22% jump in airfares expected as airlines tackle climate change

> The International Council on Clean Transportation predicts that it might cost as much as $1 trillion for decarbonizing the industry and that ticket prices will have to rise as much as 22% by 2050 to foot the bill.

By 2050.

Inflation alone will probably cause prices to double by then, and we're in the middle of a very unpredictable period of technological development (thanks to AI, etc.,) so I wouldn't worry about an estimated 22% price increase that's nearly 30 years away.

Am I reading this right? Only a 22% fare increase? For completely decarbonizing air travel? That's less than the price variance of just flying at a different time.

The cynic in me expects them to make zero progress or impact on climate change by their deadline, but still end up with a 22% increase in fairs.

It's already up over 25% in the last year anyway. Not sure why we're worring about long term. Anyone try booking a trip to Europe from US lately?

100,000 flights a day, every day of the year is 2% of all emissions.

Burning all that coal to make electricity is 20-25% of emissions.

When will we fix the big problems? If we’d started 40 years ago, we’d likely be worrying about aviation being carbon neutral by 2070 instead.

Time to watch Carl Sagan’s 1985 warning again

https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI

If (big if) this is true, then good.

If (again, big if) society is interested in tackling climate change then individuals should be willing to pay the true cost of their actions.

But I suspect neither statement is true.

Airline executives will raise prices because they want more revenue. Rich (in the global sense) people in the developed world are in love with $20 toasters from halfway around the world and $99 flights to a beach that will be underwater in a century.

Ignoring the cost of our modern lifestyles is a big part of how we get by.

I have these weird "future stories" I like to play in my head. One is where we end up in a situation that mystically some global policy comes into place that gives each human a limit to fly 5,000 miles every year, and then a market for flight miles emerges. People sign into a website and trade their miles for their local currency, flight miles eventually become a pseudo currency. It's super weird, but I think about it often.

> The World Travel & Tourism Council reports that the travel industry generates between 8% to 11% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions—much of which comes from transport and a lot of that, from aviation.

Does anyone know what actual percentage of the total this represents? From the article it sounds like "2-3% of the world's green house gas emissions", which is not nothing but not particularly huge either.

Idea: Pandemic lockdowns called people's bluff on a lot of bullshit. The "need" for routine long distance business travel was an example. Which means airlines now have less leverage when trying to get something from government than they would have in say 2018 because who cares if your higher fares mean less people fly if the government's model says that has negligible larger economic impact.

When I purchase flight tickets I like to review the breakdown of associated fees and taxes - usually plenty of entities taking their pound of flesh. So I was pretty surprised to learn that airlines have enjoyed tax exemption for jet fuel for international flights, on a worldwide basis apparently since the 1940s. IATAs position is unsurprising [0]. I find it curious that the airline industry has enjoyed such generous tax treatment for so long [1].

Granted, unlike today, in the 40s when this tax treatment was being established I doubt any government was considering taxes as a way to tackle climate change.

[0] https://www.iata.org/contentassets/ebdba50e57194019930d72722...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene_tax#Criticism_of_kero...

I'd generally go to the source for such claims, it's usually a bit more HN-level:

https://theicct.org/stack/net-zero-aviation-mar22/

And indeed their graphs on carbon price (and other points they make) are far more interesting than the headline.

> Taxes, like a ticket tax, could be designed to shift some of the cost of technology from those who fly infrequently to relatively prosperous frequent fliers. Indeed, almost two-thirds of aviation CO2 is emitted by upper-income country residents, while countries representing the poorer half of the world emit only 10%. Any discussion of the prospects for decarbonizing air travel should recognize that air travel’s benefits skew toward prosperous people, while its climate impact affects everyone.

Realizing that there are other issues with which to contend, why not just start slowing down airline flights?

Drag, and therefore fuel used, is a function of velocity squared. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(physics)#Aerodynamics

Slowing down from 500 to 400 knots adds a half hour to a 1000 nm flight, but could provide maybe 25-30% fuel savings?

FTA: "it is likely that some of this cost will be picked up by travelers in the form of much more expensive airfares."

Maybe, but it's disingenuous to make that comment without also noting who will pay for the cost of negative externalities arising from _not_ making these changes (spoiler: it's all of us, but disproportionately it's the people who can't afford to fly who will pay the most)

They jumped more than that when the pandemic ended and they apparently decided to try to make back all their pandemic losses overnight.

Some of these things overlap into reducing fuel costs, which is the thing airlines spend the most on, aside from employee salaries.

Yes, I’m sure the execs at airline companies are solely looking at climate change as rationale why to increase prices in a very very tight margin industry, with recent record high inflation and record high borrowing rates.

Perhaps if everyone agrees to a price hike, then customers won’t be incentivized to switch to a cheaper airline.

