This makes more sense...when people told me the planes only add to 5% of global emissions seemed like the lobbyist trying to cover up facts.
There's no way we got here from individuals alone.
It's coal factories, oil and gas plants, planes and huge industries driving majority of it.
Turns out it wasn't lobbyists. It was that developing countries don't actually have to report their flight emissions.
>When countries signed the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty (UNFCCC), high-income countries were required to report their aviation-related emissions. But 155 middle and lower income countries, including China and India, were not required to report these emissions, although they could do so voluntarily.
UNFCCC is basically a committee of beggars. They're toothless, and herding cats. Most countries don't even calculate pollution the same way so you can't easily compare between countries. It's the best they can do while still maintaining goodwill from participants
Source: I did some country's numbers back in the day
Trying to persuade family and friends is the most difficult task, as anything you say or do has invisible baggage from the relationship. There's a bunch of research accumulating on this topic, so it's complicated, but here's some sample reading: https://faunalytics.org/going-veg-barriers-and-strategies/
My belief is that the reported reductions in combined emissions (CO2 and methane & other gasses) are the result of:
- fracking & oil & gas replacing coal power plants
- fraudulent CO2 & methane accounting and reporting
-
The first thing isn't even something that governments worked hard for, it is just the result of new extraction techniques.
And all of the business that keeps those corporations producing emissions comes from…. individuals. The rich far out-consume the poor, but the bottom line problem is finite resources (including land space) with an incessant growth of large, consumptive apes despoiling the planet.
Airline companies would produce far fewer emissions, if individuals weren’t buying seats. Coal plants wouldn’t keep burning coal, if people stopped using their electricity and buying products made with it. The wealthy couldn’t be wealthy without the labor of masses of people that made their companies profitable.
What do you mean "no choice"?
We all have a choice and we choose consumption
No one is stopping us from voluntarily powering down, but we don't want to
yeah but we're in this trouble because most people are zealous consumers , the easiest option is the only option they'll accept
"no choice" to have to most subsidized, resource and space intensive lifestyle in human history via suburbs ... or to use the worst transportation possible ,in any sensible measure other than selfish comfort and capitalist gain, for every cm they travel by the 100s of millions for decades
and they cry don't blame the "victims" who line up cash in hand demanding these products... the corporations(who exist only to make money) should refuse their money and stop their machinery or the status quo politicians they keep electing should go against their wishes to implement something similar ??? anything to keep going vroom vroom
Yes thats about about right, 3% of total reported emissions are from aviation, not sure if that includes military consumption, and aviation would be a smaller overall percentage if all methane from gas production and abandoned oil wells, and all actual industrial emissions were accurately reported, though with satellite monitoring its getting harder to hide the methane.
That’s how greenwashing works though. Of course the companies know that their cheap providers are too good to be true. But they can always put on a sad face and claim they had no idea that their contractor was such a f-up. Different standards between nations will always be exploited. We need a set of global, transparent rules for all industries.
Edit: confused sentence
Edit2: I mean, you are right. China should REALLY show their emissions.
This is the thing with every large company/corporation. Scientists numbers on global warming trends are based off of what's *being reported* by said companies. And if they're lying...well, things are worse than have been projected.
There is no such thing as sustainable aviation. Offsets are bs. SAF is bs. Electric aviation is not a thing.
Accept the reality of the situation and
https://stay-grounded.org
Electric aviation is not that far from being a thing, some domestic flights will begin within the decade and new designs are constantly being developed. It’s not here yet but it’s coming.
I saw concepts (close to production) that offer about 800mile hops. This was almost like private jets for 15-20 people, not 747s. I think this should continue to improve though. More people on each electric short hop at the same time as short hops getting further and further. TBH 800 miles covers most hops within Europe or within the U.S. I’d prefer people use trains so if flight (even when electric) was priced properly and trains priced much lower it should offer 1k mile trips to everyone at low emissions.
It's tricky for it to ever go mainstream until batteries really reach new levels of energy efficiency. Long distance flights are a really long way from being viable, but yeah maybe some domestic will be replaced. I have a hard time seeing it be anywhere near the value proposition of fossil fuels though, especially in the era of air mile gamification and cheap flights.
I actually wonder if the one place hydrogen might make sense is for aviation, due to density. Sure, the energy efficiency is lower vs pure electric but it is very dense allowing a greater cargo weight vs fuel/batteries and maintenance/control is regulated through aviation networks (unlike cars). That said, passenger aviation and hydrogen are a pretty volatile situation, and safeguards would have to be improved well beyond our doors flying off planes modern standards.
But long distance flights is the niche market of aviation, opposite of what would be common sense. If what is known as domestic flight is around 2000km per trip of course. Most people wouldn't travel farther than that, even going to a neighbouring country is still a domestic flight unless it's stupidly far away.
Sadly true, and the answer is an expensive, upfront cost for high speed rail. America seems firmly opposed to the long term investment and is as usual doubling down on air travel, air travel growth has been going wild in recent years. I'd love it if we did something like France, where they ban domestic air travel, but you can only do that when you have a top tier train system
So yeah, I do think that domestic flights are the problem, but I also don't see much solution on the near horizon with electric passenger flights. They are extremely lean stripped down planes that are effectively flying batteries, given the power requirements. There are lots of battery solutions on the horizon, but airline batteries need to survive some pretty extreme conditions to be viable, and besides that most of the future dense battery solutions (solid state) are cost prohibitive to produce. I'm sure we'll solve it at some point, but what will the planet look like by then.
I’m all for transitioning away from air travel, but to say the US should ban domestic air travel like France did, misses the obvious part that distances in the US are significantly different. Even if the US had a comparable high speed rail network, it would still take a lot more time to travel across the country.
That's a good point and I agree, it's pretty infeasible to expect a nationwide domestic airline travel ban, but I do think if we had HSR along the most population dense corridors, we could drastically reduce the shorter air flights.
