24
votes
Big data reveals true climate impact of worldwide air travel
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Climate emissions from air travel 50 per cent higher than reported
- Authors
- Nancy Bazilchuk
- Published
- Apr 30 2024
- Word count
- 727 words
Ive been waiting to see airline emission data highlighted ever since I worked at a major carrier. I spent a few minutes in the control and tracking center and it was the screens showing ALL the flights in the air, much like the screen grab on this article, that blew me away. I had no idea there were so many flights literally covering our world in a blanket of exhaust emissions at 35,000 ft every day of the year. Those emissions have got to have a far greater effect on trapping heat than the average joe puttering along in his Honda Civic at 2 feet of elevation. Even without the new inputs on previously unreported countries, it makes a lot of sense that air travel emissions have a much greater significance on global climate than previously thought.
But of course, its those with more money who travel most, so maybe the message shouldn't be "go buy an electric car" so much as "stop flying for your vacation." Or using the logic of our current Canadian leadership, "if you fly further than 200 kms, we're going to charge you out the wazoo with massive taxes to discourage you"
Flying to a hotspot is nice, but its certainly not a necessity. But my guess is that's not going to be a very popular message given the upper income people being targeted and the massive amount of money that tourism brings to some countries. Electric transatlantic flights are currently impossible and highly unlikely anytime soon and alternative fuel for flight is extremely limited right now, so we're basically stuck with planes burning millions of gallons of jet fuel (kerosene) every day and covering the earth with a massive blanket of heat trapping pollution. Just peachy. Maybe its time to bring back transatlantic passenger ships, just much faster and more efficient ones?
I think we should be replacing all the flights that are possible to replace with other modes of transportation. The Canadian tax on flights over 200km seems the opposite of what we should be doing. Long flights, in particular transatlantic and transpacific flights are impossible to replace with other transport (boats could replace those, but they still take days instead of hours, and that isn’t practical). Anything under 200km could easily be replaced by high speed rail, and probably have a better experience than a flight. We also need better interoperability and single ticket booking for airlines and train networks.
I am going to school this fall in Bordeaux, and I have to fly there. I tried to get a combo transatlantic flight and train ticket. I had to buy them separately and it came to more money than just buying a flight with 1 layover. In addition, I would have had to arrange transport between the airport and train terminal, and had to manage all the bags. If airlines could automatically book trips on trains the same way they do with partner airlines, this would be possible.
Leave long haul flights alone for now. Short flights are replaceable now, today, with current technology. Long haul flights already have economic realities that encourage fuel efficiency. Short flights do not.
There’s similar issues with travel across North America and I would imagine China. To visit family I’m faced with a west coast → east coast trip of around 2.7k miles/4.3k kilometers.
It’s possible to make most of this journey by rail (Amtrak), but the route has a long, awkward detour in it, requires three train changes, takes almost four days, and then I’d still need to rent a car and drive the last stint. It’d cost more than traveling by air and require me to take off 8 extra days of PTO (which I might not even have).
There’s just no good replacement for flight in cases like this.
Yep, you are absolutely correct. In today’s connected world, it isn’t practical to make long travel slower.
I did some back of the napkin math on your distance. It’s about a 5.5 hour flight. If we built a direct high speed train line, it would be at least 10 hours. That was calculating at the maximum speed Japan’s high speed rail has been tested at, not the speed it operates today, which is much slower. So probably 15-20 hours by high speed rail, once safe speeds, indirect routes, stations, transfers, and other things are accounted for.
Also Amtrak is just really bad. I’ve heard it’s a lot better on the east coast than the west. If it is, it still isn’t good enough. I listen to Accidental Tech Podcast every week. Around when the Vision Pro came out, one of the hosts told a story about using it on Amtrak (on the east coast where it is “better”). Amtrak has started to electrify some sections of rail there. His route was only partially electrified. He had to sit in the station for 20 to 30 minutes while Amtrak decoupled the diesel locomotive and coupled an electric locomotive with a pantograph. Seriously??? The locomotives that run all of the routes (that I saw) in the British isles with partial electric routes have combo locomotives with a diesel engine and pantograph, and I think they can switch while in motion. So the technology exists to make it seamless, and Amtrak doesn’t have the funding or care to improve it. For all airlines faults, they do quite a lot to make sure their services don’t have unnecessary and wasteful delays. Delays happen, sure, but most of the time they are safety related, not just because Amtrak can’t be bothered to buy the right locomotive.
