Airline Passengers Will Be Forced to Pay for $5T Carbon Cleanup

Of course, reducing their carbon footprint would also be good, but it's currently only 3% of global emissions:

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/08/maritime-shipping...

The carbon impact of the stuff on the ships is likely much higher. For instance, this BBC article breaks it down for food, and, for ocean-shipped stuff, the carbon emissions of transporting the food is rounding error:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220429-the-climate-bene...

The only real exceptions to the rule involve highly-perishable food that has to be flown in next day, but that doesn't have anything to do with ocean transport.

As far as I can tell, carbon offsets are a complete scam (vs. putting the money directly into stuff that reduces carbon production).

If anyone knows how to pay an existing company to extract carbon from the atmosphere, and store it in a biologically inactive form for > 1000 years, then I'd love to hear about it.

There's a ton of things you can do with greater impact than sending money to some rainforest that has been there for 1,000s of years anyway.

Also, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed....

Do you not see the contradiction? They are minimal because they are a scam. And it isn't that some are legitimate and others are scams. Carbon offsets fundamentally misrepresent the actual costs of carbon. The cost of getting someone to promise not to cut down trees that would have emitted 1T of CO2 if clear-cut and burned in the open air is fundamentally different from the fractional cost of redesigning air travel to not emit 1T of CO2 in the first place.

Think about it: Are there enough trees about to be clear-cut and burned to offset all the other emissions we need to cut? If so, we could just prevent climate change by saving all the forests. We can't. We have to actually reduce emissions by far more than offsets are saving. In the meantime, offsets create incentives for people to actively plan to burn carbon that they otherwise wouldn't have burned, so that they can be paid to not burn it. This doesn't reduce emissions, it is just an accounting trick. It doesn't lead to a net reduction in carbon.

From https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/18/climate/offset-carbon-foo...:

"But the biggest problems are structural, related to something called additionality.

That’s technical jargon for a simple concept: A carbon offset needs to fund reductions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. If you pay someone to preserve a grove, but they were never actually planning to cut it down, then you’re not offsetting your emissions. And it’s difficult to establish the facts in these cases with the level of confidence required for offset programs to work.

Part of the appeal of carbon offsets is the notion that it’s possible to meaningfully combat climate change while living our lives and structuring our society in the same way we always have. For that reason, some experts see carbon offsets as actively damaging, inasmuch as they give people cover to avoid reducing emissions at the source."

    > it's the best one can
    > do, I guess?

Some quick searching suggests that on hour of air travel is approximately 100 kg/hr of CO^2 per person.

A 2x4 that's 12ft long weighs around 10 kg, burning a kg of wood releases around 1.5kg of CO^2.

So, to a first approximation if you take a coast to coast flight in the US you'll come out around even if you buy around 35 (100x5.5/15) 2x4's, and then find some way to store those permanently.

That's around a 10ft wide wall of 2x4's stacked side-by-side.

Of course buying processed lumber just to store it is really inefficient, which is where carbon credits/offsets etc. come in.

FTFA: “Commercial jets being delivered today may still be flying in 2050, and new designs powered by batteries or hydrogen will take years, if not decades, to materialize. So for now, the best option is to fill up conventional airliners with less-polluting copycat fuels that don’t require more drilling for oil.

…

The new RefuelEU rule will require airlines to fill their planes with a 2% sustainable aviation fuel blend by 2025, rising to 6% by 2030 and reaching 70% by 2050.

…

Rather than force airlines to pay for their own carbon cleanup, other proposals have emerged, including a tax on passengers.”

meanwhile, on the "reality" side of things. Air traffic is common and not going away, what to do about pollution?

Consider this statement for yourself: Airlines are in a unique position in the economy. Their profits are fragile, their equipment is highly expensive, they require huge amounts of resources to be useful, and they are very much in demand for many reasons. In economic terms "people and companies are willing to pay for air travel and, people and companies cannot fly by themselves"

There is no law of economics that says that airlines have to exist! The invention of the airplane itself was considered science fiction for a thousand years+. We have to find a social balance that works -- the existing technology is new. There is nothing to say that airlines as they exist today, at the price point they bear, is "sustainable" in any way.

So - an economic change has to happen, and it can be painful and strife-ridden, or it can be negotiated via secret deals, or we could have clear thinking and do what is efficient and fair. But most importantly, these changes are not optional ! Environmental crisis is "real" .

Yes? Presumably that will create latent demand for other modes of transport (or local leisure).

I zealously shill the values of nuclear power 7 days a week, but unless we discover a physics revelation nuclear airplanes are a horrible concept.

There are no forms of nuclear power production existing or theoretical which don't involve health-hazardous amounts of radioactive material. Even hydrogen fusion reactors activate the housing walls with neutrons. Miracle on the Hudson would have been much less miraculous if it meant terabecquerels of activity floating downstream.

I was discussing with an older friend the other week, we stumbled on the realization (maybe it's obvious) that progressing up the well-being ladder means consuming more energy and CO2, compare living in an unelectrified village with bathing in the river, and just sitting around with your friends for entertainment; with a villa with a hot shower, TV, and food flown from all over the world.

We were also discussing about how sad it is that when he was a travelling young man, he could still visit the "authentic" places, i.e. places with huts and no electricity, paved roads, or cars, but as time goes on those places now have brick buildings, TV, air-conditioning and asphalted roads, which is what the people living there wanted and got.

Now the poorer people of the world are screaming about the rich west saying "You've enjoyed all the luxuries and now you want to make it more expensive because 'save the planet', the one you ruined gaining all those luxuries? Not with us!". Even the working class French screamed about proposed increase of gasoline taxes...

Nuclear power is a great idea. With heavy heavy heavy shielding that is. Maybe even worth using it to synthesize fuel for airplanes. But don't stick it on a plane.

Minewhile, chemical factories, oil refineries, and other real polluters of real harmful chemicals laugh as the climate change narrative took off all the pressure from pollution which causes cancer and death into this insufferable virtue signaling.

That along with the wasted time.. I think we should focus on the things we can replace.

Flying is bad but it's a huge benefit to our society. IMO it's the one we should look at last especially because the greener alternatives are still a ways away. Unlike most other CO2 producers like energy and automotion.

All the coal we burn is at least 10 times that. If we stopped burning coal it would actually make a difference. Air travel is a rounding error in comparison.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/27/coal-consumption-hit-an-all-...