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FAA Plans to Clean Up the Skies
coondoggie writes "On top of its recently announced plan to reduce flight delays, Federal Aviation Administration officials today launched what they hope will be pan U.S. and European Union joint action plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft. Specifically the group announced the Atlantic Interoperability Initiative to Reduce Emissions or AIRE — the first large-scale environmental plan aimed at uniting aviation players from both sides of the Atlantic."
Happily for us, according to a Canadian climate scientist, based on the sunspot cycles, we're due for global cooling to start in 2020, so I wouldn't sweat it.
So just maybe, if the "models" are accurate with regards to greenhouse gases, if we try really hard to produce more every year, we can reverse part of the eventual global cooling trend. Somehow I doubt that's likely.
However, 15 years from now we'll have the FAA talking about their plan to increase greenhouse gas emissions from planes at the behest of the environmentalists and their allies in big oil who want to regulate people into not using so many alternative energy sources that don't produce enough carbon dioxide.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Stop speculating.m l
The waste per passenger, but most of all the method and place (high in the sky) of combustion ensure that greenhouse effects of aviation fuel are far worse than those of motorcars' combustion engines.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0210/p14s02-sten.ht
If you're planning to travel, want to do it the way that's most environmentally friendly and the consideration whether to drive instead of fly is a realistic option (e.g. both take about a day of travel, no large body of water to cross), then drive.
Great post. If you want to hide your head in the sand, that is. Let me just shatter the myth that you're perpetuating in your first paragraph.
1. The US is by far the biggest polluter per capita.
Compare apples with apples, instead of of apples with oranges, by looking at per capita figures. The CIA World Factbook lists the population of China as 1,321,851,888 (July 2007 est.) and the population of the US as 301,139,947 (July 2007 est.).
You wouldn't compare the carbon dioxide emissions output of the US with that of a tiny nation like Bermuda, so play fair and use the most sensible measure to compare who's contributing how much.
A quick mental calculation will show you that, in carbon dioxide terms alone, the US produces four times as much domestically as China does.
2. China makes goods for the US, not the other way around.
All those goods that China makes that the US consumes (clothing, electronics, etc) have an associated cost in terms of carbon dioxide and other pollution. But, of course, the figures that you've latched onto don't attribute those to the country of consumption, only to the country of origin.
Put simply, when a Chinese factory makes something that an American will buy, it's at least partially (if not fully) pollution caused by the American consumer. So, a large chunk of the pollution caused by China, etc is due to the US (and other consumer nations) as well.
The US has five percent of the world's population. The US consumes roughly 25-30 percent of the world's goods, and hence is responsible for 25-30 percent of the pollution. To sustain everybody on the planet at the current US level of consumption would take five to six Earth's worth of resources and create a similar amount of pollution.
Now do you see why the US plays such a big part in this and should be taking positive, proactive steps to try to address the issues instead of trying to shift the blame to others?
As for your closing complaint that "This is more government micromanagement that will do nothing but further bring us down", well, I could not disagree more. The free market alone will never make the necessary steps to do what's necessary by itself, no matter what you might think. Want an example? Then just look at how car manufacturers fought tooth and nail against mandatory installation of seatbelts in cars. Same shit, different decade, that's all.
Please take your head out of the sand for a minute to think about it.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Fuel should be leaded!
Indeed it should. We'd be a lot better off without the filthy menace of unleaded petrol pumping benzene vapours into the atmosphere. Lead is toxic - massively toxic in certain compounds (lead acetate was what did in the Romans, from making a sweet by boiling wine in lead pots), but practically inert in the form that comes out of petrol engine exhausts. Furthermore, the lead carbonate that you get mostly settles out on the first 18" or so of exhaust pipe.
By comparison, unleaded petrol uses benzene instead of tetraethyl lead as an anti-knock agent, which is highly toxic and carcinogenic. Then on top of that we've got the eco-disaster that is catalytic converters, belching out dense clouds of hydrogen sulphide unless they're run at extremely high exhaust gas temperatures - which produces massive amounts of nitrogen oxides. By a nasty little quirk, catalytic converters make car exhaust *more* polluting when driven at low speeds (such as in towns, where they'd be most useful) than when driven at motorway speeds.