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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Tracking carbon emissions is the most inefficient, ineffective and impractical method ever devised for reducing CO2 emissions.

For example, my airline ticket has a line with how many tons of carbon are emitted by my share of the flight. What the heck is anyone going to do with that? But with the carbon tax on jet fuel, the price of the ticket is definitely going to affect behavior. And, of course, taxing fuel is FAR easier than trying to accurately measure the carbon in the jet blast at every stage of a flight.

An efficient, effective, and practical way to do it is to tax the carbon content of fuels, and let the market do its thing with prices.

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Another crazy thing is requiring companies to document their "carbon footprint". Doing this will require an army of technicians and accountants, with every incentive to tilt the results into looking "green". And then what does one do with that number? Harangue the company about it?

Again, the simple, effective solution is just tax the carbon content in the fuel. If there's one thing the government does know how to do, it's tax things.

Yesterday I read some part of a report made for a national company about their carbon footprint. They got an auditing firm to produce nice charts. Then they hired a communication agency to present the result to their employees. They literally wrote: “Don’t show this chart, we don’t want employees to lose motivation.” What the graph shows is that the main source of emissions for this company is their investments.

> And, of course, taxing fuel is FAR easier than trying to accurately measure the carbon in the jet blast at every stage of a flight.

Right, but that's exactly why we're not doing it... Anything that's actually effective would eat into profits too much and upset the people that the lobbyists and lawmakers work for.

It's even a bit sadder than that. It would eat into profits mostly in the short term. In the longer term, we would get more efficient with our transportation and manufacturing practices: a whole host of decisions are made which assume certain energy prices--after a decade of gradually rising carbon prices, these assumptions would get revised and the whole system would be recalibrated to be more carbon efficient, thus keeping prices low for the consumer while also maintaining profitability for corporations. Moreover, we can start with an arbitrarily low carbon price so we don't break the economy (specifically the aforementioned profits), but the important bit is that we actually have a dial to turn to save the environment (which is presumably what investors fear).

That's true, both very good points... Higher-tech energy eventually gets us closer to "free" energy in the long-run. And yeah, we definitely should have faded it in.

Some people/corporations use those numbers to tax themselves. Microsoft does this I think as part of their commitment to carbon neutrality.

Better if it's done across society but not totally useless to be aware of that info even in the absence of a carbon tax.

Also, if they tax the fuel (which they certainly should) someone still needs to work out how to apportion that to the individual customers. Does the first person signing up pay the full wack, do you average it across all tickets, what if the plane flies half full, and so on. This is the kind of thing airlines do every day for the cost of fuel anyway.

>Also, if they tax the fuel (which they certainly should) someone still needs to work out how to apportion that to the individual customers.

Why is this even a problem? Fuel costs money today, yet airlines are somehow able to "apportion that to the individual customers".

Right. Every cost a company has is apportioned to the customers. This has to be done, otherwise a company cannot determine the price floor needed to stay in business.

Consider that so many thousands of companies are involved in the manufacture of the lowly pencil that there is no possible way to even determine the carbon footprint of it. Howinell can that work with a gigantic company like Microsoft? How can Microsoft's auditors come up with a remotely credible number? (They can't.)

But what makes it all work is the pricing mechanism of the free market, not some auditing system.

See Milton Friedman "Free to Choose"

I think this is probably more of a marketing thing. Even though data centers consume a fair amount of electricity, software companies generate a lot more revenue per unit energy than most industries, so it's a lot cheaper for them to appear green than for, say, an air freight company who might be doing a lot more to reduce emission rates than Microsoft and yet doesn't sound as impressive as Microsoft's "we're [almost] carbon neutral".

An appropriately high tax on jet fuel would price the airline industry out of business.

Obviously they’re going to resist that, so what’s the solution?

> An appropriately high tax on jet fuel would price the airline industry out of business.

Why would it? Looking around it looks like fuel makes up 30% of airline's expenditures. Disregarding profits, that means $300 of a $1000 plane ticket is for fuel. The current world wide price for jet fuel is $3.76/gal, and burning a gallon of jet fuel produces 9.57kg of co2. One source says carbon needs to be priced at least $100/tonne[3], which is in line with current prices in the EU. With that price, the price of carbon is expected to add $0.96 per gallon, or a 26% increase in fuel costs. However, it would only raise overall expenditures by 7.7%. I doubt that's doubt that's going to bankrupt airlines. Consumers will probably fully absorb the cost.

[1] https://www.iata.org/en/publications/economics/fuel-monitor/

[2] https://impactful.ninja/the-carbon-footprint-of-aviation-jet...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/carbon-needs-cost-least...

$100/tonne is bogus. Overall emissions need to drop more than 10% per year [1]. There is no sustainable scenario where airlines continue to operate.

