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Aircraft Responsible For 2.5% of Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions
jIyajbe writes: Christie Aschwanden of FiveThirtyEight.com reports that the world's aircraft are responsible for roughly 2.5% of global carbon dioxide emissions. The industry as a whole puts out more CO2 than most countries, and emissions are expected to grow significantly over the next few decades. She writes, "Planes don't just release carbon dioxide, they also emit nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides and black carbon, as well as water vapor that can form heat-trapping clouds... These emissions take place in the upper troposphere, where their effects are magnified. When this so-called radiative forcing effect is taken into account, aviation emissions produce about 2.7 times the warming effects of CO2 alone." A related article breaks down how much each airline pollutes, relative to the others. Alaska, Spirit, and Frontier are tied for the highest fuel efficiency score, while American beats out Allegiant Air and Sun Country for the lowest spot.
How much greenhouse gas would be emitted if everybody drove their car, or took a boat vs. flying? Me thinks much more.
Most people who take planes aren't going to take buses either. The main advantage is the speed.
The cool thing about economics, however, is that there is enormous economic demand to do so. This means if we can put an emissions tax on airlines, there is an incredible incentive to make technological advances that significantly decrease emissions. When that happens, we will still be able to meet demand for relatively low cost.
I agree with the idea, but it's not a "simple fact"; coming to that conclusion requires a long argument involving a lot of scientific reasoning, experience, the particulars of our status quo of technology, population, and environmental inputs, and a certain (if reasonable) valuation of the potential trade-offs.
Proper environmentalism isn't "simple facts" - because it's not a religion of Earth purity. It's about legitimately complicated choices and consequences, and evaluating those choices over a longer term.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Figure it that way (even with the multiplier for altitude effects). Then get back to me.
Atmosfair, a German organization that sells "offsets"
I thought I disabled ads.
P.S. In my day, we called them indulgences, not offsets.
Have gnu, will travel.
Volcanoes produce less than 1% of the net CO2 emissions. Breathing produces no net CO2, since the carbon was taken out of the atmosphere in the last couple of years.
Aviation does cause way too much pollution as well as attacking all of our immune systems due to the ability to transport bacteria and virii all over the world at high speeds. Prior to avaiation germs were far more localized and therfore people did not have to fight off the large numbers of attacks that they now must do. Shipping as well as cruise ships also are major polluters and also transport diseases and even invasive wild life species and tragedies like oil spills. It may be time to halt aviation as well as commercial shipping of all kinds.
Let's have a conference about how to address this issue and fly in all the delegates. And their entourages. Don't forget them limos.
If AA, one of the largest airlines with one of the worst scores could achieve the number that Spirit (one of the smallest airlines with the best numbers) could, perhaps 2.5% of global emissions could become 2.25% or 2%.
If a half percent of all global CO emissions could be eliminated, that'd be noteworthy, and a good start.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... .2 kg ppm cars .3 kg ppm
planes about
However its a lot easier to rack up miles in an airplane.
Per passenger mile isn't really fair either. Every few years, I fly a few thousand miles for vacation. If flying was not an option, I'd never consider driving a few thousand miles. Instead, I'd find a closer destination.
Breathing produces no net CO2, ...
It does, however, cause death -- 100% of all dead people were habitual breathers.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So having read the articles, a couple things are clear:
1. Their comparison metric includes "flight frequency per unit of fuel burned", which I think causes their comparison to be backwards. Modern jet engines are most efficient at high altitude and cruising speed, lowest efficiency at low altitude and low speed. Maximum thrust (fuel burn) occurs on takeoff, so more flights=more takeoffs=more fuel burned.
The list favors airlines with short hops and appears to penalize long-haul airlines. Long haul airlines are likely more efficient in terms of passenger-mile, both due to intrinsically more efficient airplanes (per passenger mile) and more time spent at max efficiency service.
2. The article showing the 2.5% emissions compares an airplane to a car getting 44mpg. The airplane is a little better than the 44mpg auto traveling 7500 miles. Considering most sedans are at 30mpg or less in the USA, and that a family traveling 7500 miles by auto is more likely using a van or SUV for the space to carry luggage, the airplane is a far better choice.
The simple fact is Globalism is bad for the globe.
