it’s the most expensive to build/operate and much safer than typically perceived. Accidents are spectacular and rare.
But it’s one of the worst polluters
Id say cars are even greater polluter per km per passenger.
The data disagrees.
https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
It turns out that overcoming gravity is a bitch
Thanks, I stand corrected, however it does not apply for short haul flights (154g)
If travelling domestically, driving – even if it’s alone – is usually better than flying;
However on the other hand, most popular European airline boasts much lower numbers. I wonder how they achieved this figure.
Ryanair already has the lowest CO2 emissions per passenger/km of any major airline in Europe (66g) and by switching to Ryanair, passengers can now further reduce their CO2 emissions.
It really isn’t. More Kerosene is burnt in lamps and cook stoves in rural Africa and Asia than in the global aviation industry. Moreover, airlines have a capitalistic incentive to reduce carbon emissions already, since fuel is one of the largest costs they bare and the only one easily reducable.
Aviation is a tiny fraction of global travel emissions. It’s mostly road vehicles. Aviation is 11% of transportation which is 30% of global emissions. It’s a tiny fraction, considered.
I think that might be because there’s a lot of lamps and stoves in Africa and Asia, rather than anything to do with aviation
Yeah but it illustrates that while the airline industry is held up to a lot of scrutiny for carbon emissions they are much less yet equally as polluting sectors that are much simpler to affect change that probably should get more attention.
If done wrong? Then yes.
Kinda like nuclear is one of the most clean power sources we have, until you put the raw waste into nothing but iron barrels and store them in a salt mine, and then wonder why the underground is becoming radioactive.
Planes can be clean, it’s just a question of using synthesized fuel (edit: as in artificially created fuels, hydrogen-mixes, kerosene replacements, the stuff they use for rocket propellant, that kind of fuels), and not refined fuel (edit: from oil). Of course there are some other problems associated with jet planes, but fuel shouldn’t necessarily be one.
Do you have any kind of source for your claim that synthesised aviation fuel doesn’t pollute? That’s certainly a new one on me, especially considering the companies that sell it don’t even make that claim themselves.
Less polluting /= not polluting.
My claim is that fuel can be done right (read “clean”, more on that later), just how nuclear power can be done right. Will it be done right? Probably not.
Also, clean does not mean no pollution, at least not in our world. Solar cells pollute, windmills pollute. Green energy in general pollutes quite a lot when compared to “no pollution at all”.
No pollution seems unrealistic with current technologies and politics, so best we can do is attempt and limit our pollution to technologies which pollute less, or at least have the possibility of polluting less.
Also, how did natural gas become a clean, green source of energy? (that’s a rethoric question, I know why, i just think it’s stupid.)
Synt fuel is still loads of co2 in the atmosphere, and just because you bought a forest it doesn’t remove it from the atmosphere. Would you talk about hydrogen planes then I’d agree with you, but synth fuel? That’s the biggest bullshit of the air industry.
As far as I understand, the idea behind synthesized fuel is to bind CO2 to create the fuel, which theoretically should make it net neutral, if one ignores power consumption and chemical usage, as well as the CO2 probably not being sourced from the atmosphere.
In other words, the technology should be sound enough, but it will most likely not be used for good, as per my first post.
Then we come to the other issues I mentioned. The fuel should theoretically be CO2 neutral, but the plane does not fly where the factory is located. It flies some ~10km above surface, which means that we are pumping CO2 into the middle layers of the troposphere, which probably is bad idea.
Edit: i realize that I formulated myself in a rather unlucky way in the first comment, whelp.
With the climate change we need more than net neutral. Net neutral is plain bullshit, greenwashing for those who don’t want to see the reality of the problem. We need to fully stop ejecting co2 in the atmosphere, full stop.
Hydrogen engines are much more promising. They could be ready by 2035.
Do you have any sources on that? I’d love to know the per-passenger, per-distance exhaust output of the various airplane classes. A packed trans-Atlantic flight is probably not as damaging as the same voyage on a ship that burns the worst dogshit-grade bunker oil, but I seriously doubt that regional flights, regardless of fuel, could reach anywhere hear the exhaust- and fuel-efficiency of high speed trains.
If you packed that ship too, it would easily beat the flight. A ship can just pack on orders of magnitude more passengers.
Except that’s not how its actually dealt with and we can actually reduce the waste by 90+% if we use fast reactors.
*Rail travel
Air is generally cheaper than rail for the cheapest ticket, but more polluting and for journeys under around 300 miles slower, if you’re flying from city centre airports like Billy Bishop or London City, or 500 miles if you’re flying from larger out of city airports. Additionally it’s even safer than flying and you can take way more luggage and bikes.
People don’t tend to have a fear of train travel though, it’s just that NIMBYs, those who would rather pour money into a pit than make investments and corrupt politicians (those last two often being the same people) who tend to dislike it.
They don’t fear safety of rail, but they do have rail related fears. They fear that rail is too slow and expensive to build and to use. They fear it’s worse for the environment thanks to several major ecological disasters caused by bad rail stewardship (and I suppose they do fear safety there too). They fear it’s just too inconvenient for practical use.
I’m a huge rail supporter but we don’t do it any favors by not acknowledging the reality of how fucked it is in some major markets. It’s for a long time been treated by Americans as the inconvenient thing we used before airplanes and cars that only makes sense in New York, DC, and Chicago. As well as the “what if the greyhound was also unaffordable and didn’t go where you want” option for cross continental travel. Europe seems to have treated it as the option for staying in your country and getting around your city.
With neither a cross Schengen heavily subsidized and standardized system that is designed to outcompete air travel or a massive change in how amtrack is treated and going from seeing it as a corporation owned by the American people that needs to support itself to a public resource that is supposed to take a loss when it needs to akin to how the post office used to be treated then rail isn’t going to beat air. California and France can’t do this alone
I see a difference regarding the effects if something does go wrong. A plane crash is no Fukushima.
sure, a plane crash typically kills everyone aboard. The explosion and resulting leak at Fukushima killed no one.
they’re obviously not exactly the same, but similar in certain respects
Didn’t know that, but you are right, nobody actually died directly from radiation related causes at Fukushima. However, deaths from circumstances relating to the evacuation of the area are estimated to be in the thousands (source: wikipedia). I find that that somewhat illustrates the extent to which human lives have been impacted. While a plane crash is a personal tragedy for a number of people and relatives, a nuclear accident feels more like a collective catastrophe.
It’s not clear to me that these deaths from evacuation are from the explosion at the plant and resulting leak or the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan (mag 9.0) and resulting tsunami. it’s really hard to pin a definitive reason onto these fatalities.
Fair point. Nuclear plants are fairly safe and historically have a low death toll, I agree. Leaves the radioactive waste to deal with.