That's why I said an appropriately high tax. Any tax that can easily be absorbed by consumers, will not reduce emissions fast enough.

[1] https://www.showyourbudgets.org/?country=united_states_of_am...

Airline margins are already razor thin, about 10%, so increasing costs by that much would make them very close to not profitable. Not profitable industries die

Air travel will get more carbon efficient. The whole idea behind a carbon tax is that we start low and hike gradually, giving the market time to respond (rather than flipping a switch and raising ticket prices 7% overnight). Of course, the longer we wait the faster we have to hike prices (the timeline compresses), so it's hard to feel bad for industries that have resisted carbon taxes for the last decades. Moreover, if climate science is correct, the consequences of doing nothing far outweigh the loss of cheap air travel (of course, that's just a worst-case scenario; we absolutely don't have to choose between those two outcomes).

You realize that companies can raise prices? That's wha I meant by "Consumers will probably fully absorb the cost" last comment. Supermarket margins are even thinner than 10%, yet they aren't going broke during this inflation spree.

Economics 101: raising prices reduces demand. If airlines raise prices less people will fly — demand for flights is fairly elastic — further eating margins. Grocery stores sell food, the ultimate inelastic item.

Wouldn't regulating the industry put it out of business?

Taxing the fuel allows the industry to evolved towards an optimal solution. Regulating it does not.

Just look at how government regulation of the production, distribution, and price of infant formula resulted in mass shortages, as the manufacturers are unable to adapt.

Taxing carbon would impact airlines much less than you might think.

A carbon tax high enough to basically kill off all ICE cars and fossil fuel power plants would modestly impact airfare costs. Airlines are convenient and take very direct routes while getting extreme fuel efficiency per passenger.

Airlines are not efficient. The carbon footprint per passenger is about the same as driving a car for the same distance.

And airlines have been flying empty planes during the pandemic. That's ridiculously wasteful.

Pandemic saw reduced passengers but it also saw vast reductions in flying down to as low as 9% of normal operations. So it had a smaller impact on averages than you might assume.

In normal operations they are about 100 passenger miles per gallon of fuel and that’s straight line paths with 80% full aircraft.

Seems like the “ghost flights” were a more recent issue: https://www.wired.com/story/airplanes-empty-slots-covid/

As for the fuel efficiency, this says 58mpg. Business class or first class are much worse, of course. And private jets simply shouldn’t exist…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft

Where did you get 58mpg?

The only global number was: “In 2018, CO₂ emissions totalled 747 million tonnes for passenger transport, for 8.5 trillion revenue passenger kilometres (RPK), giving an average of 88 gram CO₂ per RPK.[2] A 88 gCO₂/km represents 28 g of fuel per km, or a 3.5 L/100 km (67 mpg‑US) fuel consumption.”

Anyway that’s not measuring direct fuel consumption in flight but estimating fuel used by the industry to transport passengers. Sort of like including fuel transportation costs to gas stations as part of a cars fuel efficiency. It’s also using US numbers to do so which likely overstate fuel consumption.

It's right on the wikipedia page, under "Operations":

> In 2018, the US airlines had a fuel consumption of 58 mpg‑US (4.06 L/100 km) per revenue passenger for domestic flights

We should take a system-wide view. The relative efficiency of any particular plane is irrelevant if the entire system depends on other, wasteful aspects. Let's consider the energy required to run an airport, including the infrastructure leading to the airport.

First that’s excluding more efficient long haul flights. If you want a system wide view then you also need to include the costs associated with building and maintaining rail/road networks etc.

Also just like road, rail, and boats aircraft don’t get to fly hypothetically ideal paths from origin to destination. Actual MPG is distance traveled / fuel used not distance from the origin to destination / fuel used.

Not to mention most commercial flights are also moving freight on those same aircraft but that’s secondary.

The solution is the airline industry would improve efficiency, increase some prices, cut some flights.

Unsustainable business are unsustainable and we can't exterminate humanity to make some CEOs happy.

Yes, I think airlines should go extinct. They're inherently unsustainable.

The problem is, I don't have any say in the matter, while corporations have a lot of power, and rich people depend on airlines.

So, it's unlikely that the beneficiaries of an unsustainable industry will voluntarily decide to drive it to extinction.

If you look at who actually flies in airliners, it ain't rich people.

According to Oxfam, if you earn more than $30,000 per year, you're in the top 10% of the world's wealthiest.

I'm from the future. In a few years time, the EU and other large governments will have instituted Carbon tracking apps directly linked to bank account information which have been combined with CBDC's to directly tax you for spending on carbon emission heavy products. It will also limit that spending.

So there is a future? Good to know!

The UK has a Carbon tax of sorts, surprise surprise it worked.

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