In the end it really does not matter what you are moving, the people, the goods, or both. It does not much matter how you are moving it, planes, trains, autos, freighters, or sail boats.
Fundamentally transportation is overhead. If your goal is to maximize the sustainable population (and I am not sure that actually is noble pursuit) than the solution will always be to find ways people can get things they need without having to move, and created out of local resources. Which does not mean you start growing rice in the desert, it means your find a substitute for rice that can be produced efficiently locally.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
No it isn't. Flying is probably among the most carbon intensive thing you could possible do. I have heard that from multiple sources.
this ( I don't how great a source it is), says
"Flying from San Francisco to Boston, for example, would generate some 1,300 kilograms of greenhouse gases per passenger each way, while driving would account for only 930 kilograms per vehicle.
That is comparing a flight on airline to a passenger car. My guess can get the per person carbon down much lower than that if you use loaded buses.
The fact is all the pols screaming for us all to slit our throats to cut carbon while they jet all over the place for this summit and that, are the worst hypocrites of them all. If they really gave a damn they'd just have conference call.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Today's newest, most fuel-efficient jetliners achieve about 100 passenger-miles per gallon, while electric bullet trains run at the equivalent of 300-500 passenger-miles per gallon. So air travel has a long way to go before it's as fuel-efficient as ground transportation.
Also, bullet trains are faster, curb-to-curb, for distances up to about 400-500 miles. And you can add intermediate stops at a cost of only a few minutes each.
So there's great potential to reduce air travel at no cost to our standard of living.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
In our efforts to decarbonize our society, aircraft should be the last to go. There's no renewable technology that's likely to match what a passenger jet can do (try to design a battery-powered Airbus. You won't get far.) Also, the amount of carbon dioxide they emit is pretty minor, relatively speaking. I'm a pretty big global warming doomsayer, but even I want to live in a world where I can fly to the other side of the planet in 24 hours if I really have to.
I want nerd news back.
Okay. It's Friday afternoon, you still don't have a date, and knowing the names and histories of all of the Transformers doesn't seem to be helping with that.
From some website:
A plane like a Boeing 747 uses approximately 1 gallon of fuel (about 4 liters) every second. Over the course of a 10-hour flight, it might burn 36,000 gallons (150,000 liters). According to Boeing's Web site, the 747 burns approximately 5 gallons of fuel per mile (12 liters per kilometer).
This sounds like a tremendously poor miles-per-gallon rating! But consider that a 747 can carry as many as 568 people. Let's call it 500 people to take into account the fact that not all seats on most flights are occupied. A 747 is transporting 500 people 1 mile using 5 gallons of fuel. That means the plane is burning 0.01 gallons per person per mile. In other words, the plane is getting 100 miles per gallon per person! The typical car gets about 25 miles per gallon, so the 747 is much better than a car carrying one person, and compares favorably even if there are four people in the car. Not bad when you consider that the 747 is flying at 550 miles per hour (900 km/h)!
Overstate much?
I agree with your sentiments and some of your points, but the above is preposterous. You really think if there were no security at airports we wouldn't have more shit go down on planes?
I honestly doubt we would. Not much shit goes down on busses or trains and they have a lower cost of entry (allowing the riffraff onboard).
But he didn't suggest getting rid of airport security. He suggested getting rid of the TSA and going back to the airport security we had before: walk-though metal detectors and luggage x-ray machines. Any shit that would go down on planes would likely be caused by hotheads with guns or knives (even though shit rarely went down on planes before they had any security at all) and the metal detectors would catch those.
You're buying into the FUD. The threat is enormously overstated.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
It all depends on the problem you're trying to solve. You're right- industries would be disrupted. It is an unfortunate side-effect of any industry moving in any direction.
It is my belief that the government has the right to impose taxes to compensate for negative externalities. Pollution and emissions are prime examples of this.
I strongly agree with Milton Friedman on this issue. Primarily, that it isn't simple or easy to solve, but also that when the government intervenes it shouldn't be through regulation or standards, it should be through a straightforward tax to pay for the costs. That's why if you had an emissions tax it would have to follow a number of basic guidelines:
1. It cannot be transferable or creditable. The entity is taxed only for its emissions, and only based upon the quantity of emissions.
2. It must be used for one of two purposes: either mechanisms to clean up the pollution and emissions, or research into more efficient and cleaner sources of energy.