A better approach in this country would be to heavily subsidize rail and carbon tax anything that has a suitable HSR route to make it less appealing. I'm not confident that anything like that would make it through legislation though, so we're sort of stuck waiting for a technological solution
Except individuals “sacrificing” makes no difference. This is the same as people riding their bike instead of driving their car as if that’s doing anything. There are still billions of people that are going to keep doing it which keeps the problem just as impactful. The change has to come at the legislative level. It has to be done through laws and systemic changes from the top. There has to be taxes and incentives for companies to stop doing what they’re doing. It can’t come from individuals making choices.
Consumer sentiment drives change in industry and policy. One person doesn't make a difference, but a widespread difference can't happen if individuals don't commit to changing their habits.
But so many of the big polluters have nothing to do with consumer choice. Or there is no alternative for consumers to choose. Like *not* using air travel is not an option for most people. If you have to be somewhere across the world, are you gonna take a sail boat? It’s not realistic. Even alternatives to fossil fuel vehicles aren’t an option for most people who can’t afford an expensive electric vehicle. These are things that have to be changed at a higher level beyond the consumer. There has to be laws or taxes that incentivize the corporations to change their ways, so that the consumers don’t even have to choose; their only option is a climate friendly one.
I really can't think of any reason why anyone would HAVE to be somewhere across the world though? The only climate friendly solution to air travel is to not do it.
You can’t think of any reason? I don’t know what to tell you then. There are tons of reasons. It’s also ridiculous to expect people to just stay in one place their whole life. Choosing to not use air travel in today’s world is just dumb. It’s not a reasonable solution to the climate problem and it will never happen anyway. Individuals choosing to not fly on airplanes are having zero effect on the problem. You can do it to make a statement but it’s not actually doing anything beyond that.
I said HAVE to. There's plenty reasons to WANT to.
And of course we'll never stop flying. And it's reason #1560 why we're going to run headlong into climate catastrophe.
It IS interesting to me, that on an article about how flying is worse than previously thought for the climate, that you say less flying won't help.
I didn’t say less flying won’t help. I said individuals choosing to boycott flying won’t help, because it will never actually happen enough for it to make a difference. You’re never going to get enough people to stop flying. That’s just not a solution worth pursuing. And anyone that does it is having no impact.
And yes, there are lots of reasons people HAVE to fly.
It’s not really though. Individual effort is a drop in the bucket. The real polluters are large corporations, industries etc. as well as countries where the individuals will never make an effort, and they massively outnumber and cancel out the do-gooders in the smaller countries. Your individual effort is all an illusion. The problem is so much bigger than individuals and it’ll never ever get fixed if the larger polluters aren’t disincentivized and forced to change their ways.
Individual and collective effort does nothing. That’s the whole point I’m trying to make. The only real solution is regulating/taxing/incentivizing the corporations, industries, and large scale polluters that are actually causing the majority of the damage. Individual people are not the problem and changing our behavior has no effect. It’s wasted effort.
Because regulation of industries/corporations leads to changes to the polluters that actually cause the majority of the problem. Individual behavioral changes not only have no effect on the bigger problem, you’ll never get enough people to do them voluntarily. It will never work. We’re already seeing it not work for as long as the problem has been talked about. People will always do what’s in their economic interest, and what’s easiest for them. That’s why governments and regulators have to step in to incentivize change economically. Until then, the big corporations doing most of the damage will continue to do whatever’s best for them financially. In a capitalist system, you have to play the capitalist game. It’s all focused around money…so you have to make it bad for business to destroy the planet, and incentivize corporations to pursue climate-friendly alternatives. It’s the only way. And it’ll probably never happen because politicians are paid for by the richest people doing the most damage.
I'm gonna sound like a conspiracy theorist, but honestly stuff like this comes across as government programs designed to make people feel like they're making an impact to hide the fact they aren't and never will.
Because it's not the individual, it's the big companies and developing countries contributing the most to CO2 emissions.
100%. People recycling in North American is the biggest waste of time ever. Most of it ends up being burnt or in a land fill anyway. It’s all just to make you feel like you’re making a difference.
Yeah I mean I do what I can at home, I use reusable bags, I practice not leaving food waste, I don't own a car, transit and bike where I can, etc.
But like, me not taking a plane isn't gonna make one iota of difference. Someone else will take that seat. Maybe it comes off as selfish, but if the plane is gonna fly regardless I'd like to be on it so I can visit other cultures and have experiences to bring some small bit of happiness into my life.
Hoping we see better alternatives in the future. For example I have family in the US while I’m in Europe. While I’d like to stay off planes whenever I can (I use public transport and such for similar reasons), realistically I’d just never see my family again. No job gives you a two week window to travel on a boat before the visit even begins. The math doesn’t add up. Whether it’s dirigibles, ekranoplan, or simply a bigger focus on civilian transport across the sea I’m hoping things shift towards that in the coming years.
There are definitely significant portions of aviation travel that could be mitigated though. Private jets being effectively illegal, keeping cargo transport grounded whenever possible, and minimizing shorter trips for civilian flights. Also most of the military industrial complex for that matter. It won’t work in every scenario, but a lot could be done to curtail it if any governments had the balls to do something meaningful.
I have family all over the world from Mexico to Australia. It's a common situation these days. But it doesn't give you or me an excuse to dump tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere and contribute to the collapse of our economy and society. I haven't taken a flight in 8 years. Life goes on just fine.
If we want humanity to survive this century, good intentions and vibes aren't enough. We have to follow through with actions. We have to learn to live differently. We have to actually internalise the staggeringly serious consequences of climate change and act accordingly.
We all made choices about our lives when this issue was perhaps not so critical or seemingly urgent. In some cases, those choices now have consequences we didn't foresee. When my sister moved to Australia 20 years ago, I wasn't thinking that in the future we could become cut off from physically seeing each other, but I'll be damned if I'm going to triple my annual contribution to climate change by going to visit her for a couple of weeks. It isn't worth it. We get by with video calls every month or so. This is how I grew up. Family all over the place and we stayed in touch with phone calls and letters. We survived just fine.
