Airbus and Climate Change (opens in new tab)

Everything is only a small amount of the problem:

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

That's why putting a price on emissions helps.

> Those of you who are against air travel for climate reasons, can you share a source that has convinced you that it is a real problem?

1. As others have said: Many things contribute some non-trivial percentage to climate change. And anything that is above 1% on a global scale is non-trivial.

2. Personal carbon budgets are very quickly exhausted by flying

3. You have to start somewhere to avoid emissions. Some things are harder to avoid than others. I am convinced that 99% of flights are not needed to maintain a good standard of living. It is a low-hanging fruit that we need to pick. The same thing applies to cruise ships.

By official stats, aviation is something like 3% of global emissions. Global emissions seem wildly underestimated while aviation emissions are pretty hard to obfuscate.

I also couldn't believe when I found out a Learjet 7 seater might get 4MPG while an average US-sized SUV pulls about 12mpg. I thought it would be an order-of-magnitude or two different, not a factor of 3. Trucks are even closer. Americans drive trucks that never go off road or haul or tow.

And I think industry is far worse than individuals about emissions.

Overall, would I say planes are good for the world? No, not really. But I don't think they're anywhere near the first or most valuable place to focus efforts on

Not claiming I am against air travel, but the point often made is that the growth rate of aviation means that it will consume ever higher slices of the “carbon budget”.

> His [Dr Joeri Rogelj] calculations suggest aviation emissions between 2015 to 2050 will consume 27% of the remaining carbon budget to have a decent chance of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5C above preindustrial levels.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/aviation-consume-quarter-carbon-...

> Those of you who are against air travel for climate reasons, can you share a source that has convinced you that it is a real problem?

No, because it is obvious that flying less is better for the planet. Replace “flying” with “eating meat”, “driving”, etc.

The problem is that all the research in the world won’t get people to change their behavior. The incentives are too strong (it’s fun to go on vacation, meat tastes good, I can make money by selling cars) and the disincentives are too weak (some fish I’ve never seen goes extinct, 50 years from now Miami will be fucked, some people halfway around the world will die, etc.).

Personal emissions are framed as a moral issue by environmental activists. Those allied with the activists are perceived to be outsized users of air travel. And most air travel is non-essential.

Amongst users of air travel, it is a significant source of emissions. A single round-trip across an ocean is on the same magnitude as driving emissions for the average american.

The hypocrisy is obvious. Morality and personal responsibility are a terrible foundation for environmentalism.

Both things are bad. Reducing one doesn’t mean you can’t reduce the other and vice versa. We will need to curtain emissions in all sectors to avoid more warming.

Also electric cars are coming but electric passenger and cargo planes are very far away or even impossible due to the physics of battery power density.

https://tinyurl.com/4uf7v3wm

All sources of emission are real problems, because the consequences of emissions are catastrophic. The issue is to prioritize which ones to work on first. Flying is nice, but less necessary than many other human activities. Living at a continental or planetary scale is completely unnecessary.

I'm not against air travel for climate reasons, so I can only venture a guess that this is the result of the same psychological mechanism that rivets people attention to air crashes and terrorism, not to car deaths and heart attacks: saliency of former and familiarity of latter.

I tend to agree. Air travel contributes around 4% to increased global warming. That is substantial for a single industry. That said, of all industries, it feels like the practical difficulties of reducing that footprint are enormously more difficult than other industries. Air travel is just enormously energy intensive and has unique difficulties in switching to carbon-free energy that other industries do not.

I think some regulations are great, like the prohibition against short haul flights in France that the article mentions. But I think overall efforts to reduce global warming should be targeted in ways that give the "biggest bang for the buck", and aviation-specific changes ain't it.

The issues with aviation are two-fold: First, the amounts of emissions are very high relative to total passenger throughput. Second, the issue is very difficult to address meaningfully, because heavier-than-air aircraft have inherently high energy requirements that must be fulfilled by very dense, high-quality fuel, which we have no way to sustainably produce in sufficient quantities.

This video series explains the issues well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k50qD40p3WU&list=PL_AaC0duf8...

Aviation currently represents ~2% of total emissions according to our world in data. So yeah, not that much.

On the long tun though, we have to reach net zero. And if possible even go into negative carbon emissions. 2% isn't much but there are probably activities much more critical than flying which we could use our carbon offset capabilities.

My biggest concern with aviation today are people flying private. It is symbolic but I don't think we will be able to ask people to sacrifice some of their comfort if the wealthiest people are not in the same boat.

> I don’t see why we should be discouraging commercial air travel while allowing individual automobiles to emit so much.

How fortunate that nobody is actually suggesting that.

Do you happen to fly a lot, and thereby might have a personal reason to not want flying to be as bad as reported?

