Should frequent flyers pay for the decarbonization of the air industry? | Hacker News Reader

Should frequent flyers pay for the decarbonization of the air industry?

footprintcoalition.com

30 pointsjelliclesfarm21 comments

People who fly 1,000 times more than average only use 1,000 times more carbon. If jet fuel was taxed more then frequent flyers would pay that tax 1,000 times more often. Luckily this is already the case.

Private jets on the other hand, are sometimes exempt. https://bitluxtravel.com/eu-proposes-to-exempt-private-jets-...

From the linked article

> Under current legislation, across Europe fuel used for aviation is largely tax-exempt, with a small exemption for low-altitude recreational aircrafts. This has long allowed air freight companies, commercial airlines and private jet operators to operate with a free pass regarding taxation.

Which implies, in Europe at least, there is no tax on jet fuel currently.

> exempt, with a small exemption

I've never seen a double negative in this form before.

While I agree the double negative is awkward there it would read a lot easier with "small exception" instead of "small exemption" and maybe the author even wanted that word but was writing an article full of the word "exemption" and either made a mistake or forgot.

Mass surveillance is a boiling frog scenario. Just a few decades ago, it'd have been absurd to suggest this type of regulation, because no one collected authoritative data pinning individuals to how they used airplanes. Airline tickets were even transferrable.

Aren't "air miles" basically this ?

Complex partnerships, mostly funded through leverage, with credit card companies and corporate accounts have been subsidizing the airline industry for decades; not to mention government bailouts.

The airline industry needs to stand on its own or fall. That will help solve the carbon problem they have.

I sort of agree, but I think this is strictly orthogonal to the underlying problem . Achieving carbon reduction by removing state subsidies doesn't tackle the problem first class, it achieves it as a second-order effect.

So outlaw planes?

Ok not literally but I do wonder how scaled back they could be before affecting day to day.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-54018542

A mass grounding of flights during the peak of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic saw CO2 emissions from aviation reduce by up to 60%, according to the Global Carbon Project.

So, 60% of aviations contribution to C02 disappeared from the scale of shutdown we had in covid. The first order question would be what is aviations contribution to carbon and what is the contribution of the alternatives, including zoom video conferences.

I meant before society would hit significant pain points. Trains and trucks are logistics. Planes do a little, too, but how much of what planes do actually qualities as critical?

In australia, the painpoint is very close. Few people take trains or drive between Melbourne and Sydney, its one of the worlds most heavily used routes. Lockdown meant nobody was able to drive or go by train. Remove aircraft, the burden on australian norms would be immense. In Europe, a case is being made somewhere between 4h and 2h is a place to say "you should not fly" -France had a small panel of ordinary citizens propose this, and its being dickered down by the government but the principle is there.

Mel-Syd is 1.5hr by plane btw. By car its 9 hours. even adding the 1hr either side of flight process costs, its faster than car.

We don't have HST. Its a 20+ year dream to build one.

That people prefer to spend significant amounts of time and money flying for face-to-face meetings is an indication of the perceived utility of zoom video conferences.

> The airline industry needs to stand on its own or fall.

The airline industry probably stands next to banking as one of the industries with the highest amount of state interference. Looking at this list[0], there's probably more passenger-miles flown on airlines owned solely or majority by a government than not.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government-owned_airli...

I feel like very little of this comment makes sense?

So airlines have debt? What enterprise doesn’t?

And their cash flow is provided by customers using credit cards? Again, just like every consumer facing business. What are the airlines supposed to do differently?

I can’t figured out your proposed solution, unless it is carbon taxes, which yes, would work quite neatly to price externalities in the airline industry (as well as every other industry).

Decarbonizing aviation will probably be achieved via conversion to using liquified hydrogen ("LH2") fuel.

It is not clear whether existing airframes can be retrofitted to burn hydrogen. There is not room in the wings for LH2 fuel because, despite its extreme mass-energy density, it takes up much more space. Carrying it inboard on passenger flights might be seen as a safety hazard. Most likely, LH2 would be carried in nacelles slung under the wings alongside the engines.

New airframes may use fuel cells to drive electric turbines in preference to burning H2 the ordinary way.

Once LH2-fueled craft enter a route, kerosene craft will be unable to compete there, because the lighter fuel load allows for more paying cargo in its place.

Major airports will electrolyse H2 from water on-site, and bank LH2 in underground tanks. A big airport will have huge solar and wind farms around it, feeding in power for that. They will represent a very substantial part of each nation's generating capacity, and the LH2 much of its storage.

In the nearer term, there will be a massive demand for synthetic kerosene for the current fleet.

I think that the business case for hydrogen over synthetic kerosene is slim to non-existent.

You will come around.

Why? Please elaborate

Are kerosene combustion emissions as clean as those of hydrogen combustion?

Burning Kerosene emits as much co2 as producing it consumes, but kerosene is massively easier to transport and store in existing infrastructure. (It's literally jet fuel)

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