Let's all remember that while jet aircraft emit much more than other forms of transportation, this is nothing compared to the emissions of animal agriculture.
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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The only way we make air traffic sustainable is by only travelling by plane when absolutely necessary and by not ordering stuff to be delivered ASAP so it can be shipped by boat instead.
Four people in a Chevy Suburban with a V8 pollute less to travel the same distance than if they do it via the air. Air traffic pollution is very, very bad, especially since it's released at altitude, and yet air traffic keeps increasing, especially for leisure.
And before someone comments about the ultra rich and their private planes, their emissions is basically nothing compared to the rest of air traffic.
Air traffic altogether is only 2% of global emissions. We could focus efforts to reduce emissions elsewhere without the negative effects on logistics and people traveling. Even if you completely eliminated all air traffic tomorrow it would be insignificant compared to other sources. Not that I think it’s a bad idea to reduce emissions from air traffic, but it’s going to highly impact people’s lives for barely a dent in emissions.
2.5% of emissions but 4% of global warming impact due to where the emissions happen. That's 1/25th of the global warming.
I stand by my point; even if you eliminated all air traffic tomorrow it would barely make an impact. Efforts are best focused elsewhere that would have more of an impact on climate and less of a negative impact on people’s lives.
With this logic there's no sector that would have an impact significant enough that we should worry about it.
I disagree. Electricity generation and industrial processes are emitting many times more greenhouse gases than air travel. If you eliminated all emissions from electricity generation tomorrow it would make a massive difference, far exceeding the 2% of air traffic. Looking at an EPA source electricity generation is 25%, industry is 23%, and transportation less air transport is 26%.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions
transportation less air transport is 26%
Then the trucking industry will say "But just our sector isn't that bad, why not concentrate on ships?" and then the shipping industry will say "But just our sector isn't as bad as electricity production!" and so on.
What you're doing is exactly the same thing most people are doing to justify not making any effort "I won't make a difference by myself, why should I do anything?"
I just don’t see people taking vacations or seeing relatives across the country as being the problem at this point in time. I think the limited resources we have to pursue environmental changes could be spent significantly better elsewhere.
If you came up with a revolutionary technology that saved an astounding 50% of the air transport emissions, you’ve eliminated 1% of total global emissions.
If you come up with a much more mundane technology that saves only 10% of electricity generation emissions, you’ve eliminated >2% of total global emission, more than twice the impact.
Limited resources would be much more effectively applied starting with the largest polluters.
I don’t think kneecapping air travel, pissing off many normal people, for little environmental benefit, is the way to get people to start seriously caring about emissions. It’s just going to fuel more reactionary bullshit and people completely missing the point, IMO.
As a side note, ships are way more efficient than trucking. Despite the scary numbers they put out, they also haul an insane amount of cargo.
I agree that while reducing emissions from air travel is beneficial, it isn't enough of a solution. However, I think that "pissing off many normal people" is inevitable in the process of arresting climate change, as eliminating animal agriculture is necessary in order to solve the problem. People won't like that.
It is not the airliner which is the problem, it is the government. Compare it with the tobaco and alcohol industry: You can't expect them to protect the health of their customers and to reduce their profit voluntarily, If you want to reduce alcohol consumption, you just need to make the stuff more expensive with taxes etc. A bottle of spirit would cost the same as a bottle of cola if the government would not interfere, it is the task of the government to avoid this danger to society. The same with air travel: To make air travel less attractive is not the task of the airliner but a task of the government. At this moment, airliners are pampered, get tax free fuel, can expand at the cost of the neighborhood, etc. so what do you expect?
The air travel industry doesn't care much about fuel consumption. They still descent with flaps and spoilers out, instead of trading off altitude for speed slowly. They fly with speeds of 400+kts, but just like with cars, going slower saves fuel. And as long as the airliners demand fast airplanes, manufacturers keep designing them, despite the higher fuel costs compared to a slower plane. Again, making fuel much more expensive could cause the industry to rethink their strategy. There is a tipping point where customers accept a longer flight time for a substantial reduce in costs.
They still descent with flaps and spoilers out, instead of trading off altitude for speed slowly. They fly with speeds of 400+kts, but just like with cars, going slower saves fuel.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that aviation fuel subsidies must end, and train travel should be prioritized above all else.
That said, it's not true that going slower saves fuel, for multiple reasons.
- One is that the primary resistance planes encounter is air resistance, which is lowest in the highest parts of the atmosphere, because the air is thinner. But since planes use air pressure differences to stay up, thinner air means you have to go faster if you want to stay aloft.
