https://thepointsguy.com/2017/09/american-airlines-amazing-s...
See Fig. 7 in the research paper linked in this article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
See Fig. 1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
That sounds implausible to me. Perhaps by dividing the number of flights by the world population. But I can't conceive more than 800,000,000 different people flying last year
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/07/boeing-ceo-80-percent-of-peo...
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-...
That's a very weird phrasing to use, designed to cause shock and outrage for something that - if I'm deciphering the phrase properly - means "They burnt fuel without paying for the emissions", which as far as I know is something nobody does.
To make matters worse, they don't really cover even that cost, in most (US American) locales.
So much so that there's even a law in the USA designed to prohibit participation in the EU scheme ("European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act of 2011")
This is the obvious solution. Tax carbon heavily and the economy will reward efficiency and non-carbon-generating technologies. Hands off! https://concretecuts.xyz/articles/green-tech-market/
History doesn't agree with your view, if anything it creates a perverse market wherein people who benefit from the status quo pay people who don't in order to skirt their supposed environmental responsibilities and commitments as they continue as they did before. Just look at the Carbon Credit model and the relationship Tesla had with the big auto manufactures [0].
> As a spokesman for Fiat Chrysler said: “Until demand catches up with regulatory requirements, and there is regulatory relief, we will use credits as appropriate.”
I worked for VW during Diesel gate, and I can tell you that this is standard operational procedure for the Industry and what made me quit in utter disgust. It will not change course unless dire, existential consequences are imminent. And it has to be more severe than what Diesel-gate cost VW.
You could argue this gave Tesla a lifeline that it otherwise wouldn't have had during its early years after the original Roadster was released and they were working on the Model S, but those are tertiary effects at best and consequential more than anything.
In short, no, nothing seems to indicate that is what occurs when you allow the State to create such a system as it will always allow for exemptions if their is profit to be made.
Making individual people at these corps responsible for things like Ecocide and have the dire consequences (actual prison time) for the infractions multi national corps currently get out of with political bribes (campaign contributions and fundraising) and lobbying would be a much better start.
Some VW execs got thrown in jail and VAG lost ~$12 billion from diesel gate, and yet the brand gained Market share in certain emerging markets that offset those losses. Incidentally, many other manufactures (Ford, Subaru, Mazda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Mitsubishi, Nissan-Renault, Harley Davidson) were all caught cheating emissions as well and weren't nearly as punished in the US. In fact Nissan was able to purchase Mitsubishi Motors US outright in the midst of the VW fall out with no scandal.
0: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/14/why-greenho...
This saves you the task of deciding who's deserving, but it produces outcomes that sure feel unfair...
Tax some carbon, tax some consumption, harsh penalties for countries that pollute a lot. I think there are many ingredients needed here.
You don't, the entire point is that it naturally gets dealt with (or at least, sufficiently) if you simply internalize the emission cost of inputs. You set the price of emitting a ton of CO2 equivalent during energy or material production at the present bid price of industrial scale rapid removal of a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere with some attractive margin (10% maybe, but that could be set by experts), and then the market can figure it out from there. All energy then becomes net neutral, as well as the vast majority of materials, and it's more straight forward to police (though still real work) since law enforcement just need to focus on a smaller number of central points.
"CO2 emissions" don't just materialize by magic, they're a result of energy/material inputs to a product. Take care of those and there isn't any need at all to care what people do with the product or for how long. There is no stupid, counter productive moralizing required either about what people do with their luxury energy budget. The goal is that the net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere stays static (or at this point, is lowered back to our optimal standard, then kept steady state). That goal is what should be legislated, not how to reach it.
I really can't imagine that most of those frequent fliers are people that take a flight every week to go on a vacation "just because it's cheap" like the article says.
Apparently enough such that flight avoidance due to covid has had a large impact on the management consulting industry:
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/coronavirus-causes-....
"The global management consulting industry is expected to lose around $30 billion of value in 2020, as clients tend to delay projects, decrease scope or cancel them altogether, according to Beroe Inc, a procurement intelligence firm."
I understand the appeal of "We have to do something and this is something so let's do it" but that never works in practice.
what if flying people around in produces 10 Trillion dollars a year in value. That money can be used to build a 1,000 solar farms that will will reduce the amount of CO2 twice as much as just stopping all those flights?
Or what if the politics of stopping people from flying are mind mindbogglingly toxic. They'll vote for and support people who will happily build coal plant upon coal plant just so that they can keep flying. But for that they'd happily pay the taxes and/or pay the capital to build a million wind turbines.