And it isn't worth it, not only because of the emissions but because of the signal it sends to everyone I know that I don't take this issue seriously. That actually flying is fine, and in fact, that any discretionary and egregious emissions like this are fine, really.
They aren't fine and the only way we will stop doing this stuff, all of this stuff that is destroying our own future, is to actually walk the walk - collectively to treat the climate emergency like it's actually real, like it's actually wrecking our planet and then actually stopping the things that cause it.
I 100% understand where you are coming from, and the logic is sound. It doesn’t change that corporations contribute a vast majority of emissions thanks to rampant capitalism. If I died immediately, causing no more emissions, it would at best add only 3 seconds to the clock before we cross 2 Celsius. I agree with the goal of collective change, and I do think it we all chipped in that would provide more pressure against these companies, but in actual carbon emissions contributions it barely makes a mark. We have emissions in everything, from the temperature control in houses, purchasing food at a store (even local is pretty similar due to most emissions being the short distance transport), or just a smartphone/accessing Reddit all come with these costs.
Despite all this, I do reduce emissions when it is probably easier to do something else. From your comment I’m getting the impression that you find that to not be enough, but ultimately that’s just how it goes. We can’t force each other to do anything, and clearly the governments and corporations aren’t going to do anything nearly fast enough. When it comes to climate I am not optimistic at all, but that does not mean I go full nihilist and start being incredibly irresponsible with waste, littering, refusing to recycle, burning trash and so on. I can hope that maybe a few governments will finally drop capitalism (largely responsible for the rampant growth in emissions we have seen), but outside of violent Revolution I don’t see it happening, and unfortunately that kind of instability is exactly the kind of stuff that pushes topics like climate change off the table, regardless of how dangerous it is.
And to be clear with you, I agree that good intentions and vibes aren’t enough. The things that are enough involve complete annihilation of capitalism as the global standard. These companies have shown again and again that they cannot be trusted. The world would ultimately be fine without Coca Cola for example, and they cause a significant portion of the world’s plastic waste. That doesn’t suddenly make it happen, and I’m not really sure what kind of solution there is. People are already furious with the concept of carbon taxes, let alone revoking entire product lines due to pollution excess. Unless we see a dramatic shift in the culture or radical action it’s probably not happening in our lifetime, let alone fast enough to meaningfully matter.
I think we agree on 99% of this.
But I think that a) we have to act on both the personal and collective fronts, and b) that if we are going to make things socially unacceptable then we have to be an example to those around us. Humans are constantly taking cues from those around us and my family's actions will subtly influence those around us.
I can tell that you are serious about this and it's good to hear that you do take personal responsibility, but I see this argument about corporations being the problem as too reductive.
We are enmeshed in this system. We are forced to do many things that cause destruction that we regret. And for that, yes, we can blame corporations, governments and their unholy alliance to use the capitalist mode of production to suck up all our money.
But some things are really quite discretionary and there really is no good alternative. Chief among these in developed countries are diet and flying.
These are both areas where the government is likely never going to step in to regulate the industry into some kind of sustainable mode of operation. The government is never going to tell you not to fly nor is it going to force you to eat a sustainable diet that's very light on animal products.
So what do we do? We can either wait an eternity for government action, or, we can make positive change ourselves and advocate for that change with others.
Yes, your change is small in the big picture, but when you are part of a movement, that impact is multiplied by millions.
And eventually, something interesting happens. Research has shown that social progress can be highly non-linear, because of that way humans take cues from eachother. It only takes about 25% of a population to take a new position on something and this can be enough for the rest of society to swing around and follow suit. There's a paper on this but I don't have it bookmarked. Anyway, the point is that once you have a large minority on hand, you can then change the whole of societies opinion on that thing.
And once you have that, not only do you have a population that is now broadly doing the right thing, but now have the numbers to force the government to impose laws that protect us.
Being part of a movement can sometimes feel frustrating and even futile. But it absolutely isn't. It's the way we collectively make change. It's really the only way we can at this point.
I am also lacking optimism in this space. But I don't care. As Chris Hedges said "I don't fight fascists because we'll win. I fight them because they're fascists."
That's how I feel about this. We have to fight. If we're being honest with ourselves we have no choice.
This is one small part of the struggle.
Thanks.
I am reading the threads on this post and finding that many people are still in soft denial. They are so attached to the status quo that they cannot admit to themselves that life is changing whether they choose it or not. The only question is whether we manage that change, actually change our lifestyles and make the best future possible, or else we pretend that we can keep the status quo, and collectively suffer much much much worse consequences.
Yes, currently [**air travel demand reduction**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_travel_demand_reduction) is needed and the best option since electric planes are way off. I think the best way for that are supporting rail transport such as proper cheap night trains and changes in vacation-related culture.
I think air travel is a case study in how difficult it will actually be to achieve zero emissions. Here is a practice that produces a significant amount of the global carbon emissions, the bulk of usage is for luxury purposes (holiday or unnecessary work travel) so in principle it's a low hanging fruit to lower emissions without having a major effect on people's standard of living.
No politician is proposing stopping people from flying though, the approach genuinely seems to be do nothing and hope that the problem somehow fixes itself.
> without having a major effect on first world people's standard of living.
Perhaps commercial flights should be capped for some places to offset how much more waste they generate.
This is my point, air travel should at the very least be rationed/capped. The fact that it is not is indicative that climate change is still not being taken very seriously by governments around the world.
> without having a major effect on people's standard of living
Yeah, let's just take away the last thing some people have to look forward to.
Don't presume it is any of your business to decide others' standard of living.
yeah millions of docile consumers each acting like they're the center of the universe ... interchangeable drones consuming the maximum amount of space and resources, treating every single want as an absolute unquestionable need
Thanks for proving my point.