- Even discounting that, going slower means a higher angle of attack for the plane, meaning the plane will pitch up more to maintain altitude. This actually increases drag, and that's true for everything from airliners to small propeller planes. Point is, the speed where fuel consumption is minimal for a given distance is not going to be near the lower end of the scale, more likely you'll find it in the upper third, above 400 knots for an airliner.
- The first point may be valid, but since going higher saves fuel, steep descents may actually also save fuel, as an idling engine will still consume a lot of fuel. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that going 400kts at altitude, then cutting the engines idle, and extending flaps and spoilers reduces flight time and thus fuel consumed compared to just cutting the engines and slowly descending. BTW you need flaps and spoilers to land, so it's more of a when rather than an if you'll open them.
- And finally, air pilots and airlines already optimise for fuel consumption, because that's in their interest as well. Fueling an airliner is hella expensive even with the massive subsidies. It should be more expensive, we agree on that, but slowing down airliners is just going to make fuel consumption and emissions even worse.
All you say might be true for the current design of airplanes. But it is like saying, "this formula 1 race car is really more efficient on the race track than in urban traffic, hence driving cars faster is more efficient.". I agree flying higher is more efficient. There is however no rule that you need to get to 400kts in order to be able to fly at FL350. It all depends on the design of the airplane. In general, for every form of transportation, road vehicles, boats, airplanes, going faster always means "spending progressively more fuel". I built my own airplane. And sure enough, flying it at 160kts instead of 140kts costs more fuel, at any altitude. And, not insignificantly, my small propeller airplane has a lower fuel consumption per passenger per mile than the airliners do, despite the latter flying higher and faster... What is the reason of that? There was also the Concorde. It could fly even faster, and higher, but... it used way more fuel. But this also doesn't mean that flying the Concorde close to its stall speed would be more efficient. There is no way to fly the Concorde at the same efficiency as a 737, at any speed or altitude, because it is designed to fly high and fast, and burn more fuel to make that possible.
So, I'm pretty sure, if we would not optimize the design of airplanes for a certain speed, but for the lowest fuel consumption, you might indeed end up with airplanes that fly slower (and maybe lower) than the designs we have now, and we could have airplanes that use less fuel per passenger per mile.
An airliner is not an F1 car though, that's a jet fighter. All I'm saying is that I think if Ryanair could get a plane that would eat less fuel but take twice as long to make a trip, they would jump at it. The Concorde shows exactly that, while some airlines might want the prestige, mostly they just want to provide the cheapest service they can get away with.
And, not insignificantly, my small propeller airplane has a lower fuel consumption per passenger per mile than the airliners do, despite the latter flying higher and faster… What is the reason of that?
Are you carrying enough fuel while doing that to do a trans-Atlantic flight? Airliners do. Can you fly over the troposphere to avoid significant weather that, beyond having people throw up, would have planes divert and use a lot more fuel as well? Airliners can. There are other reasons, of course, but these are just off the top of my head. All that said, of course fuel efficiency is but one of the things airliners are optimized for, and there are other concerns, but speed is not really one of them for the sake of it.
A bottle of spirit would cost the same as a bottle of cola if the government would not interfere
Sorry, how do you figure? Cola is basically water, sugar, and flavorings/colorings. Mix it together, carbonate it, put it in a bottle, and ship it out. Super easy to scale up. Whiskey (for example) involves mashing grain, fermenting it to get alcohol, distilling that alcohol to get it more concentrated and less watery, aging it in a barrel for a number of years, and then bottling it and shipping it out. Each step involves big, specialized equipment (harder to scale up) and many involve losing product along the way. And yet, it's because of government? Sure, there are higher taxes on alcohol and that contributes to the difference, but to blame it entirely on government is ridiculous.
Whiskey (for example) involves mashing grain, fermenting it to get alcohol, distilling that alcohol to get it more concentrated and less watery, aging it in a barrel for a number of years, and then bottling it and shipping it out.
If the government would not interfere, most companies would just label watered down cleaning alcohol as whiskey and sell you that. Point is that there are cost-increasing measures on alcoholic drink production from the govt beyond taxes.
I understand your point, but the original claim was that spirits and cola could be the same price. My argument was that spirits have a much more involved manufacturing process which raises the price. In my opinion, watered down cleaning alcohol has a different manufacturing process and wouldn't count - whether government prohibits it or not. It's a different product, made a different way, so of course it's going to have a different cost.
