Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly I think most aviation should just go away. There are legitimate reasons for people and high-value cargo and mail to use planes to get places in a hurry, but I'd rather people treat plane flights as a rare luxury rather than a routine thing. The energy costs are enormous, and civilization is kind of in a wile-e-coyote-ran-past-the-cliff-edge-but-hasn't-looked-down situation with respect to climate change.

Electric aviation might be a huge improvement over burning kerosene with respect to CO2 emissions, but also reducing how much we rely on planes would go a long way too. I don't see electric air taxis being a good thing in almost any situation -- they're tremendously inefficient and they make a lot of noise. Air taxis for emergency responders might be an acceptable tradeoff.

If someone can come up with a good way to run a large airliner off of batteries in a practical fashion, then by all means I think that's worth doing, but I feel kind of obligated to be a wet blanket on the idea of the aviation industry suddenly revitalizing itself and everyone flying everywhere just because they can.

I think it is interesting that per km travelled, it is actually more energy efficient to travel by plane, than by car. This is mostly because most people tend to drive solo, so they are moving around a lot of vehicle for just a single passenger.

Of course people tend to travel much further/faster by plane. So prehaps it is not plane travel that you would like to see as a thing of the past, but traveling long distances? Or perhaps you class car ownership/driving in the same class of things that should go away.

Is that spent fuel or ghg emissions? Because high-altitude emissions are worse.

I was just looking at energy consumption per km travelled, and used this as a source:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transpo...

It's important to note that I'm just talking about an average situation. If a car is a massive gas guzzling thing, it's a much different equation from a micro-electric.

I hadn't thought about the differences in high altitude emmissions vs low. If you'd asked me before today if there would be a vig difference, i would have guessed that eventually it all just mixes evenly throughout the atmosphere, regardless of wjere it was emmitted. But after what you wrote, I learnt that this might not be the case (the science is still investigating):

https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/9818/why-do...

And there are a few other potential issues with other pollution aircraft emit at higher levels.

It would be nice if long-distance travel by train were much more practical than it currently is in the U.S.

Personal vehicles are a huge source of CO2 emissions, but I don't think it's realistic to just ban them all. I would rather we focus on phasing out internal combustion as quickly as possible, which is a lot easier to do if we had suitable infrastructure. (Not just more public charge stations, but it should be standard for new apartment construction, and we should be looking at electrification of highways so cars don't need huge batteries for cross-country trips. It's not realistic to expect every car to have 500-1000 pounds worth of batteries. That doesn't scale, at least not in the short-to-medium term.)

It would also be good if public policy didn't encourage large vehicles.

It's niche but I'd love for the most logical option to be train for any trip under 1,000 miles (SF to LA, Berlin to Paris, etc.), and then something along the lines of https://ecoclipper.org/ with decent internet for longer trips. Though sailing ships are probably not going to replace transatlantic flights any time soon. Maybe airships can come back, if only we weren't squandering all the Helium...

That's just a very practical way to ensure aviation remains a polluting and oil guzzling industry for perpetuity.

Since the economic and political elites of the world (in the broad sense) are the clients of aviation, there is just about zero chance they will allow the field to be dismantled for environmental reasons, especially since they have come to relly on it in the global competion.

What’s the co2 hit of aviation compared to the total?

EPA says it's about 8% of the transportation total, which is actually less than I would have thought. By comparison, light vehicles are at 57%.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...

> I'd rather people treat plane flights as a rare luxury rather than a routine thing.

Trains would definitely be key here. However, for migrants living in another continent, it becomes impossible in several scenarios to go back to visit their beloved ones.

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