Observation: Often articles about the airline industry and new aviation tech manage to completely miss the giant elephant in the room - which is the incompatibility of this industry in its current form with a world in a climate crisis. This article is a noteworthy exception that it even talks about it.
I'd say 2% is a whole lot for a single industry, but there's a few more things that make this concerning.
It's an industry that has been growing a lot. It is an industry that is very unevenly used by the world population (many people don't fly at all). And it's an industry that barely has any idea how to fix its emission problem. (H2 will likely only work in short range and is still decades away, synfuels is extremely inefficient.)
We should really get started developing alternatives. Cement is a tough one, probably the toughest industry sector at all. For steel the swedish companies SSAB+LKAB have a very ambitious plan using hydrogen. I hope they succeed doing that.
That said and as othes have noted: Aviation is 2% of CO2, but a much larger share of overall emissions. I was surprised to recently learn that this is scientifically underresearched (particularly effects on cloud formation) and it may be everything between 4 and 7%.
It's part of a long line of perception management that shifts the burden of climate change off of the industries that are responsible for the problem (Oil and Gas, agriculture) and away from governmental solutions (carbon tax high enough to fund carbon neutrality, green industry incentives) and onto the individual (recycling, veganism, staycations, biking). I am at a point where I find all climate change solutions that focus on voluntary individual behavior to be laughably dishonest. Tragedy of the commons has been well understood for centuries. International governmental cooperation and regulation is the ONLY chance we have at addressing this issue, full stop. The rest is magical thinking.
And yet, avoiding a single transatlantic flight is enough to reduce an individual's CO₂ emissions by about 1.5 tonnes, or 2/3s of the reduction from living car-free (~2 tonnes) and is generally the third most effective way to reduce individual CO₂ emissions (behind having one fewer child and living car free and ahead of buying green energy, buying a more efficient car, siwtching to an electirc car or no car at all and eating a plant-based diet, in that order).
wait until you see what happens to the standard of living if we don't!
All IPCC targets assume getting to 0 emissions relatively soon. If we can't take economic hits to get there, then we'll take a fantastically more wild economic hit once we miss those goals.
I suggest you spend some time researching a bit what happens with each degree C we get to. It's far worse then just rising sea-levels.
The cost of diking every susceptible mile of seashore has been calculated before and it is a rounding error in terms of global GNP. The Netherlands was doing it in the 12th century with 12th century technology, and I don't think there is any nation today with average living standards below 12th century europe.
>Our survey of the climate record from station data reveals many global TW exceedances of 31° and 33°C and two stations that have already reported multiple daily maximum TW values above 35°C. These conditions, nearing or beyond prolonged human physiological tolerance, have mostly occurred only for 1- to 2-hours’ duration (fig. S2).
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>Steep and statistically significant upward trends in extreme TW frequency (exceedances of 27°, 29°, 31°, and 33°C) and magnitude are present across weather stations globally (Fig. 2). Each frequency trend represents more than a doubling of occurrences of the corresponding threshold between 1979 and 2017.
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>The southern Persian Gulf shoreline and northern South Asia are home to millions of people, situating them on the front lines of exposure to TW extremes at the edge of and outside the range of natural variability in which our physiology evolved (36).
I feel like air conditioning millions (and soon, billions) of people will be more than a rounding error of GNP. Indeed, economic activity may be... slightly curtailed... in countries where going outside results in death.
there is a lot more land in the northern hemisphere than at the equator. People will move over the next hundred years. Populations will look much more different in 2100 just like they looked very different in 1900. Countries like Canada will become more than 90 km in vertical length. Countries like Russia and Norway and Finland and the United States will also become more habitable. There is a lot more land that will become accessible than land that will become too harsh.
People are moving because of climate right now and it's causing massive civil unrest. This is nothing compared to the scale that will happen when a sizeable portion of the earth is not inhabitable.
If we get to 6C, which is a very real possibility given the fairly large number of positive feedback and history of rapid climate events on the planet, human extinction is a potential outcome.
But I suspect that's really no evidence or argument that would convince you that things won't be pretty much fine, which is why I'm personally more convinced then ever that we will likely see that 6C.
I'm not saying that things are pretty much fine. Climate change is a real problem. It is a global problem. I can't think of a reason to believe that prevention is a strategy that will work. Adaption on the other hand is likely to be the better option.