Thinking of it another way, and trying to play devil's advocate against myself to think this through, what if government said that cola needed to come with a side of premium caviar? It would raise the cost, and government would have caused it, but it would also be a different product. That doesn't mean that if you got rid of government regulation, cola with a side of caviar would cost the same as cola without caviar, spirits, or diluted cleaning alcohol. It just means that the regulation alone wasn't what made it expensive, because there are intrinsic manufacturing costs regardless.
Yeah, and I'm not disputing your point beyond that "no regulations" would be weirdly bad, not just normally bad.
Damn NZ what happened, you used to be cool.
There's no path for a commercial air carrier to do this, nor is there any point as we're all well and truly fucked.
No matter how fucked you are you can always get that much more fucked
That is the thing: Mitigating climate change does not have a boolean result (we mitigated it or not), it is a scale, without a relevant upper limit. So, if you think "fuck this, we can't stay even within 3 degrees warming, so it doesn't matter what we do from here" you are wrong. Even if that is the case, at least try to mitigate 4 degrees and so on. Basically there is a difference between "we are fucked", "we are super-fucked", "we are mega-fucked" and so on! Getting complacent is not an option here!
We're already mega fucked.
That is my point though: No matter how fucked we are, it could always get worse. There is no "we reached the limit anyway, so no need to worry about anything anymore"
I get how hard it is to cut down on airline emissions. But the strict requirements on budget has significantly improved that number over the past few decades. Aircraft engines today are much less polluting than they were 30 or 50 years ago. Perhaps the goals shouldn't be dropped so easily.
What scares me about this is how lightly climate change is taken. "Yeah, I don't think we can do it. So we're going to just stop trying". Do you even realize what sort of trouble the humanity and this planet is in? Especially for a country dominated by its coastline?
Profit this quarter matters more to these people than how many die in the next century.
They’d rather make a dollar today than save a life tomorrow.
If only they valued future lives at a dollar.
Billions are going to die and people are selling out for a few hundred bucks a year.
How much better is biofuel than fossil CO2-wise, if you need to cut down forests for arable land?
A very good question.
It is a very common misconception that trees and plants just always absorb CO2. The Carbon (C) in CO2 does not just disappear when plants produce Oxygen (O2). Plants use it as material to grow themselves and their fruits. Once they are fully grown, they don't really absorb any more. So if you burn a tree in a fireplace and grow a new tree in its place, the new tree will eventually re-capture all the CO2 burning the wood released as it grows. This works even better with fast growing plants used for biofuel. The CO2 released by burning biofuel is re-captured when you grow more plants to make more biofuel.
So chopping down a forest to create fields is bad in the short term since it releases and does not recapture the CO2 from the trees, but is sustainable in the long term since you "recycle" the same Carbon.
Old-growth forest stores more carbon than younger trees, so continually "recycling" fast-growing plants is not superior to letting the forest grow. A combination of syntropic agriculture and forest conservation would probably be more effective.
It is superior if letting the forest grow means using fossil fuels. That was the point of my comment. It releases CO2, but only once and then is sustainable without additional CO2.
Of course, having the forest and e.g. nuclear power would be even better but that does not work very well for mobile applications, such as vehicles.
I don't think it's so easy to say that burning biomass is superior (from a carbon sequestration perspective) to preserving old-growth forest even if that means relying on fossil fuels (e.g. natural gas for heating). I don't know the answer, but considering that burning biomass does not allow that carbon to accumulate in the soil over time as it would in a mature forest, the alternative to burning biomass would need to have very high emissions in order to come out ahead.
Of course I am not advocating for burning fossil fuels; I am only advocating for protection of forests. I don't think that biomass would be a viable fuel for air travel in particular due to the energy density needed, but if so, and if non-combustion energy sources could be used everywhere else, then farming some young trees to continually cut to use for biofuel for air travel wouldn't have so much of an impact if that land would not be forested anyway. Freeing up land currently used by animal agriculture to use it for this purpose would be an improvement, but "chopping down a forest" would be highly questionable.
Do you have any hard numbers comparing the total lifecycle emissions of fuelwood to those of other fuels (coal, gas, jet fuel, whatever), taking into account soil carbon as well? If the carbon emissions argument for protecting forests doesn't make sense, I will stop using it. Deforestation brings plenty of other problems (biodiversity loss, habitat fragmentation, increased run-off and erosion...) that I/anyone could focus on instead.
the alternative to burning biomass would need to have very high emissions in order to come out ahead.