I don’t have any evidence to back this up, but my thinking for what flights we should switch to trains is this: anything under 2 hours by flight should definitely be a train. Anything 2-4 hours could possibly be a train depending on the route and quantity of passengers. Anything over 4 hours likely should remain a flight, although having a train alternative is always beneficial. Also frequency is a factor. A twice weekly flight of 50 miles that can only fill a small 737 probably doesn’t make sense to replace with a train. But a super busy route definitely makes more sense by train.
A 10-20 hour rail trip for cross-country would be plenty doable for me, especially if it were as low-hassle as the Shinkansen is in Japan (buy ticket at machine, wait at platform, board train).
Good luck gathering the political will and getting all the involved states and localities on board to make this happen, though. Obstructionism from competing industries will also be a factor.
Agree that flights around 2-3 hours and shorter are good candidates for replacement with rail.
I mostly agree with you but don't forget the time cost of security at the airport when calculating travel time. I can arrive 15 minutes before a train.
High speed rail for medium distance trips would be an excellent option and more comfortable
I'm probably an outlier, but I would 100% take a 10 hour high speed train in place of a 5.5 hour flight. I'd even take a multi-day ship across the ocean instead of a flight if such a thing existed.
But the problem is that even for weirdos like me those options rarely exist - so flying it is. I do my best to take the lowest emission flights available to me, and take alternatives when available, but having friends and family scattered across the country and several other continents means flying is usually the only choice.
You are correct that Amtrak is better on the east coast, specifically from about Virginia up to Maine (the so-called "Northeast Corridor"). That's the one part of the US where I've been able to take zero-flight trips and vacations multiple times without issue. The views on the trains from NYC to Boston are quite beautiful as well.
Thinking about selecting flights for lowest emissions, one thing that is without a doubt preventing more people from doing this is the significant differences in cost between originating airports, particularly for transoceanic flights.
For example, for people living on the pacific coast of the US, it’s frequently cheaper to fly to east asian countries from Los Angeles than it is other pacific coast international airports, such as those in Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, and San Diego, even factoring in the flight from those airports to Los Angeles. This is not only unnecessarily increasing the number of flights between pacific coast airports, but encouraging travelers coming from interior states to connect in Los Angeles instead of geographically closer airports or choose less efficient multi-stop flights over more direct non-stops.
Perhaps some kind of price control/normalization on flights exiting the country would be beneficial to nudge buyers towards options with reduced emissions.
Something that was surprising to me is that if you're driving alone, even with a hybrid car, the CO2 emissions are roughly comparable to flying the same distance. Flying is seen as worse than driving mostly because of how much ground you cover in such a short amount of time. Switching to electric puts this in the car's favor.
However as soon as you add a second person to your car it's dramatically better to drive. And with how much overhead there is to flying (taxis, security, delays) it's honestly comparable for me to drive for distances as far as San Francisco to Los Angeles. Plus you can carry way more stuff with you and back, leave and arrive when you want, and it's much more comfy. You just need to be okay with driving for 5 hours. And for an interstate it's a pretty low cognitive load activity.
The main kink in this is if the destination is reasonable to exist without a car in or not, which determines if you’ll need to be finding parking, potentially getting parking tickets, etc. Getting around San Francisco without a car for instance is feasible but other cities not so much, so if I could rent a car in my origin point that I turn in after reaching the destination city that wouldn’t be so bad, but I wouldn’t necessarily want to be burdened with a car for my whole trip.
I doubt it's physically possible to achieve the kind of speeds on water that can be reached by air. Even if super-fast (and also somehow efficient) passenger ships could be engineered, they're not gonna get someone from NYC to London in 7 hours. And they'd do nothing to reduce air travel over land, for routes unserviceable by sea. I don't think anyone's going to be willing to give up fast air travel in the 21st century; there's going to have to be an aviation innovation.
I'm reminded of the Star Trek episode where it's discovered that the technology that enables FTL travel (and the rich intragalactic culture that ensued) is actually damaging space and putting worlds at risk. Picard quote:
Hey, I'm not the only one to shoehorn in Trek deep cuts around here lately!
Unfortunately for the real world, we can't just retcon that problem away like Trek did. The problem necessitates a solution. High-speed rail could be a decent alternative for land-based travel. But it would require an astronomical investment in infrastructure that doesn't really seem achievable in today's political climate. Seems like we've painted ourselves into a corner here. Of course we're just looking at one facet of the climate-change fractal, which seems to be repeating that same narrative in every possible sector these days.