What you say is entirely correct: in 2120 there will, proportionally, be more people living in northern latitudes.
It nimbly skips over what will happen to get them there. India is the second most populated country in the world. Pakistan is fifth. Between them, they need to move hundreds of millions of people before the end of the century.
Directly north of them are China and Russia. China and Russia both have very restrictive immigration policies, and are one-party authoritarian states.
Pakistan's average temperature is 60-70f. They are not under threat from heat rise predicted by the IPCC. A good part of India is also moderate in temperature. Like I said earlier, most people already don't live in areas that will become too harsh. The equator is sparsely populated relative to other latitudes.
It's not the sea-level rise itself that would be the most damaging economically long-term. It's the changing weather, and how it affects agriculture, water availability etc - and in some regions, the ability of humans to function there in general, for some parts of the year.
There is an incredible portion of the planet that is not habitable for most of the year. The majority of land on Earth is north of the equator, and very much of it is just flat out impossible to thrive in year round. Global warming will probably be a net benefit in this respect.
As far as agriculture is concerned, the IPCC says that rising temperatures will be good for farming (within a certain limit, 2-3c I believe). Carbon after all is an input to photosynthesis.
There's more to farming than temperature. A lot of people think that, as things get warmer, we'll simply move agriculture further to the north. But it's also a matter of soil fertility - many of the most fertile areas that we have today will be adversely affected, and the new ones that'll open up due to warming (e.g. in Canada and in Siberia) have very poor soils.
> And if we apply that logic to every industry, we end up driving people's standards of living back centuries.
That assumes that the only way to reduce CO2 is to halt the industry, and that is not true for most industries. The problem is that most industries have no cost associated with CO2 emissions. So they have no profit incentive to reduce those emissions. Simply adding in the full cost of operation, including CO2, would drive industry to innovate more efficient technology, reduce CO2 waste, and yes, some industries would be revealed as being too costly in CO2 production to be viable at the current levels of use.
There are many industrial processed that are horribly inefficient and wasteful, but the cost of that inefficiency is not paid by the company, so switching would only hurt profit margins. Any company competing would be at a massive price disadvantage. If the full cost fell on the company, consumers would quickly buy products and services that used efficient tech and reduced waste, because those would be the cheaper options.
Most industries are not CO2 producers because it is required to maintain that standard of living. I pay for my garbage to be collected and properly disposed of, but if I could just dump it in my neighbor’s yard for free, I could save money. Forcing me to pay for it myself keeps us all from having our yard filled with garbage.
We're talking about flying. You don't need to go back very far (less than 50 years) to get to a point where the majority of people in western countries never took a flight. We're absolutely not talking about resetting life to what it was like in the 1700s. We might possibly be talking about going back to what it was like in the 1980s, where flights where mostly for the very wealthy or something people did 4 or 5 times in their lifetime, but it's more likely it'd be nothing as dramatic as that.
Food production is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. We have used fossil fuels to prop up the carrying capacity of humans on the planet quite a bit.
This is why it is really important to ask questions about what we really need, and if we're at all interested in human survival in the future, we need make serious decision to scale down the economy soon.
Of course I'm not very optimistic that this will happen.
I suspect the efficiency and productivity gains from information technology mean computers and software engineering actually reduce the effect of climate change by improving most industries more than they contribute to climate change directly, but I don't have any hard evidence for that.
I said if we applied that logic to every industry, we'd set standards of living back centuries. The vast vast majority of what humans produce and consume is not essential for living, but if we cut it all out there wouldn't be much to live for.
It is 2% of mostly completely needless carbon emissions which are produced exclusively by the richest 1% of Earths population. Considering the distribution of benefits for very few and costs for all, it is an entirely predatory technology.
If the airline industry goes completely bust, I am sorry for the people who worked there, and all in to give them another meaningful job, but at the same time it would be a very good thing for humanity as a whole.
If you have been on a commercial flight in the past 3 years you are very likely (50%+ chance) in the 5% of the richest people on Earth. If you are just on hackernews you are very likely (50%+ chance) in the 5% of the richest people on Earth.