3. The tax should slightly outweigh the cost for companies to reduce their emissions themselves. When a CFO looks at a balance sheet, he should see he can either fork out $50,000 for a much better engine or $51,000 for taxes on the emissions from the worse engine.
But then where would you get your red herrings from?
1) Europe alone produces 10x CO2 emissions/year than all volcanic activity on the earth combined. Europe is only the 3rd biggest emitter behind China and the US
2) Volcanos are part of a balanced system. Their relatively constant CO2 contribution over the last few million years is easily handled by the earth's natural CO2 sinks
3) The CO2 you exhale was originally captured out of the atmosphere by plants, who will again capture what you're exhaling now (see: balanced system)
Side note: All the coal we are mining now is coming from 50 Million Years worth of carbon sequestration from a time when trees had evolved but no species had yet been able to digest them (wiki: Carboniferous). If nothing changes we can probably burn through all of that in a few centuries. You really think reversing a natural process at a rate 100,000 times faster isn't cause for concern?
Yet these alternatives produce much more CO2 to get from certain point A to B ... Imagine 200 cars driving from Finland to Sweden + requiring 20 hour boat trip too with 200 cars loaded... that, compared to 55min hop flight which also carries a lot fo cargo.
Flying is, for most common routes, VERY efficient after you also consider how much cargo the planes carry..
I dont have to imagine it, the WSJ already released the figures. The most fuel efficient airline got around 75 passenger miles per gallon of fuel, so if you put 2 people in a Prius, or 4 in an SUV, they'll get better gas mileage without all of the high-altitude effects. Fill the trunk and unused passenger space with Cargo, and that takes care of the cargo. Replace those 200 cars with a few buses and cargo trucks and the balance tips even further toward ground travel.
http://www.wsj.com/news/articl...
Jet engines are quite fuel efficient, but the air resistance at 500mph coupled with the need to provide enough lift to keep the plane in the air puts airplane travel at a big disadvantage for fuel efficiency.
Please explain how I take a train, bus, or car from Seattle to London
Please explain why you really need to. Let me guess : to attend a conference on organising conferences? A conference on designing aircraft for taking people to conferences on designing aircraft? A conference on marketing holiday flights?
In my work I see others who make careers out of travelling to meetings all over the place, then writing reports on the meetings they had. No-one ever reads the reports. It is all bullshit.
There are a lot of industrial processes that generate *a lot* of CO2. A quick check on Wikipedia indicates that 5% of man made CO2 is from the manufacture and use of concrete. Steel production is another big one.
Industrial processes are something we can improve without unbearable cost increases in the foreseeable future.
In the transportation sector, marine shipping accounts for 14% of man made CO2 and mostly through the combustion of the dirtiest bunker fuel. Nuclear powered ships are an obvious solution.
Its hard to imagine any technology that we can realistically apply in the next decade to reduce CO2 from aircraft in any meaningful amounts. Why bother with aircraft when there is so much other obvious low hanging fruit?
Greed is the root of all evil.
I don't how great a source it is
Apparently not a very good one. Google maps says that the optimal driving distance from SF to BOS is about 3000 miles, which, on a 30mpg car, results in 100 gallons of fuel burn. Gasoline is typically around 0.75kg/L, so that comes to 284kg of fuel. Unless your vehicle manages to break the laws of physics somehow, you're never going to emit 930 kg of just greenhouse gases per vehicle. Now the same trip using a plane is about 2700 miles (from a real flight plan). A typical Airbus A320 or Boeing 737 comes to about 0.03L/km/seat, and given that Jet-A is typically around 0.82kg/L, this comes to ~100kg per seat.
So it really comes down to occupancy. A nearly fully-booked plane wins over a single-occupancy car hands down easily. The break even point is at about 2-3 passengers per car, so a car can be more efficient, assuming you car pool. One thing frequently forgotten in these comparisons, though, is the cost of time. The flight is 6 hours. The drive is 4 days of non-stop driving. In any case, just wanted to let your know that the source you cited is quite off.
Southwest only has 737s.