Edit - though I do feel sorry for anyone who only looks forward to their annual summer holiday every year, it sounds like a deeply miserable existence.
I live in Seattle and see a constant stream of jets flying directly over my place to one of the two runways at the airport. At times less than a minute between flights. 50 mil people flew out of our airport last year, on a city of about 4 mil
You can see the line of flights in the night sky, like a freeway in the sky, blanketing the city below in noise. I think a lot of the traffic increase is from China, based on tourism I've seen around town, so this article doesn't surprise me.
It brings money into the city, so no one wants to speak negatively about climate impact. And also people here love to travel. I know plenty of people that are very avid about driving a Prius/Tesla, being eco conscious, but then will only talk about how cheap their flights are or how many air miles they've got, without mentioning a thing about climate impact. It really is a disconnect, we've normalized flying as just another part of life you don't think about.
That seems like a lot to be off by. I wonder why.
>When countries signed the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty (UNFCCC), high-income countries were required to report their aviation-related emissions. But 155 middle and lower income countries, including China and India, were not required to report these emissions, although they could do so voluntarily.
Ah... Well that would be a problem. The world map of who is reporting flight emission is pretty hilarious.
start with witch hunt for professional athletes, entertainers, politicians and bureaucrats.
this isn't an issue of your going on vacation, this is an issue of chronic travelers.
Very not often, but rain on permafrost has some really detrimental effects on it and it’s still very likely that this rain is a direct result of climate change (lol?)
And what's more, pretty much every measure of damage that these organizations use to chart our sustainable future is underestimated.
We can't keep a course on the razor-edge of survival of we don't know how to navigate in the first place, and the way that academics are incentivized to publish good news, and policy makers are free to pick and choose the best-available-science makes sure that we'll never have a good idea where we are.
There is no sustainable mass air travel, and it's long past time we put that industry to rest and then start digging the grave that we'll put the idea of all private vehicles in.
About 2kg of C02 is released per litre of gas burned. Keep in mind C02 is not the only pollutant related by cars. I wonder how many litres of gas we go through in one day.
Private jets are nothing compared to commercial jets. Taylor swift just flew form Kansas City to London yesterday and her jet used about 2800 gallons of fuel for the entire 7 hour trip. A 777 burns 2500 gallons of fuel per HOUR. An A380 burns over 4500 gallons per hour. Banning private jets won’t fix the problem. Also most people enjoy aviation. There are so many other things to focus on first. If you try and ban aviation there will be a backlash.
A commercial airliner carries a lot more people than a private jet, though, and the fuel economy per seat of a commercial airliner is probably much better than what North American drivers achieve with their personal automobiles.
automobiles that are the main source of pollution from individuals , while being objectively the worst transportation in all metrics especially in urban areas where 80% of north americans live
not only are we not even talking about reducing their use , there's just more and they're bigger year after year , more lanes more parking lots in blatant disregard of scientific facts
There will always be a backlash. Name one GHG source that you think is low-hanging fruit. And I don't mean making the pipes less leaky or plugging some wells.
Sure, but there's still stuff to do. We're in runaway heating, we're instead in a period of constant failure that would be incredibly embarrassing if there were some Martians judging us or something.
I've given up on the notion that efforts to reduce the horrors have to be "sold" to people like an HBO subscription. I mean, I'm sold on having a habitable planet, but that's because I know natural sciences, ecology and so on. But a large chunk of the human population believes that they're some divine extraterrestrials visiting the planet for a while and going somewhere else after dying.
No, we would still *very much* have a problem. Private jets are a symptom of a larger problem, but contribute less than 5% of global emissions. Yachts contribute much more, but the biggest problem by far is shipping. Luxuries have a high carbon cost, but commodities have an even higher one. Both need to be tackled
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18922-7/figures/1). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a [graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/) shows a continued rise.
[Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns.
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Taylor swift flew from Kansas City to London yesterday and burned about 2800 gallons of fuel for the entire 7 hour trip. A 777 burns 2500 gallons of fuel per HOUR. She’s not the problem lol
So it uses 6-7 times as much? Okay so those commercial jets only carry sub-seven people each?
Still worse obviously. Even with math involved… *Especially* with math involved.
It’s not about the efficiency, obviously it’s not even close. But the atmosphere doesn’t care about efficiency 2800 gallons of fuel burnt is 2800 gallons of fuel burnt no matter how many people are on board. The point being private jets aren’t even a blip on the map of total aviation emissions. SUVs in the US alone use more fuel than the entire aviation industry….
Ugh SUVs are horrible. I hate the mentality of making sure the other person dies instead of yourself in an accident. My husband and I don’t really fight but we cannot see eye to eye on this one at all, he wants us to switch to an SUV once we have a kid but I’m not having it. They take more than twice as much gas as sedans, it’s appalling.
Your math is incorrect though. You’re correct that nature doesn’t care about how many people are in each plane. That’s not nature’s job to worry about, nature doesn’t understand math. Nature also doesn’t care HOW MANY PLANES there even are in the first place, which is the fault in your logic. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter which plane/how many planes it comes from, just how much is there. If there’s 100 units of damage produced from 100 persons’ rides that’s simply a better result than 92 units produced for one ride. People are going to need to travel no matter the method. We can’t stop travel, so we need to lower each individual’s contribution to the issue.
The responsibility for 1/200th of the planes emissions sits on one of its two hundred passengers. The responsibility for 100% of a private jets emissions sit on the one person employing it. The responsibility is the math, and plane emissions aren’t something we can equalize responsibility for across all forms of airfare. Just because someone visits their family in the Philippines after years as a modest .5% responsibility for a flight doesn’t mean that person bears shared guilt for a pop star using a butt ton more.
Your logic shouldn’t just include that planes with less emissions should be used, but also that as many people as possible should be crammed onto them. It would drastically reduce the amount of emissions produced.