If you make $33,500 a year, you are among the richest 5% in the world. [0]
The threshold for an individual to enter the global top 10% in 2012 was about PPP$15,600 per capita household income, or PPP$62,000 for a family of four. [1]
The threshold for an individual to enter the global top 1% in 2012 is about PPP$50,000 per capita household income, or PPP$200,000 for a family of four. [1]
>It is 2% of mostly completely needless carbon emissions which are produced exclusively by the richest 1% of Earths population.
This is completely untrue. One of the biggest sources of airline travel is Chinese domestic tourism, far from the richest 1%.
>but at the same time it would be a very good thing for humanity as a whole
How incredibly arrogant of you to think you speak for all of humanity. Clearly a huge number of humans value air travel, due to their extensive use of it, please explain to me how you know better than all of them about what's good for them?
Surely it's even more arrogant to assume that individual preferences and a market that doesn't price externalities will somehow avoid the existential threat of climate change. Or do you not "believe" in that?
> Some can't get other, e.g. countries living off tourism.
You mean countries like Greece which destroyed their local industries, and eco systems, in favor of tourism and can't go back ?
People have been warning about these things for decades. If you build your entire economy on a flimsy and unsustainable business model you'll lose at some point.
It doesn't really matter if it feeds millions or not, the unsustainability will make it crash sooner or later, the longer you let it go the harder it'll be.
> at the same time it would be a very good thing for humanity as a whole.
In some ways half of us dying would be good for humanity as a whole. Let's try to balance the humanity with the individual benefit a bit. Otherwise we'll get to absurd conclusions.
Worldwide it's not far from 1%, if you make more than ~30k a year you're already top 5%. Also, the flight is "cheap", the actual vacation is much more expensive than the ticket itself.
We need to get to 0% emissions, cutting all air-travel and getting 2% knocked off in a single move is pretty good.
Consider this view: I'm currently trying to reduce my monthly expenditures, especially subscription services I no longer use. A service that was 2% of my monthly expenditures would be a pretty good savings for cutting a single service.
Given that it provides mostly luxury services, it's quite easy to get rid of these 2%. Nobody is going to suffer from not being able to take the plane to go on a vacation.
So they drive, or ship instead, and both being worse? or are you asking people to sacrifice their quality of life (i.e., _not_ take a vacation)? Because you know that won't happen.
You don't have to take a flight or drive your own car to take a vacation. I've been spending all my holidays in Greece in the last 10 years or so and I've taken a flight there maybe one or twice (and once was to attend a funeral when time was pressing). Otherwise I travel by land and sea, train and boat, no cars or planes whatsoever. I live in the UK, so it's a two- or three-days journey if you do it head-over-heels but it can take a lot longer if done at a leisure (which I usually do). I spend time visiting towns and cities in France and Italy that are out of my way, and still do that without driving.
In any case, taking a holiday or going abroad doesn't mean taking a flight, or driving. And I really doubt that taking a boat trip produces more CO₂ per capita than taking a flight, given that many more people will typically board a ferry boat, than board an airliner going the same distance.
That sounds fabulous, but it's a bit incompatible with a 1 week holiday if you don't want to view sitting on a train as "a holiday".
The purpose of travelling for holiday is not always sightseeing. Sometimes (for me, most of the time) it's about what's at the destination and what you do when you get there. For example, a sporting event, a particular sporting or leisure activity etc.
Well, I don't spend my holidays on the train. Like I say I visit places on my way to my destination, which is usually the Greek island of Corfu in the Ionian Sea. So for example, the summer before the Covid winter I spent a couple of days at Bruges, then Lille and finally Bologna, before taking the ferry from Ancona to Greece.
On the other hand, I've also travelled by bus (no good trains) to go to a conference in Plovdiv, Bulgaria and I'd have also travelled my usual way to conferences in Athens and Rhodes this year, that got cancelled because of Covid. Like I say above, you can do this kind of thing at a leisurly pace, or you can do it fast.
But I think the real problem is that travelling like that limits your range. I was offered an exchange position in China but travelling there by land would have taken me a week or so, so I declined.
But I can accept that my options are curtailed this way. Air travel has spoiled us in that we take it for granted that we can travel to the other end of the world in a few hours any time we like (if we can afford it), but this luxury has cost us greatly in terms of environmental damage. So, personally, I don't accept that going at a sporting event or leisure activity trumps the need to reduce emissions from air travel.
