Big data reveals true climate impact of worldwide air travel | Hacker News Reader

Big data reveals true climate impact of worldwide air travel

norwegianscitechnews.com

38 pointssilly_ninja13 comments

There is a nice, albeit possible outdated, graph of emissions by type: https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector

Interesting that shipping is 1.7% of which supposedly 40% is fossil fuel transportation.

So that's about 0.7% for shipping petrochemicals and another 0.3% from pipelines. So 1% of global emissions is just the overhead of moving fossil fuels around to where they are processed/burned.

Does it? It sounds dramatic:

"At 911 million tonnes, the total emissions from aviation are 50 per cent higher the 604 million tonnes reported to the United Nations for that year."

But the article suggests that all the model does is fill in the blanks for countries that didn't report to the UN (China being the largest emitter in this category). Technically true that it is 50% higher than reported, but not 50% higher than expected

> The new data show that countries such as China, for example, which did not report its 2019 aviation-related emissions, was second only to the United States when it came to total aviation-related emissions.

Prices for flights are too low; if we price in the effects they would be much higher. Still can fly to places in Europe for 5-20 euros; that cannot work. Everyone knows this but it’s just to stimulate tourism etc; who is picking up that bill though? Currently we all are, vacationing or not on the cheap, in a worse future.

Flights are expensive enough. The world isn’t going to end and neither is mankind. Relax, you’ll be fine.

They aren’t expensive here locally; it is crazy you can fly 4000km for 10 euros.

Not the point though really; where does that (expensive enough) money go and is the airline taking care of their environmental obligations? Is the gov? Nope. Low/no tax on kerosine and greenwashing. It has to be more expensive and with clearer laws to make it work for the world.

There is no way a 4km flight for 10 euro is profitable. Which operators are doing this?

Had friends over who paid 9 gbp for a return ticket London-south Spain on Ryanair. I see rows of tickets even in the summer for 9-30 euros for the same trip on different budget airlines.

If the price were E50 for that flight, it would still barely make a profit if you pay for the carbon credits to offset; 1 gram would cost 0,00007 (I see the current price for 1 credit for the EU is around 70 euros); a 737 has about 115gr per seat exhaust per km as per Wikipedia , so that makes the price for a 4000km trip around 30 euros only on emissions per seat. And that’s with all seats filled (it will use a tiny bit less with less seats but not that much).

And this is not including the contested and highly unfair lack of kerosine tax which competing transportation (cars, trains, buses etc do have to pay), but that’s another story.

Tickets under a 100 return means that someone is cutting corners with the environment. At least until we have fully neutral/clean planes (proven), which will come eventually.

Famous last words

40 million flights is big data? That’s a decently sized PostgreSQL database to me.

I think it depends on how much data is stored per flight. If each flight is one record, sure. If each flight is tens of thousands of coordinates and velocities, that's a lot more. Analyzing the data from 40 million data points is very different than analyzing the data from half a trillion data points. Whether that's "big data" depends on your perspective, though, but I'm not sure I'd store quite so many records in a Postgres database.

Guesswork. If you don't measure this you can't tell for sure. Just guesswork...

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