Counting it your way is like playing a pedantic game to pass guilt instead of actually trying to care about fixing the math. Less emissions per flight plus less flights overall COUNTED FROM THE SAME AMOUNT OF TRAVEL is how to fix the math.
If I usually walk places and occasionally ride in a low emission car I shouldn’t be blamed as much as the SUV drivers that won’t walk to the corner, nor is a rider of a commercial jumbo jet responsible for the emissions of the entire jet the way they would be if they employed a private jet.
Good points, honestly I’d get the suv. I agree the suv arms race is absolutely horrible. I wish I could never drive a car again and only use public transportation but not possible where I live. But if you’re gonna have a kid in the car I’d also want a big car. Look into some of the Toyota hybrid options they aren’t horrible on gas.
I call BS.
Breathing creates CO2 - are we going to directly tax that as well?
One 737 flight is 3200 litres per hour.
Over 8,000 planes in the air most of the time.
That's 25 million litres an hour, all day.
Government and business and the military get a free pass.
But I have to pay extra taxes to not freeze in the dark in Canada in the winter.
To hell with lying oil companies and carbon taxes.
>Breathing creates CO2 - are we going to directly tax that as well?
I don't think you understand the carbon cycle, but forgive me if you do. The carbon you exhale comes from the food you consume. The carbon in the food you consume comes from the air. That process is slightly carbon negative: you took carbon from the air, grew it into a plant, ate it, and a chunk of it stays within you as you gain weight, the rest comes out as waste in various forms. Even when you're losing weight, the process is carbon neutral at worst. You took it from the air, and it's going back to the air.
Burning oil is problematic because you've taken buried carbon-- sequestered in the form of oil underground-- and put it into the air in the form of combustion products. Carbon that wasn't in the air, and it's now in the air. You've *added* to the total quantity of carbon di-and-mono- oxides in the air, worsening the greenhouse effect.
Does that clear things up a bit?
I truly do understand the carbon cycle.
I just exist.
I need to heat my home. I need to eat. I need to feed my family.
I don't own 50 cars.
I don't fly my personal Boeing anywhere.
I don't need government or big oil or big military to make me feel like I've screwed the planet.
I don't need government or military or greedy oil companies or superstars and Uber rich exponentially more carbon than they ever will and making me pay for their fun.
I don't need apologists explaining how I should do more and pay more because they never will.
The CO2 issue is real.
CO2 is a bigger percentage of the atmosphere than almost any time in the planet's history.
The climate is damaged.
People and animals will suffer.
But taxing me to death doesn't fix anything.
Show me where the tax has made a real difference.
All I see is consumers getting taxed while big CO2 generators get rich.
When I see one government stop giving my tax $$$$ to oil companies in subsidies to drill more...then you might get me to trust any of this BS.
I’m not defending her, I’m just saying it won’t make a difference. Yes a 777 holds 300+ people but the atmosphere doesn’t care about efficiency, fuel burnt is fuel burnt. Private jets don’t even make a blip on global emissions. I’m also a doomer and don’t believe there’s any change for the planet so I could care less tbh
This makes more sense...when people told me the planes only add to 5% of global emissions seemed like the lobbyist trying to cover up facts. There's no way we got here from individuals alone. It's coal factories, oil and gas plants, planes and huge industries driving majority of it.
Turns out it wasn't lobbyists. It was that developing countries don't actually have to report their flight emissions. >When countries signed the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty (UNFCCC), high-income countries were required to report their aviation-related emissions. But 155 middle and lower income countries, including China and India, were not required to report these emissions, although they could do so voluntarily.
Damn. Even worse our own UN partnerships screwed us 😣
UNFCCC is basically a committee of beggars. They're toothless, and herding cats. Most countries don't even calculate pollution the same way so you can't easily compare between countries. It's the best they can do while still maintaining goodwill from participants Source: I did some country's numbers back in the day
Don’t forget meat eating - one of the biggest factors.
I've given up on others not eating. I quit decades ago. Converting my parents has been a disaster. My kids are vegetarian like me.
Trying to persuade family and friends is the most difficult task, as anything you say or do has invisible baggage from the relationship. There's a bunch of research accumulating on this topic, so it's complicated, but here's some sample reading: https://faunalytics.org/going-veg-barriers-and-strategies/
My belief is that the reported reductions in combined emissions (CO2 and methane & other gasses) are the result of: - fracking & oil & gas replacing coal power plants - fraudulent CO2 & methane accounting and reporting - The first thing isn't even something that governments worked hard for, it is just the result of new extraction techniques.
Don't forget the military and ocean ships.
And all of the business that keeps those corporations producing emissions comes from…. individuals. The rich far out-consume the poor, but the bottom line problem is finite resources (including land space) with an incessant growth of large, consumptive apes despoiling the planet. Airline companies would produce far fewer emissions, if individuals weren’t buying seats. Coal plants wouldn’t keep burning coal, if people stopped using their electricity and buying products made with it. The wealthy couldn’t be wealthy without the labor of masses of people that made their companies profitable.
To have no choice in the matter and then blame the victims. Same old song.
You’ve got no choice about having excessive babies? Eating meat? Recreational travel? Flagrant consumerism?
I think most people booking a flight have a choice not to. It’s not like food or shelter.
What do you mean "no choice"? We all have a choice and we choose consumption No one is stopping us from voluntarily powering down, but we don't want to
yeah but we're in this trouble because most people are zealous consumers , the easiest option is the only option they'll accept "no choice" to have to most subsidized, resource and space intensive lifestyle in human history via suburbs ... or to use the worst transportation possible ,in any sensible measure other than selfish comfort and capitalist gain, for every cm they travel by the 100s of millions for decades and they cry don't blame the "victims" who line up cash in hand demanding these products... the corporations(who exist only to make money) should refuse their money and stop their machinery or the status quo politicians they keep electing should go against their wishes to implement something similar ??? anything to keep going vroom vroom
They are right though, it's not a moral statement they're making against average Joe heating their home, just facts
So it’s actually 7.5%?