Look, I realize this is just a dumb thread. It won't change a mind one jot but maybe someone here will make an argument that - pro or con - will make the end result come about or not come about a bit faster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle#/media/File:Anthr...
This is the only real answer. There's a hard limitation to how emissions friendly aviation can ever be. The energy density requirements given current technology can only be met with hydrocarbon fuels. High speed trains are infinitely more efficient, and actually would have an outsized effect on emissions given that the type of short haul flights it would replace are the least efficient per mile travelled, since takeoff/climb uses far more fuel than cruise. We'll never be able to replace carbon intensive long haul international flights, but focusing on what can be replaced could go a long way.
When you take in account all the time it takes getting from your place to the airport and back to the hotel there's usually not much of a difference in time in taking the train anyway.
I wouldn't be too optimistic on that. We've already reached a point of massively diminishing returns on fuel efficiency with commercial airliners. Boeing spent billions of dollars and a decade designing the 787 to achieve a fuel efficiency gain of <10% over the 30 year old 777 [0]. The reality is that airliners are just extremely carbon intensive by their nature. And there is almost zero possibility that jet fuel will be replaced by battery or fuel cell technology for a long long time to come.
[0] https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/Transat...
I might actually argue that frequent flyers are flying to hubs and on flights that haven’t been canceled in 2020.
Regardless, you can’t just make assumptions like the one in the article. Flying frequently is not the same as driving frequently. Your car doesn’t take off whether you’re in the car or not, but a plane does.
As for tackling the emissions problem, why can't we introduce an emissions tax on the aviation industry to fund investment into carbon capture technologies to offset emissions? It seems to me the costs of carbon capture could quite easily be passed onto the consumer in this case given I know so many people who buy flights just because they're cheap.
I wouldn't expect 1% of people to produce half of auto emissions. I wouldn't expect 1% of people to consume half of the electricity.
That's that's why I included, "(or some equally small fraction of the population)". We should expect a small percentage in any sample like this to be extreme outliers. We call them "power users" in tech, but the same applies to most activities.
What about all the other pollutants (nox &co) ? Don't forget they're released at very high altitude too, which generates a whole other set of problems than sea level pollution
"Global aviation’s contribution to the climate crisis was growing fast before the Covid-19 pandemic, with emissions jumping by 32% from 2013-18"
Should be:
"Global aviation’s contribution to the climate crisis was growing fast before the Covid-19 pandemic. Aviation's contribution to global CO2 emissions rose from 1.3% to 1.9% from 2013-18"
But the latter doesn't attract clicks so much. Transportation overall accounts for 28% of greenhouse gas emissions [1]. That's the story that matters.
There's certainly a point here about wealthy nations and wealthy people being responsible for a lion's share of the problem, but really, everyone knows that. This article, and indeed the linked paper [2] gloss over the relative size of the aviation problem.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
Aviation is also fairly unique in that we don't know how to make it climate neutral. Even burning synfuel made from renewables won't be enough, because adding emissions higher in the atmosphere has a stronger warming effect. And we just don't know how to make all-electric long distance planes yet.
It has a temporary strong effect, that falls back into the normal one in a couple of decades. What means that synfuel based aviation would have a constant impact on the global temperature, like painting your ceiling black. We can live quite well with that.
I now have close to 100 percent of my meetings online, and for me it has been far more efficient than meeting up physically.
I hated every minute of it, and in some ways I feel like the pandemic saved me from the gluttony of in person meetings.
The pandemic offered many of us an opportunity to use the technology we have and avoid unnecessary travel. Is zoom/g-meet a replacement for in person meetings? No. But is it good enough and worth the savings on time and damage to the environment? Hell yes.
With 6 continental and 2 inter-continental flights a year, I think you're probably in that top 10% most frequent flyers.
This is why it's so important to prompt cultural changes and encourage people to think about their impact beforehand, rather than in a reactionary sense.
The only solutions I've seen are "everyone should travel less" basically making the proposition that poor people don't deserve air travel or making grandiose claims about building huge high speed rail networks. The rail networks bit is ironic since building them wouldn't solve any energy production or distribution carbon emissions and would likely just take money that should be spent on research into promising renewable sources.
Glad to hear you support progressive approaches to addressing climate change.
In truth, we may be also responsible for aviation emissions even if we are not flying; simply by clicking the "Order" buttom on some faraway e-commerce site, or posting something via airmail...
Looks really cool, IMO.
