Slow Travel

Too bad we used productivity gains to consume more rather than give us more leisure time. I think if I had Tim Bray flexibility, I’d be willing to do take nothing but bicycle touring vacations.

I’m not sure if it’s what the author intended, but I understood that to be talking about the actual trip being more expensive. I’ve looked into sea travel before for short (e.g. Melbourne to Tasmania) and longer (e.g. Melbourne to New Zealand), and it consistently ends up a good deal more expensive than air travel because it’s basically a hotel and restaurant for overnight or however many days or weeks or whatever, whereas with air travel that part is minimised, and accommodation and food at both ends can be much cheaper (e.g. free accommodation between one’s own home and friends’ homes).

>emissions tend to do more damage at high altitude than they do at ground level

I've always been a bit dismissive of aviation as a carbon emissions contributor because globally it only accounts for around 2%. Thanks for pointing this out, I was unaware of this fact. Is the relationship between altitude and warming effect known? Are we talking linear or something worse?

In Canada, it’s implemented as a carbon dividend, IIRC. The tax earnings are distributed to the entire population, so those who pollute less get more than they spent. Presumably that includes people who consume less because they’re poor.

Depends where you put the revenue. Use it to fund a UBI, if the tax is set to raise $100b and everyone on earth gets $12.50, then that benefits the poor.

Well yeah, but the onrushing climate catastrophe is going to selectively wreak havoc on the poor, and especially poor brown people nearer the equator.

Could you give more context to why that is so? Couldn't it be adjusted the way something like income tax is?

From your replies you seem to be genuine, but I think you've probably picked up this ides that carbon taxes hurt the poor from someone who wasn't genuine and didn't actually care about the poor or believe a carbon tax would be bad for them.

I don't know where to start deprogramming you from this misinformation, but maybe just look into the actual discussions about the real carbon prices already in use im the world.

Not the politics when one is proposed in the USA, but the boring implementation details in the countries that have used them for decades.

A just transition and carbon pricing are in no way opposed.

https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/20.500....

That doc dives into the political, administrative and political complexities of real world implementations in developing nations.

Oh, they already did, Tim. Hence my last paragraph.

I expect that, if implemented, carbon taxes would continue to rise as we discovered that 10% wasn’t cutting it to modify people’s behavior.

(I’m generally in favor of the concept, but I fear giving a framework that amounts to a sledgehammer.)

If I’m taking a weekend trip, I’d be happier to wake up in the destination city from a sleeper train than to take an 0600 flight to arrive around the same time.

If I have a need for transit and a need for sleep anyway, I’d rather the sleeper train take 8 or 9 hours. (I did basically this with a Eurail pass in college. I’d often plan to visit cities that were 8+ hours apart by train and just sleep (in regular train seats) rather than pay for a hotel.

Assuming this took off, you'd have the embodied cost of all the extra hotels required, for a start.

I love the idea, I always try to travel leisurely when I can, but it's in no way a realistic carbon-reduction strategy, IMHO.

I agree it's a hard problem to replace these kinds of fuels, especially in aviation.

But it's a much less hard problem to make synthetic versions of them (eg butanol). And ultimately, sustainably.

> really nothing rivals the energy density of petroleum fuels

This isn't actually true, and gets said a lot more than it really should.

This same argument was made for EVs, and here we a short time later, and it turns out that EVs are much more efficient as was predicted by nerds who did the sums before it was practical as a business.

But, you'll say, what about trucks or busses, they need much more fuel and therefore it's still all about energy density?

And I'll say, no, electric busses and trucks are being rolled out right now, because they are cheaper than diesel busses. Because they are more efficient.

Okay, but what about planes, you can't make an electric plane can you, so it's all about the energy density.

Except people are making electric planes, and their pitch is that they're going to be cheaper, because they're more efficient.

We could do shipping etc. but I think you get the point, so we'll skip to:

Wait, you say, really long distance flight that's not possibly with heavy batteries is it, so I'm still right.

Well, no, because you were attaching some magical properties to a fuel that we semi-randomly use today because we found a bunch of it lying around and didn't have anything better.

If kerosene didn't exist, and you had the tech to make it (which we do) why would you make it? Well, it's got the most energy density, right. Except methane and hydrogen score higher on gravametric energy density, so you could make those instead.

But you say, those need cooled and pressurised, not realising that this disproves your own claim that the only thing that matters is energy density. It's the whole system efficiency and cost that matters, just like the familiar EV story.

We mostly use fossil fuels for historical path dependency lock-in reasons. We'll continue to use synthetic versions of them in jets for the same reason, nobody wants to redesign working planes just to save some energy on fuel.

But at some point, new planes, and new air transport systems, will get designed around what is actually the cheapest form of energy we have lying around, and avoiding the externalities of carbon, NOx, and high altitude condensation and they'll probably look quite different than they do today and energy density will be only one of many factors.

A neat anecdote to summarise this, there's a company making 19 seater jets that are electric. They asked a few people in the business, do you fly any planes that size, and they all said no. But one regional airline said, no we don't, but we used to fly planes of that size all the time. We switched because the fuel cost economics for short flights was worse than long flights. We changed what we did, flying further in bigger planes, for cost reasons. They're now attempting to go back to more smaller planes.

https://heartaerospace.com/

> Is there really a market for 19-seater electric aircraft?

