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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

He won't fly? Or he won't travel?

Big, big difference. Because flying is one of the MOST efficient ways to travel. FAR more efficient than even taking a bus.

> If more would cut down on just one long-distance flight per year, he maintains, that would also have a major impact.

That's terrible advice because people will drive instead. And adding "long-distance" makes the advice worse since long-distance flights are more efficient than short ones (most of the work is getting in the air, not staying there).

The ONLY was to cut down CO2 emissions is nuclear power plants. Nothing else is practical. If you care about CO2, and you have the opportunity, lobby to have a nuclear plant installed near you[r city].

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I don't think you're right about efficiency. Trains and boats are definitely more fuel efficient than flying, and cars are close. The figure for planes is about 90 passenger-miles per gallon, for fully loaded (55 people) deisel buses it's about 330. (All from this lovely article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transporta...)

Of course it depends on your stopping and starting.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...

For more realistic figures rather than theoretical maximums.

And I especially found it interesting to note that as typically used, cars are better than busses.

I think buses are better than cars, for inter-city travel. Wikipedia's numbers are probably more relevant to transit buses (i.e. the ones local governments run, which are often empty). Greyhound doesn't run uneconomic routes.

Bicycles are really healthy, cost little to acquire, are easy to repair, last for ages, and work reasonably well in most climates.

the bicycle is one of the most efficient forms of transport... half the energy per unit distance of walking ... converts to about [there are 2 claims in wikipedia, 732 and 879 mpg]

I strongly suggest any hackers (aging and pot-bellied or otherwise) give long distance cycling a go: it's truly pleasurable and great for your brain! I spend much of my 20s doing this in foreign countries.

> work reasonably well in most climates.

If you like to be boiled in the summer and frozen in the winter, not to mention having to cycle on icy roads with no shoulder and sixteen-wheelers bearing down on you.

Anyway, if you do cycle, please don't make a habit out of blowing past pedestrians at full speed, and think twice about riding on the sidewalks.

Perhaps consider moving to a less automobile-obsessed culture and a better climate.

Your snark aside, I don't cycle. I walk. Mainly, I'm concerned with getting knocked down by a cyclist who thinks that sidewalks are a wonderful place to go full speed without having to worry about anyone else.

Do you think perhaps they may have a similar concern regarding significantly larger mass vehicles moving at higher speeds some distance to your side?

> Do you think perhaps they may have a similar concern regarding significantly larger mass vehicles moving at higher speeds some distance to your side?

So they're justified in acting recklessly around me because others act recklessly around them? If it's that much of a problem, they should walk.

But planes are more likely to be full than buses or trains. From personal experience buses and trams are only full at rush hour and are sparsely populated at other times.

There is also a question of how efficient a mile is. When talking about transportation efficiency, the distance you want to talk about is the distance from point A to point B. When you talk about miles per gallon, you generally are talking about the total distance traveled which, unless you are moving in a perfectly straight line, is greater than the distance between the two points.

I assume that air travel would travel closer to a straight line, so a single air mile gets you further than a single bus mile. I haven't actually checked this, and have no idea if this difference is large enough to cover factor of ~4 difference you are citing.

>The ONLY was to cut down CO2 emissions is nuclear power plants. Nothing else is practical. If you care about CO2, and you have the opportunity, lobby to have a nuclear plant installed near you[r city].

Agree 100%, and I've been saying this for years. I'll even say that I don't take anybody talking about the threat of climate change/global warming seriously if they aren't willing to do this. Everything else I've heard suggested about how to actually go about massively reducing global CO2 emissions sounds like a joke. Am I supposed to believe that they think the threat is real when they won't advocate for the only thing that has a decent chance at making a difference?

Anything involving changing your personal lifestyle won't work. Food, living space, transportation habits, whatever. Maybe it makes you feel good somehow, but it won't scale to the world population, so it can't make a difference.

I am actually in favor of more walkable cities, since I personally like walking, but it isn't going to make a difference as far as CO2 emissions. A city with less motorized transportation, and more of it electric like trains and such, probably does produce much less CO2, but our cities are already built. Rebuilding them to be like that would produce so much CO2 that it would probably take the better part of a century to actually see a net reduction in total CO2 emitted.

Renewable energy is nice where it works, but I'm not convinced that it's capable of scaling big enough fast enough to solve the problem. Prove me wrong by all means, but while we're working on getting that going, how about we get started on something that we know will work? I was given to understand that this was urgent and all.

That's terrible advice because people will drive instead.

Or - more likely - they'll choose a closer destination for their summer vacation and avoid losing six days driving the round trip from New York to San Francisco.

Energy consumption does not equal warming impact.

Jet aircraft produce a number of non-CO2 emissions with high warming potential, and deposit them directly into the high atmosphere where they do the most harm.

The IPCC estimates that the total impact on the climate of jet aviation is 2-4 times greater than the CO2 emissions alone.

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/aviation/index.php?idp=2...

It's not just about efficiency though. From carbonfootprint.com - "Emissions from planes at high altitudes impact climate change more than if the emissions were released at ground level. To take account of this you have the option to factor up the CO2 emissions released by aviation Radiative Forcing Factor of 1.9"

"That's terrible advice because people will drive instead."

More likely, given the time, and $XYZ in the bank account, people will probably find something to do other than pointless movement. The local, momentary optimum of what to do with my spare time and spare money rarely randomly rolls the dice "fly!" although on rare occasions it does.

If he buys land and plants a forest on it while meditating, well, thats probably a net positive. On the other hand, having the extra money laying around maybe he gets a second car or a ski boat or spends the time installing a fireplace in his house, that's probably a net negative.

Rather than fly to Ireland this summer my kids drove out in the country where my cousin at his vacation cottage pulled them around behind his speedboat and/or rode around on my cousin's son's jet ski. I'm not sure which possibility ruined the earth more. Probably the amortized environmental capex of a vacation home and all the gas powered toys greatly exceeds any actual consumed fuel environmental cost by a couple orders of magnitude so they may as well burn a little gas to get something out of the damage caused by creating the infrastructure to burn it. Merely not flying isn't going to automatically fix anything.

The real tragedy of the story is the inhumanity of it. So flyers are treated like worthless cattle by employees, like freely abusable guilty until proven innocent enemy of the state terrorists by .gov, ripped off by the airlines, and all that inhumane treatment is perfectly OK with this guy, its just that he doesn't like some numbers on a report that won't really affect anyone anyway. And that is the inhumane tragedy of it. It would be like protesting the holocaust ovens not on moral and ethical ground but merely as an air pollution issue. Or protesting slavery pre-civil war not because the whole thing is inherently wrong, but because human slavery messes up financial reports somehow. The whole concept of the story makes me feel icky when seen in this light.

I'm pretty sure that flying is the least efficient way to travel that's not a partially-filled car, and it's only more efficient than individual car travel when you assume that less available or more expensive air travel will result in an equal expansion in the mileage of car travel.

The low price of air travel causes people to travel when they normally wouldn't travel and wouldn't be reasonably expected to by employers.

>The ONLY was to cut down CO2 emissions is nuclear power plants.

Or to cut down on burning jet fuel.

> I'm pretty sure that flying is the least efficient way to travel

You are wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...

> Or to cut down on burning jet fuel.

The amount is utterly minuscule compared to how much energy is used for everything else. It's gets lots of press but is a mostly worthless reduction.

Or migrate to places with abundant hydroelectric power.

While flying is efficient, on the other hand you don't drive the same distances that you would fly. The more you stay where you live, the less emissions. If you choose a walkable town, you don't need to drive except occasionally.

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