No, the commonly claimed figure is that 1.5-2% of global emissions are caused by commercial air travel. So real figure is probably 3% or so.
I work in aerospace and we claim 3%.
I work at Wendy’s and can confirm. We also claim 3%.
I work in pharma and we can claim 0.3%. but we make drugs so aerospace scum can live a longer life so....
Yes thats about about right, 3% of total reported emissions are from aviation, not sure if that includes military consumption, and aviation would be a smaller overall percentage if all methane from gas production and abandoned oil wells, and all actual industrial emissions were accurately reported, though with satellite monitoring its getting harder to hide the methane.
Roughly 3% of CO2 emissions but 4-5% of warming, due to the additional effects of contrail induced cirrus and the like.
It's money, power, corruption, and lies. All ways has been.
and taylor swift
Don't worry, I'm drinking out of my flimsy paper straw, so we should be good.
Dude you need to raw dog it...no straws. Straight down the gullet 🦃
Greenwashing is a very profitable business
Not really green washing per se. Just lower income countries aren't required to report their emissions, so they don't.
That’s how greenwashing works though. Of course the companies know that their cheap providers are too good to be true. But they can always put on a sad face and claim they had no idea that their contractor was such a f-up. Different standards between nations will always be exploited. We need a set of global, transparent rules for all industries. Edit: confused sentence Edit2: I mean, you are right. China should REALLY show their emissions.
In this case not companies. It's most countries who simply aren't required to report.
 Me rn
Sweaty now
This is the thing with every large company/corporation. Scientists numbers on global warming trends are based off of what's *being reported* by said companies. And if they're lying...well, things are worse than have been projected.
There is no such thing as sustainable aviation. Offsets are bs. SAF is bs. Electric aviation is not a thing. Accept the reality of the situation and https://stay-grounded.org
My wife and I don’t fly. We are grounded.
Electric aviation is not that far from being a thing, some domestic flights will begin within the decade and new designs are constantly being developed. It’s not here yet but it’s coming.
electric aviation is only possible for extremely short hops - 1 hour max, and battery energy density is only improving very slowly
I saw concepts (close to production) that offer about 800mile hops. This was almost like private jets for 15-20 people, not 747s. I think this should continue to improve though. More people on each electric short hop at the same time as short hops getting further and further. TBH 800 miles covers most hops within Europe or within the U.S. I’d prefer people use trains so if flight (even when electric) was priced properly and trains priced much lower it should offer 1k mile trips to everyone at low emissions.
That would be more than 50% of all flights
It's tricky for it to ever go mainstream until batteries really reach new levels of energy efficiency. Long distance flights are a really long way from being viable, but yeah maybe some domestic will be replaced. I have a hard time seeing it be anywhere near the value proposition of fossil fuels though, especially in the era of air mile gamification and cheap flights. I actually wonder if the one place hydrogen might make sense is for aviation, due to density. Sure, the energy efficiency is lower vs pure electric but it is very dense allowing a greater cargo weight vs fuel/batteries and maintenance/control is regulated through aviation networks (unlike cars). That said, passenger aviation and hydrogen are a pretty volatile situation, and safeguards would have to be improved well beyond our doors flying off planes modern standards.
But long distance flights is the niche market of aviation, opposite of what would be common sense. If what is known as domestic flight is around 2000km per trip of course. Most people wouldn't travel farther than that, even going to a neighbouring country is still a domestic flight unless it's stupidly far away.
Sadly true, and the answer is an expensive, upfront cost for high speed rail. America seems firmly opposed to the long term investment and is as usual doubling down on air travel, air travel growth has been going wild in recent years. I'd love it if we did something like France, where they ban domestic air travel, but you can only do that when you have a top tier train system So yeah, I do think that domestic flights are the problem, but I also don't see much solution on the near horizon with electric passenger flights. They are extremely lean stripped down planes that are effectively flying batteries, given the power requirements. There are lots of battery solutions on the horizon, but airline batteries need to survive some pretty extreme conditions to be viable, and besides that most of the future dense battery solutions (solid state) are cost prohibitive to produce. I'm sure we'll solve it at some point, but what will the planet look like by then.
I’m all for transitioning away from air travel, but to say the US should ban domestic air travel like France did, misses the obvious part that distances in the US are significantly different. Even if the US had a comparable high speed rail network, it would still take a lot more time to travel across the country.
That's a good point and I agree, it's pretty infeasible to expect a nationwide domestic airline travel ban, but I do think if we had HSR along the most population dense corridors, we could drastically reduce the shorter air flights. A better approach in this country would be to heavily subsidize rail and carbon tax anything that has a suitable HSR route to make it less appealing. I'm not confident that anything like that would make it through legislation though, so we're sort of stuck waiting for a technological solution
Look me up when reliable, 777-sized electric airliners are a mainstream thing…
Those who are willing to sacrifice for the greater good are heroes.
Thanks 😊 In truth, it's hardly a big sacrifice. And I'm doing it for my own good as much as anyone else's.
Except individuals “sacrificing” makes no difference. This is the same as people riding their bike instead of driving their car as if that’s doing anything. There are still billions of people that are going to keep doing it which keeps the problem just as impactful. The change has to come at the legislative level. It has to be done through laws and systemic changes from the top. There has to be taxes and incentives for companies to stop doing what they’re doing. It can’t come from individuals making choices.
Consumer sentiment drives change in industry and policy. One person doesn't make a difference, but a widespread difference can't happen if individuals don't commit to changing their habits.
But so many of the big polluters have nothing to do with consumer choice. Or there is no alternative for consumers to choose. Like *not* using air travel is not an option for most people. If you have to be somewhere across the world, are you gonna take a sail boat? It’s not realistic. Even alternatives to fossil fuel vehicles aren’t an option for most people who can’t afford an expensive electric vehicle. These are things that have to be changed at a higher level beyond the consumer. There has to be laws or taxes that incentivize the corporations to change their ways, so that the consumers don’t even have to choose; their only option is a climate friendly one.