> A few decades ago, 19-seater aircraft were very common. Since then, the large acquisition and maintenance cost of turboprop jet engines have made 19-seaters uneconomical. Whereas regional planes averaged at 20 seats in the 1980s, today they average 80 seats.

> Why don’t airlines fly as many 19-seaters anymore?

>When the engine cost-of-ownership can be the same for a 19-seater and a 70-seater, and engine wear is the same whether you fly a 100 km as a 1000 km route, flying short hops with small turboprop aircraft is simply not profitable to airlines.

> How does going electric change the economic equation?

> Our electric motor is about 20 times less expensive than a similarly-size turboprop, and about a 100 times less expensive than the cheapest turbofan. More importantly, maintenance costs are more than 100 times lower. These lower operating costs will make 19-seater electric aircraft competitive to 70-seater turboprop aircraft.

I just checked -- you can buy a ticket from Munich - Berlin today, for any day you want in December, for € 17,90. Direct ICE train, travel time between 4h30m - 5h20m (depends on the departure time).

Of course, the reliability of Deutsche Bahn is another question.

> it would be much cool to have 5-6 weeks holidays instead of 3

I get 30 days paid holiday per year. I could take all my holiday in one lump and spend 6 weeks travelling there and back. But I'd massively prefer to have more, shorter, holidays and not spend half my precious holiday time travelling.

And, obviously, I'm lucky. I work for a German company. When I worked in Australia the standard was 20 days, which makes a 10-day travelling time completely unworkable.

There are advantages to killing off bulk tourism, I'll agree. But I also don't think we want to go back to a world where only the idle rich get to travel.

> > That wasn't incorrect.

> You just have different opinions.

That's my point. Others' opinions aren't incorrect just because they differ from your own.

Pretty sure earth will be fine, humans may not be.

I drove on back roads, not the freeway. Most cars had a very easy time passing me or going around me as traffic was light, and there was plenty of room on the road.

> In the US, South Bend Indiana to Chicago is only about 90 miles, but is scheduled for an hour, and has a 1 hour difference. Driving is far faster.

That's an interesting route. There is a direct Interstate connection, direct flight connections, and a direct passenger rail connection.

Driving is the fastest option, except when there is traffic and there is frequently traffic. 2.5 hours is not an unusual amount of time for the drive. Also, it feels like the interstate between the two cities is in a permanent state of construction.

The train is around 2-2.5 hours (and strangely the train station in South Bend is in the airport terminal), but there is currently construction along a lot of the route that when finished will shave 10-15 minutes off the time. There are more future improvements planned that will also reduce the time.

Nuclear ocean liners would need substantial government support, but this has been true of all international travel since at least 1900. The ocean liners of the golden age were financed by governments, and modern jet travel is supported by large state investments into things like air traffic control, R&D, and airports. All that is really needed is the political will, which is a much better situation than the alternatives, which require extreme engineering that comes close to the limits of physical possibility.

Hard to believe we'd be pushing that idea at the very moment we're trying to encourage shipping vessels to slow down by 10% because of the dramatic reduction in fuel consumption that provides.

I've taken the Queen Mary II (the only current ocean liner) between NYC and Southampton. I thought it was a very, very nice way to cross the Atlantic, even though the carbon and general pollution footprint could be dramatically improved.

You can, but it results in non-linear increases in fuel consumption. A nuclear reactor can be run at a high power output continuously without substantial reductions in efficiency. It also allows for infinite range and reduces cost and turnaround time caused by refuelling. Using Ammonia would have none of these benefits, require expensive infrastructure, and involve enormous energy losses.

That's a viable strategy for bulk commodities, but this was a discussion of passenger transport, and people are unlikely to use sailing ships for point-to-point travel.

True, hadn't even touched on that. It's a particular point of privilege for the knowledge workers that we can do this.

You say that, but on the other hand we (at least here in NL) complain that there is so much administration to do for medical staff.

Oh, there are plenty. First of all, actual energy production with fossil fuel. Second, better insulation/ventilation of existing houses to reduce heating/AC costs. While we are at it, we can fit solar panels on roofs, it will give us more electricity hence less fossil fuel to burn. Electric cars too, the tech is already there. Steel production (and other heavy industry) accounts for 8% of global emissions afaik. Meat production estimates vary a lot: from 9% to 35% or so.

I know it is very controversial, but I'd rather go vegan than give up air travel.

Electricity production with coal.

From the top of my head is a two digit number, but I’m currently suffering from the aforementioned jetlag… so let check with that French guy jancovisi. He has a utterly pragmatic approch.

https://jancovici.com/en/climate-change/ghgs-and-us/how-do-g...

See : « CO2 emissions by activity since 1971 »

Transports comes third after power, and industrie.

As per someone above:

">emissions tend to do more damage at high altitude than they do at ground level

I've always been a bit dismissive of aviation as a carbon emissions contributor because globally it only accounts for around 2%. Thanks for pointing this out, I was unaware of this fact. Is the relationship between altitude and warming effect known? Are we talking linear or something worse?"

We should target industries where going 100% green only increases costs and doesn't result in a worse product or service, e.g., switching power plants from fossil fuels to renewables.