Not really, that's the point. Soil has a max capacity of carbon it will hold. Just like biomass. So even if the fossil fuels release tiny amount of CO2, they release it continually vs deforestation releasing it one time. The only thing that changes is how long it takes for biomass to break even. But after thousands of years, the one time big release will always turn out better than continual small releases.
Of course, avoiding both deforestation and fossil fuels is even better.
I understand what you're getting at, but I don't see it as being so simple.
Fossil fuels are essentially just ancient soil carbon, so in a way, we're talking about the same thing on different time-scales. My point was/is that the combination of deforestation and burning of the cut biomass actually reduces the amount of carbon that can be stored in the soil on a given area of land, not just releasing it once and then recycling it. To capture the same amount of carbon again would require a greater area under management than the area originally cut. On a finite planet, there is a limit to how much this deforestation for biomass production could be scaled up without net-positive emissions. (I'm tired, so this may not be the most articulate.)
The world's forests capture a substantial amount of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans, and extensive reforestation could capture even more. By reducing the carbon capture potential of forests, that's less carbon dioxide absorbed year after year. Over a very long period of time, "releasing it one time" is what burning fossil fuels does: it releases stored carbon once, and then trees and other plants recycle it. Deforestation reduces the recycling.
Even though mature forests can store more total carbon, it seems that young forests, with more small trees, may actually be able to absorb more methane, so there can definitely be some advantage to managing trees for wood production on a short cycle. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so this is one way in which the overall situation is complicated.
Of course, avoiding both deforestation and fossil fuels is even better.
I'm glad that we agree on this point. It doesn't need to be one or the other. The most effective approach to addressing climate change would involve reforestation and eliminating dependence on fossil fuels by developing clean energy technologies.
Ultimately, carbon capture just needs to match carbon emissions (plus a bit extra at first to compensate for current overshoot), and realistically, it will take both reforestation and a reduction in emissions to achieve that. Ending animal agriculture makes the most progress toward both.
Again, the issue is that once you burn fossil fuel, you are not turning it into fossil fuel in any meaningful amount of time.
On the other hand, let's say that a field used for producing plants for biofuel does not capture any carbon at all to simplify. So deforesting an area releases all the carbon a forest held. The difference is that the fossil fuel gives you energy one time, while the field produces it yearly. We need energy yearly. So if you deforest an area for biofuel, you release CO2 from deforestation but all the CO2 released in the future is what was recaptured by the plants. It is one time CO2 release for perpetual energy delivery. If you go with fossil fuels, you will keep burning more and more every year until it is much worse than deforesting an area.
So reforesting can capture CO2 already released, but that only offsets fossil fuels for some period of time. Even if you cover the whole planet in forests, there is a finite amount of fossil fuels you can burn before it is negated. That is why eliminating fossil fuel use, and quickly, is far more important than protecting forests. Once you burn fossil fuel, you can't recapture it into fossil fuel and would have to increase fores area permanently to compensate.
Even if you cover the whole planet in forests, there is a finite amount of fossil fuels you can burn before it is negated.
I think that this is the crux of the matter, and of course you're right. The total amount of carbon stored in fossil fuels is (presumably, without searching for the numbers) much greater than the amount currently stored in living organisms, so there is a finite amount of fossil fuels that can be burnt before the carbon emissions exceed the capacity of forests/vegetation to capture it. Do you know what that "finite amount of fossil fuels" would be? From what I have seen, it is quite large, though humanity is rapidly approaching it. What's needed is for the rate of emissions to be reduced below the rate of capture, and so a reduction in fossil fuel use is urgently needed, but I wouldn't say that completely eliminating fossil fuel use is more important than protecting forests. All that's needed in the long term is for carbon capture to at least equal carbon emissions. In the short term, the planet is already close enough to the "point of no return" that reforestation is necessary in order to bring down levels of carbon dioxide, regardless of how quickly fossil use ceases. It has to be both. Burning fossil fuels is not a sustainable way to meet the energy needs of 8 billion+ humans. Cutting down forests for biofuel is not a sustainable way to meet the energy needs of 8 billion+ humans. Deforestation for biofuel would be sustainable for a much larger population than would burning fossil fuels (due to the extremely slow renewal rate of fossil fuels), but we're past that point. There's not enough land. Either energy consumption needs to drastically decrease, or non-combustion sources of energy are needed.
I get the impression that we are essentially "on the same side" and just quibbling over details. You make an excellent case against fossil fuels! Looking at it in terms of the broader carbon cycle makes the necessity of ending fossil fuel use very obvious even ignoring any concerns about pollution, destructive extraction practices, or other harmful effects.