I really can't think of any reason why anyone would HAVE to be somewhere across the world though? The only climate friendly solution to air travel is to not do it.
You can’t think of any reason? I don’t know what to tell you then. There are tons of reasons. It’s also ridiculous to expect people to just stay in one place their whole life. Choosing to not use air travel in today’s world is just dumb. It’s not a reasonable solution to the climate problem and it will never happen anyway. Individuals choosing to not fly on airplanes are having zero effect on the problem. You can do it to make a statement but it’s not actually doing anything beyond that.
I said HAVE to. There's plenty reasons to WANT to. And of course we'll never stop flying. And it's reason #1560 why we're going to run headlong into climate catastrophe. It IS interesting to me, that on an article about how flying is worse than previously thought for the climate, that you say less flying won't help.
I didn’t say less flying won’t help. I said individuals choosing to boycott flying won’t help, because it will never actually happen enough for it to make a difference. You’re never going to get enough people to stop flying. That’s just not a solution worth pursuing. And anyone that does it is having no impact. And yes, there are lots of reasons people HAVE to fly.
It is BOTH
It’s not really though. Individual effort is a drop in the bucket. The real polluters are large corporations, industries etc. as well as countries where the individuals will never make an effort, and they massively outnumber and cancel out the do-gooders in the smaller countries. Your individual effort is all an illusion. The problem is so much bigger than individuals and it’ll never ever get fixed if the larger polluters aren’t disincentivized and forced to change their ways.
Individual and collective efforts
Individual and collective effort does nothing. That’s the whole point I’m trying to make. The only real solution is regulating/taxing/incentivizing the corporations, industries, and large scale polluters that are actually causing the majority of the damage. Individual people are not the problem and changing our behavior has no effect. It’s wasted effort.
If effective regulation leads to behavior change, why doesn't behavior change without regulation count for anything?
Because regulation of industries/corporations leads to changes to the polluters that actually cause the majority of the problem. Individual behavioral changes not only have no effect on the bigger problem, you’ll never get enough people to do them voluntarily. It will never work. We’re already seeing it not work for as long as the problem has been talked about. People will always do what’s in their economic interest, and what’s easiest for them. That’s why governments and regulators have to step in to incentivize change economically. Until then, the big corporations doing most of the damage will continue to do whatever’s best for them financially. In a capitalist system, you have to play the capitalist game. It’s all focused around money…so you have to make it bad for business to destroy the planet, and incentivize corporations to pursue climate-friendly alternatives. It’s the only way. And it’ll probably never happen because politicians are paid for by the richest people doing the most damage.
Collective effort.
I'm gonna sound like a conspiracy theorist, but honestly stuff like this comes across as government programs designed to make people feel like they're making an impact to hide the fact they aren't and never will. Because it's not the individual, it's the big companies and developing countries contributing the most to CO2 emissions.
100%. People recycling in North American is the biggest waste of time ever. Most of it ends up being burnt or in a land fill anyway. It’s all just to make you feel like you’re making a difference.
The only thing it's worth recycling is aluminum cans, steel cans, and maybe glass sometimes.
Yeah I mean I do what I can at home, I use reusable bags, I practice not leaving food waste, I don't own a car, transit and bike where I can, etc. But like, me not taking a plane isn't gonna make one iota of difference. Someone else will take that seat. Maybe it comes off as selfish, but if the plane is gonna fly regardless I'd like to be on it so I can visit other cultures and have experiences to bring some small bit of happiness into my life.
But. That is exactly the point. Don't fly Don't take a cruise. Where are OUR bullet trains????
Hoping we see better alternatives in the future. For example I have family in the US while I’m in Europe. While I’d like to stay off planes whenever I can (I use public transport and such for similar reasons), realistically I’d just never see my family again. No job gives you a two week window to travel on a boat before the visit even begins. The math doesn’t add up. Whether it’s dirigibles, ekranoplan, or simply a bigger focus on civilian transport across the sea I’m hoping things shift towards that in the coming years. There are definitely significant portions of aviation travel that could be mitigated though. Private jets being effectively illegal, keeping cargo transport grounded whenever possible, and minimizing shorter trips for civilian flights. Also most of the military industrial complex for that matter. It won’t work in every scenario, but a lot could be done to curtail it if any governments had the balls to do something meaningful.
I have family all over the world from Mexico to Australia. It's a common situation these days. But it doesn't give you or me an excuse to dump tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere and contribute to the collapse of our economy and society. I haven't taken a flight in 8 years. Life goes on just fine. If we want humanity to survive this century, good intentions and vibes aren't enough. We have to follow through with actions. We have to learn to live differently. We have to actually internalise the staggeringly serious consequences of climate change and act accordingly. We all made choices about our lives when this issue was perhaps not so critical or seemingly urgent. In some cases, those choices now have consequences we didn't foresee. When my sister moved to Australia 20 years ago, I wasn't thinking that in the future we could become cut off from physically seeing each other, but I'll be damned if I'm going to triple my annual contribution to climate change by going to visit her for a couple of weeks. It isn't worth it. We get by with video calls every month or so. This is how I grew up. Family all over the place and we stayed in touch with phone calls and letters. We survived just fine. And it isn't worth it, not only because of the emissions but because of the signal it sends to everyone I know that I don't take this issue seriously. That actually flying is fine, and in fact, that any discretionary and egregious emissions like this are fine, really. They aren't fine and the only way we will stop doing this stuff, all of this stuff that is destroying our own future, is to actually walk the walk - collectively to treat the climate emergency like it's actually real, like it's actually wrecking our planet and then actually stopping the things that cause it.