So, to rephrase my original comment, above, taking a holiday doesn't mean you have to go around the world for it. You can holiday closer to home. So I won't get to see the Fiji islands? I can live with that. We're not going to get out of the mess we've done and still enjoy our way of life, one way or another (the "other" being that eventually climate change will make our current way of life unfeasible anyway; for example, Fiji will sink under the sea).
People have to come to the conclusion that there is a gap between what they want, what is currently allowed and what is sustainable. The fact that something is economically viable doesn't mean it is ecologically viable.
It really makes you wonder how people lived before aviation took off ... they must have had horrible life conditions ....
When I was a kid we were too poor to afford vacations out of the country, we drove to the nearest seaside every 2 or 3 years, during summer, with no AC, and I still had loads of fun. You don't have to go to _exotic_destination_234_ to enjoy your vacations.
People won't be able to drive from Berlin to Barcelona for the weekend in 3 hours for $50 (round trip), nor book a cruise from London to NY in 6 hours for $400. It doesn't take much to imagine how the world would look like actually, since coronavirus made most touristic places either very inconvenient or impossible to visit most people stay local and discovered that their region is just as beautiful as others.
These "what will people do without all these cheap vacation destinations" comment reek of entitlement
>CO2 emissions are literally about to destroy the habitable planet, including problems with food, wars, wildfires, violent storms, flooding, and on.
This is baseless fearmongering. Even the worst-case sea rise predictions for 2100 would have relatively minimal impact on the lifestyles of most people living in developed countries.
Why do you only care about the lifestyles of people living in developed countries?
Also, even if we decide that we don't care about 4/5 of the world, increased flooding and wildfires are already affecting hundreds of thousands of people each year in North America.
I predict that more people will do a vacation in their own continent. It's not like that's super horrible or limiting. Plus I predict that we'll see more "warm jungle in a glass dome" resorts so that you can do a beach vacation without leaving your city.
Climate change sure isn't going to be fun, whether we manage to stay under the 2 °C target or not. But I don't think we should spend too much time lamenting about it. Instead, we can find ways to lower our CO2 emissions, even if it means lowering our luxurious standards of living – flying is a luxury.
If reducing air travel seems a depressing consequence of the climate crisis, it's going to get way more depressing. This is a good tradeoff to mitigate much worse things.
It's not that air travel will just disappear or anything. Some areas are simply too remote to depend on anything else.
However, up until about 8 months ago, there were lots of 15-30 minute flights that could be replaced with videoconferencing and (post-pandemic) train travel. Sure, you still might need to catch a plane if you're going on vacation on the other side of the globe, but you can usuall have that client meeting over Zoom, and if you're going on a trip from one European city to another then train travel is often not a bad option.
Your definition of reasonable is not universal. For many people, life is for living, not for sacrificing worldly pleasures to eke out as long an existence as possible.
Perhaps "suffer" isn't great here, because it's used coloquially as "being affected" and to literally suffer because of something. People will be affected, absolutely. And some people might also suffer from not being able to have an international vacation. But probably not reasonably so, i.e. a reasonable person would not suffer in that situation. You can suffer unreasonably, and you're right, it's irrelevant to the question of "does suffering exist", but it's very relevant to the question of "should we do something about it as society". If it's reasonable, probably. Otherwise that's between an individual and their therapist.
Come on, do you think CO2 is the nastiest thing planes reject ? Also, plane pollution happens at high altitude, which surely has a different impact than at sea level.
I don't think any industry was prepared for a year of shutdown. I mean early on I was like "well these companies should have had enough savings to last for a couple of months without firing people", but the world at large has failed to contain it despite the measures (mainly because measures were slackened off again because of the economy).
Citing the article: "In the near term – a timescale that matters enormously to climate change – the only way to decarbonise aviation is to fly less. As an option, that seemed plumb absurd until this year, when we were forced to learn how to live without planes."
If we've learned one thing this year it is that we can totally do a lot of things if we take a crisis seriously.
Managing climate change is about reconciling wants and emissions. It'll have to be resolved by reducing air travel a lot and pricing emissions (= making it more expensive) seems the most realistic today, even though it's not very democratic.
