduce disease transfer, etc.
But at its root, human activity, namely living longer and increasing number of human lives is itself the biggest polluting factor.
This is a very common answer and attitude in general, that I find terrible. Even if something represents 5% of the pollution compared to another 60% source, it's worth focusing on those 5% (just random numbers for the example)
I am talking about a practical solution instead of focussing on 100 different things how about we focus on the main thing because right now the status quo isnt helping.
They may be able handle 2 projects at a time but its of no use if its too late.
I'd welcome a much smaller-scale air travel industry, even if prices per ticket increase substantially.
I suspect any mass transport is going to take a hit with the current situation, trains included.
1. Air travel is point-to-point (for reasonably large points) practically for free. Open three airports, you have six connections. Open a fourth, you now have up to 12 connections. This kind of combinatorial growth cannot be done with road or rail (but partially with ports).
2. Air travel is quick. Flying between the US and Europe is the matter of a day. No need for intermediate accomodations, etc. On short distances, trains can compete here.
3. Air travel is relatively cheap. Not so much because of the energy used or the construction, but because of the utilization of aircraft. A modern aircraft can make multiple connections a day. This can be replicated by some fast trains, but not to that degree. It cannot be replicated by ship, except for the shortest of routes.
Conclusively, I would say that carbon-neutral or even just carbon-efficient air travel is here to stay, or traveling will become much more expensive.
In practice, everything from aluminum production that was ramped-up in WWII, to regional pork barrel, to national technology policy, to sovereign wealth fund politics, to issues of national prestige, all hide subsidization of air travel.
It may be you are right about the efficiency of air travel, but there is potentially a gap between that and reality.
Carbon neutral air travel is far in the future, and may not arrive in time to make a difference.