Car carbon emission are usually around the level of aviation emissions with typical occupancy levels [1]. But Air travel encourages flying much larger distances as opposed to e.g. driving. Without air travel, no sane person would travel to e.g. Asia from Europe a few times per year. Flights over 4000km are 6% of flights but around 52% of emission in europe [1]. Few people will drive 4000km with a car.

In my opinion, simply comparing the averages is also not useful. I expect that car occupancy will be higher for distances where flying becomes reasonable, reducing the average emission levels. For example vacation travel most often happens in a group not alone. I also think that the economic benefit of car emissions is higher than plane emissions.

Emissions of air travel are commonly often given as CO2 Emissions (around 2% of emissions worldwide), while the complete warming effects are likely around 4% of warming worldwide [2].

Air travel is very unevenly distributed, with most of the population never flying as opposed to e.g. cars (in germany 2/3 of people fly less than once per year with half of them never flying [3], 12% of adults in the US account for 68% for flights takes [5]. In general look at [6] figure 4). Thus a small portion of the population benefits from air travel as opposed to e.g. car travel.

The increase in flying for developed countries and the further economic growth in developing countries means that without any intervention flying is expected to increase a lot in the next decades and threathen the paris goal.

It's very unlikely that air travel can meaningfully decarbonise in the next decades as opposed to car travel where a broad adoption of electric vehicles is expected in the next decade. The adoption of SAF has been pretty much non-existent up 'till now, contrary to industry promises (and fraught with issues both financial and energy usage) and battery-based solutions are only an option for ultra-short distance flights. Hydrogen based solutions are also very much in the early development phase and IMHO also unlikely to succeed.

Long-distance air travel is also without real alternative and can't be rolled back. For example, as air travel gets adopted more broadly, more people live in other countries a longer distance away and regularly visit their families at home. Trying to revert this is basically impossible (people can't see friends and family anymore), so higher adoption is hard to revert. If the population broadly becomes used to international vacations, reducing them in a large way also becomes unpopular. This is continually increases, so social solutions continually get harder.

Thus we expect to increase flights (but still with uneven distribution), have little hope for technical solutions for eliminating emissions in the next decades and social solutions will get harder as time goes on.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_aviat... [3]: https://www.eurocontrol.int/sites/default/files/2021-02/euro... [4]: http://www.mobilitaet-in-deutschland.de/pdf/MiD2017_Tabellen... page 74 [5]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802... [6]: https://theicct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/global-aviati...

The issue with aviation should not be framed by its share in total carbon emissions, which appears to be not that much. It's the fact that, in a world where the individual target of CO2 emissions is 2T, there is no room for aviation. Same thing for eating meat more than once a week, or using a personal car.

To evaluate your individual CO2 emissions, you can use this simulator: https://nosgestesclimat.fr

Air travel is a way for an individual to blow through a significant chunk of their individual annual carbon budget in a couple of hours - and it’s emitted high in the atmosphere where the warning effect is amplified. Globally it doesn’t look so bad because overall, few people use air planes. Among those who use air planes, it looks pretty bad.

Also consider that those who advocate against excessive air travel also argue for the use of public transportation, walking and bicycling as a means to replace car travel. For long distance travel, the alternatives aren’t so obvious, that’s why aviation is such a concern.

What's helped me is changing my opinion about what I, my kids and the rest of humanity deserve in the grand scheme of things. I used to think we deserve to live in comfort and safety, with the hope of reaching an old age. I thought technology, knowledge and progress where the reason for all that luxury. Now I believe it's got more to do with a sudden rise in available energy. The trend is going down. Life is becoming more tragic again. I won't lie to my children and let them believe war happens to others. I know the world has never been as safe and rich as it's been recently. But I think the peak is around in my part of the world, and the environmental crisis is going to cause many peaks everywhere.

I often wonder about refugee camps and wonder how I'd fare in one of them. Is it possible to organise theater courses? How difficult is it to find a space to meditate? Would people still care to have intellectual discussions?

A difficult life is still one worth living.

For you and others reading this, here's some ways to put your skills to work on solutions:

https://workonclimate.org/

https://www.mcjcollective.com/

https://bootup.airminers.org/

Fear is the problem, not the solution. I recently talked to a friend and he‘s so much in fear that he just gave up on all the good ways to improve the situation.

These aircrafts are going to be flying for 30 years, continuing to add to emissions. We have a lot of passenger planes from the 1980s.

Producing as many as we possibly can right now is a step in the wrong direction.

They're a killing company, obviously they are going to kill as many people as possible. What else are they going to do? Killing less people is nice and dandy, but you need money to do so and that comes from sales.

Even Airbus themselves have powerpoint slides about how they are going to do hydrogen planes etc.

Please don't be with a limited imagination.

its the single most impactful marginal decision a person can make, thank you.

Thank you! I found that hard to dig up even on the linked page.