Climate change movement has lost its original gestalt and now is used as a means of price action, policy changes that really make no sense.

why are the US policy makers hyper focused on reducing carbon footprint of the country and destroying QoL by pushing more expensive but more ‘green’ alternatives. We’re 13th in the world per-capita emissions [0]

And yet, we’re okay pushing child slave labor to mine cobolt for batteries of electric cars that, if even a small majority of Americans had, our electric grid could not handle.

It’s fine, just add an additional tax to it, while millions of families are suffering from economic conditions that are likely to get worse.

The green cult, like many, started for great reasons. And now it’s been high jacked for corporate interest and power grabs.

I would like the planet to be more green. I think most people would. But not at the fire expense of large populations. We can transition to a greener future more slowly. People have touted “the next 10 years is the end” for 40 years.

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/carbon-fo...

Good. This doesn't mean that the cost of flying has increased, it just means that the externalized costs are now being priced in properly. If you're a fan of markets, you should be celebrating that the market will now be more efficient as a result of more accurate pricing.

Why is it any time a user fee related to fighting climate change comes up the comments are immediately astroturfed by concern trolls?

I suspect this is just another green washing scam. The outcome I predict is fatter executive pockets.

This will be only logical output of any proposed "carbon tax". Making things expensive for poor people. At the same time society can be surprised why those people are voting for extremist or outright clima-sceptic parties. Not because they don't believe in existence of climate change, but because they can't afford to exist in the New Green World.

Obviously this won't affect the billionaire oligarchs and politicians, only the regular working people.

Two flaws in this article:

- it's written from the point of view of businesses that in any case have been struggling for a long time: airlines.

- it discounts the inevitable disruptors that will do things differently than the current companies in this space and makes the (broken) assumption that aside from fuel prices nothing changes.

So that's companies that have struggled to adapt historically struggling to adapt some more and not seeing a way out. In other words, a business ripe for disruption. The question is not if that disruption will come but when and in what form. What this article spells out is what would happen if the only disruption that will happen is higher fuel prices. Which is interesting only in the sense that it really makes a case for other disruption to happen.

IMHO, battery electric aviation will start disrupting short haul aviation towards the end of this decade. Adoption will be initially slow and people will be dismissive about the whole thing happening at all. But basically all the raw tech we need for this is already in place (e.g. 500wh/kg batteries by companies like CATL, Amprius, and others) and it's just going to be a matter of building/designing vehicles and infrastructure and improving the tech further as we go. All this actually started happening about half a decade ago and is actually well under way at this point. Lots of companies transitioning out of R&D into commercialization in the next few years. Some of them this year already. Not all will succeed. But the basic premise of a small, cheap electrical plane with about 600 miles of range is basically going to happen.

Why is that disruptive? Because we go from increasingly higher fuel prices to a state where the cost of fuel is a fraction of what it is now. And you can fly with zero worries about climate change because that will all be clean energy. That's going to change a few things.

A related disruption is going to be that these planes are not going to be the same size as today. The main reason that big planes are interesting is fuel cost. Only rich people can afford to fly in small planes and pretend they are sitting in a "flying" car. Because burning a few hundred gallons of fuel just isn't cheap. Flying small electrical planes on the other hand is dirt cheap and you don't get to share each other's farts. Win win.

Small electrical planes/drones are going to fix the cost of flying in a big way by at least an order of magnitude: fuel, maintenance, the ability to avoid big airports with their landing fees, etc.

Companies focused on their current business of burning fuel to move big jets full of economy class cattle around are going to have to figure out how to keep up with that. Most of them probably are not going to figure that out. E-fuels might keep some of them going and that may be the only thing that is economical for long haul at least the mid term. But most of their current short haul business is going to struggle and die. And that's not going to take 40 years to happen.

Finally, another disruption that's coming will be in the form of autonomous flight. Lots of small airplanes would require lots of pilots. Except those pilots don't exist and long before they can be trained, a lot of these planes will be able to fly themselves. That's more cost savings because once you eliminate fuel cost, pilots are the next cost bottleneck. And of course the manually operated planes also getlot easier to fly . Meaning the training of new pilots gets a lot easier over time as well.

All that together is starting to happen this decade. It will take ages for the aviation world to adjust of course. But that doesn't mean it's not happening. And once it starts happening it will start happening a lot quicker driven by cost savings and investors waking up and smelling money.

“Tackle”

To be poor in the United States or Europe is just becoming horrible. First of all nothing works anymore. Washing Machines are designed to use as little water as possible, so your clothes don't get clean like they did a few decades ago. The gas stovetop range is replaced with electric, so it takes 20 minutes to boil water. Toilets are low flo, which is just disgusting. I'd say soon the average Chinese citizen will live a better life than their western equivalent, not having to deal with sin taxes "For the Climate".