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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“We’re not gonna reach it in time. Guess we’ll just die.”
Damn NZ what happened, you used to be cool.
They too suffered from increased anger from the right wing, so when Jacinda resigned, they elected a right-wing government.
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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.
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You can always detail something and say it's only x percent. Every percent counts, and we have to start with the ones that are not vital. Planes for vacations or luxury mangoes are very far from being vital.
The way I see it, you’re taking away things people enjoy for a minuscule impact on climate. This will just piss people off for little benefit, and it’s not how you get people on board with the big changes we need to address the worsening climate. It’s like having to use shitty straws when industry is pumping gigatons of shit into the atmosphere. I believe the money pressure on airlines to use more efficient engines is actually doing a decent job at incentivizing efficiency in the air sector; it’s elsewhere that needs to be addressed harshly.
If externalities were actually enforced on the air sector, it would be completely replaced with high speed rail except for travel across the ocean, and even then shipping would become more prominent. The problem of giving free passes is you are artificially strangling the alternatives. It becomes much more cost effective to build high speed electric rail when your only option for jet fuel is biodiesel or paying the real costs of climate impact.
for a minuscule impact on climate.
who defines what is miniscule here? what if an oil baron deems 20% to be miniscule? do we all go swimming in their blackened beaches?
how is 2% miniscule? and who says that emission reduction exercises have to stop at 2%?
it's sometime very easy to minimise the seriousness of something with the clever use of generic statements. there are enough spin doctors already trying to pull the wool over our eyes--we don't need to help them by also shooting ourselves in the foot.
Right, it's a lot better to give somebody a better alternative first if you want the public on board. Build up public transit, build up regional and high speed rail and leave planes for long distances that are unfortunately suited for trains and cars (e.g. international, cross-continental, etc.)
It is not taking away vacations or delicious fruits, there are many lower impact alternatives for vacations and food, you just have to get out of the habits and trends, there are great things to discovers everywhere.
Also, I don't advocate for prohibition but rather for reduction proportional to footprint. Your dream is to take the plane to go to another continent? Do it, but maybe once every 5 years instead of every year, and switch to train and discovery of your region with hiking for the other years.
If we don't start taking away things that people enjoy then in a hundred years it won't be an issue anymore 👍
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Almost every emissions issue is a small part of the whole
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And before someone comments about the ultra rich and their private planes, their emissions is basically nothing compared to the rest of air traffic.
Yes but it's a hugely disproportionate amount for one person, how do people not get this?!
Using the same logic, i shouldn't do anything about climate change myself, because everything I can personally do is basically nothing.
I'm not saying it's not ridiculous for a single person, but even if they all started to take regular flights the issue would be pretty much the same, air travel in general is problematic, it's everyone's responsibility in this case. You see people complaining about emissions but they have travelled to 30 countries so far or they order shit from Amazon twice a week instead of buying locally or they decided to study 3000km from their home "to experience something new" but they come back any chance they get.
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2044: We cannot meet the 2050 climate target. There won't be enough jet fuel. We can't do much for the climate at this point anyway. So who wants to fly with us? We have air conditioned cabins. Live the cool life. Escape the heat!
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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.
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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.
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I've been assuming all climate goals are a joke. It's a way of saying "look we care!" without actually having to do anything
We're going to grow up our carbon emissions this year and the next one too, have no actual plans after that, but don't need to worry, by 2050 We're going to cut emissions by half.
Industry self-regulation, especially with regard to climate, is a joke. We either start fixing the system, or we'll burn.
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NZ is a hard ask for this. They are an Archipelago and far from the rest of the world, of course their airlines can't live up to this. Maybe a small landlocked country with access to trains like Switzerland in Europe could do it, I would not have expected that of NZ.
The first of many, I presume. Any decision with a long term goal of >10y is pretty much null and void since it can be altered at any time.
Yep. Any promised future targets are just marketing hype.
Then: "Eco-friendly is really trending now, we'll base our image around that"
Now: "It's more profitable to drop the eco targets, so were dropping them"
It needs long term planning to make any change. So the key difference is between populist rhetoric and action, even if that action doesn't bare fruit immediately.
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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.
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