Quite true. However, I should point out that the 737 has a large number of models and available engines. The 737-200 has passenger configurations of 110-120 people and a range of 2600 nautical miles, while the 737-900ER has seating for 180-205 people, and a range of 3200 nautical miles. Although the 737 is conceived as a medium range jet, some models are able to be used on mainland to Hawaii trips. Some are approved for ETOPS ( Extended range Twin Operations), joining the ranks of larger aircraft, such as the 757, 767, and 777. The largest capacity 737s actually exceed the passenger capacity of some of the 757-200 configurations.
Southwest used to use 737-200s, but now the fleet consists of 737-300s, 500s, 700s and 800s. Note that these are series numbers and the model numbers are even broken down further within these numbers. For example, some of the 737-300s consist of 737-3Q8s, -3K2s,-3H4(WL)s and about 10 other designations. WL stands for winglet. There are quote a few unique models that they fly. I could add them up, but it looks like 50+. plainspotters.net is a good source of information.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The fuel economy might be comparable, but we are talking about emissions, not fuel economy. Cars have catalytic converters that scrub all kinds of nasty stuff, stuff worse than CO2, from the emissions. Jets have no such thing, the fuel is combusted in open air, and all the emissions are propelled out of the back, no filtration.
Additionally, as mentioned in these Slashdot comments, the pollutants are more damaging when released at 35,000 feet than at ground level.
Oh cool, good luck getting the rich to drop their private planes.
Oh wait, you mean poor people should stop binge flying.
LMAFO.
Why are we obsessing over an industry
Because TFA is shilling for outfits selling "offsets". The aviation industry has money. Al Gore Inc wants a cut. But the only way to create demand is by generating guilt.
Have gnu, will travel.
Bingo.
Nitpicking over aviation CO2 is like arguing over US budget balancing but not touching the military, Medicare/aid, and SS.
There are already a lot of projects to try to improve efficiency of ships, including things like high-altitude kites delivering torque directly to the impellers. The motivation isn't environmental (although that gives good PR), it's that oil is expensive and lowering costs increases profits. If you can reduce the amount of oil a ship of a particular size has to carry, then that provides more cargo space, which is even better.
The problem in both cases is the capital investment. Ships and planes are both very expensive and have long service lives to make up for it. If you come up with a more power efficient mobile phone CPU (for example), then five years later you've replaced most of the old models with the new. Boats and planes stay in service for 20-30 years (or more). No one is going to throw away an existing fleet for one that's 20-30% cheaper to operate. You need to focus on things that can be retrofitted to existing craft.
Airlines are relatively good in one regard: their margins are razor thin. For Boeing, one of their more recent refinements to a popular series gave 1% improvements in fuel economy. That was enough of an improvement to be worth putting in the advertising material. When your profit margin is 1-2%, a 1% reduction in costs can double your profit.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The simple fact is Globalism is bad for the globe.
It's amazing what bullshit is being spun as fact these days. Globalism, which really is global trade, has improved the lot of humanity collectively (though at the expense of some dinosaurs in the developed world). Rich people pollute less than poor people. Rich people have less kids than poor people. True story.
For example, take a gander at the first chart in this link. It shows a 60+% increase in global median wages over the period of 1988-2008, adjusted for inflation, and a substantial increase in wages for people between the 10% and 75% income brackets (at least 30% increase). That is the power of global trade.
And to repeat what I noted before, those wealthier people will care more about the environment, pollute less, and have less children (greatly reducing the dominant over-population problem) than if there wasn't global trade.
Fundamentally transportation is overhead. If your goal is to maximize the sustainable population (and I am not sure that actually is noble pursuit) than the solution will always be to find ways people can get things they need without having to move, and created out of local resources.
No. Learn about comparative advantage some day. There are advantages to having other people do some of the things you could do less effectively yourself (even if, in a context vacuum you could technically do the task better). These often translate into environmental benefits because you spend less resources and generate less pollution doing stuff.
Globalism hasn't worked out so well for the U.S. Corporations have transferred a lot of skilled manufacturing jobs to low wage countries with fewer pollution controls and then ship finished goods back to the U.S. (creating more pollution). The result has been that the well paying manufacturing jobs have disappeared and everybody is working at Walmart for minimum wage selling cheap shit from China.
Globalization increases pollution and lowers living standards in developed countries. In low wage countries, they have more pollution. Wealthy people just buy more cheap shit, creating more pollution.
The only comparative advantage corporations exploit is their ability to drive down wages and not pay for their pollution.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?