Comment by abricq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abricq | Hacker News Reader

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> Focusing on "solutions" that address less than a percent of a percent of emissions is a distraction

A "percent of a percent" is of the order of scale of 0.01%. Airplanes account for 2.5% to 3.5% of all global emissions [1] and are emitted by only 11% of the population [2]. That's an error ratio of 300. If you're advocating for awareness in picking effective solutions, I think numbers should matter.

> Push any non-carbon energy source you like - nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, it doesn't matter.

Yes,but all of these sources produce electricity, that's great for EVs, but planes don't run on electricity, they use carbon-energy (and this is not ready to change for commercial flying). Even if every country gets equipped with top quality nuclear plants, it will change anything for airplanes. Electrical and oxygen airplanes are very far from any real proposition.

I completely agree with you in being effective and very rational when picking solutions and advocating for them. I also think that we must be fair to future generations and to lower social classes. In this view, I think that we should (at least) stop encouraging flying and start encouraging trains, or just more local activities. Whether we must discourage it is another question, for which I have no answer.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...

My immediate thought was that they were describing non-commercial flights fyi. I imagine the numbers for that market are on the order of <0.1% but I'm curious if there are any hard numbers for it!

> also think that we must be fair to future generations and to lower social classes

The people who fly most intensely are also in a prime position to fund meaningful carbon offsets, e.g. direct-air capture by Climeworks [1]. Railing against aviation in general is, in my opinion, pure virtue signaling. Arguing for taxing aviation to fund climate mitigation makes more sense.

[1] https://climeworks.com

Of course, I agree that taxing kerosene is what makes the more sense. There are so many great uses of airplanes ! I also really hope that one day, net-zero aviation will work, and for that to happen we must not discourage the research. I was just pointing out that it's false to say that aviation is not a problem.

God I absolutely despise direct air capture as any kind of argument for not doing something to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

It never, never makes sense in any realistic forseeable future scenario (ie not the pure fantasy that keeps getting thrown around) to capture and store CO2 at 500 or so ppm this way when it is far far far easier to not pull it out of the ground and emit it in the first place.

Atm it barely makes sense for easy industry CCS where it's done where the US gov subsidises it to reduce the price of co2 for enhanced oil recovery.

It's tantamount to arguing we should jump of the cliffs of dover because we can potentially climb back straight upwards fully disregarding the fact that if you survive no matter which way you turn it, whether you add stairs or elevators, it will always be more of a hassle getting back up than taking that one step of the ledge.

> when it is far far far easier to not pull it out of the ground

It is easier to not change how millions of people travel. If we aren’t doing direct air capture, we’ll still have the air travel. It’s a stupid place to try and optimise, and seems more a rhetorical tar pit than place where anyone seriously argues about carbon reduction.

Of the dozens of times I've flown, only once had it ever been urgent. From what I know of my colleagues and family, the vast majority of air travel is for pleasure. And we live in a country which does not afford us land travel to other countries of interest.

>It is easier to not change how millions of people travel.

Only if you assume we don't have to pull our co2 emissions down drastically in the first place.

>If we aren’t doing direct air capture, we’ll still have the air travel.

And if we'd account for the effort and cost of the direct air capture to offset it we'd have almost no air traffic and most of would remain would be less practical and fast. We'd have had so so much more runway on this issue if people were willing to go for even just the low hanging fruit. As it stands it appears we and you in particular don't even want to tacle the low hanging fruit wrt this part of the issue and so I presume in general.

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