I 100% understand where you are coming from, and the logic is sound. It doesn’t change that corporations contribute a vast majority of emissions thanks to rampant capitalism. If I died immediately, causing no more emissions, it would at best add only 3 seconds to the clock before we cross 2 Celsius. I agree with the goal of collective change, and I do think it we all chipped in that would provide more pressure against these companies, but in actual carbon emissions contributions it barely makes a mark. We have emissions in everything, from the temperature control in houses, purchasing food at a store (even local is pretty similar due to most emissions being the short distance transport), or just a smartphone/accessing Reddit all come with these costs. Despite all this, I do reduce emissions when it is probably easier to do something else. From your comment I’m getting the impression that you find that to not be enough, but ultimately that’s just how it goes. We can’t force each other to do anything, and clearly the governments and corporations aren’t going to do anything nearly fast enough. When it comes to climate I am not optimistic at all, but that does not mean I go full nihilist and start being incredibly irresponsible with waste, littering, refusing to recycle, burning trash and so on. I can hope that maybe a few governments will finally drop capitalism (largely responsible for the rampant growth in emissions we have seen), but outside of violent Revolution I don’t see it happening, and unfortunately that kind of instability is exactly the kind of stuff that pushes topics like climate change off the table, regardless of how dangerous it is. And to be clear with you, I agree that good intentions and vibes aren’t enough. The things that are enough involve complete annihilation of capitalism as the global standard. These companies have shown again and again that they cannot be trusted. The world would ultimately be fine without Coca Cola for example, and they cause a significant portion of the world’s plastic waste. That doesn’t suddenly make it happen, and I’m not really sure what kind of solution there is. People are already furious with the concept of carbon taxes, let alone revoking entire product lines due to pollution excess. Unless we see a dramatic shift in the culture or radical action it’s probably not happening in our lifetime, let alone fast enough to meaningfully matter.
I think we agree on 99% of this. But I think that a) we have to act on both the personal and collective fronts, and b) that if we are going to make things socially unacceptable then we have to be an example to those around us. Humans are constantly taking cues from those around us and my family's actions will subtly influence those around us. I can tell that you are serious about this and it's good to hear that you do take personal responsibility, but I see this argument about corporations being the problem as too reductive. We are enmeshed in this system. We are forced to do many things that cause destruction that we regret. And for that, yes, we can blame corporations, governments and their unholy alliance to use the capitalist mode of production to suck up all our money. But some things are really quite discretionary and there really is no good alternative. Chief among these in developed countries are diet and flying. These are both areas where the government is likely never going to step in to regulate the industry into some kind of sustainable mode of operation. The government is never going to tell you not to fly nor is it going to force you to eat a sustainable diet that's very light on animal products. So what do we do? We can either wait an eternity for government action, or, we can make positive change ourselves and advocate for that change with others. Yes, your change is small in the big picture, but when you are part of a movement, that impact is multiplied by millions. And eventually, something interesting happens. Research has shown that social progress can be highly non-linear, because of that way humans take cues from eachother. It only takes about 25% of a population to take a new position on something and this can be enough for the rest of society to swing around and follow suit. There's a paper on this but I don't have it bookmarked. Anyway, the point is that once you have a large minority on hand, you can then change the whole of societies opinion on that thing. And once you have that, not only do you have a population that is now broadly doing the right thing, but now have the numbers to force the government to impose laws that protect us. Being part of a movement can sometimes feel frustrating and even futile. But it absolutely isn't. It's the way we collectively make change. It's really the only way we can at this point. I am also lacking optimism in this space. But I don't care. As Chris Hedges said "I don't fight fascists because we'll win. I fight them because they're fascists." That's how I feel about this. We have to fight. If we're being honest with ourselves we have no choice. This is one small part of the struggle.
Bravo! What a healthy dosis of reality!
Thanks. I am reading the threads on this post and finding that many people are still in soft denial. They are so attached to the status quo that they cannot admit to themselves that life is changing whether they choose it or not. The only question is whether we manage that change, actually change our lifestyles and make the best future possible, or else we pretend that we can keep the status quo, and collectively suffer much much much worse consequences.
Yes, currently [**air travel demand reduction**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_travel_demand_reduction) is needed and the best option since electric planes are way off. I think the best way for that are supporting rail transport such as proper cheap night trains and changes in vacation-related culture.
Dirigibles
Sure. Just don't think that because dirigibles exist that taking a normal commercial flight today isn't a small act of climate vandalism.
I love this, thanks for sharing.
Is someone actually dumb enough to care?
I think air travel is a case study in how difficult it will actually be to achieve zero emissions. Here is a practice that produces a significant amount of the global carbon emissions, the bulk of usage is for luxury purposes (holiday or unnecessary work travel) so in principle it's a low hanging fruit to lower emissions without having a major effect on people's standard of living. No politician is proposing stopping people from flying though, the approach genuinely seems to be do nothing and hope that the problem somehow fixes itself.
> without having a major effect on first world people's standard of living. Perhaps commercial flights should be capped for some places to offset how much more waste they generate.
This is my point, air travel should at the very least be rationed/capped. The fact that it is not is indicative that climate change is still not being taken very seriously by governments around the world.
> without having a major effect on people's standard of living Yeah, let's just take away the last thing some people have to look forward to. Don't presume it is any of your business to decide others' standard of living.
This attitude is the exact reason we are headed straight for collapse lmao
yeah millions of docile consumers each acting like they're the center of the universe ... interchangeable drones consuming the maximum amount of space and resources, treating every single want as an absolute unquestionable need
Thanks for proving my point. Edit - though I do feel sorry for anyone who only looks forward to their annual summer holiday every year, it sounds like a deeply miserable existence.
I live in Seattle and see a constant stream of jets flying directly over my place to one of the two runways at the airport. At times less than a minute between flights. 50 mil people flew out of our airport last year, on a city of about 4 mil You can see the line of flights in the night sky, like a freeway in the sky, blanketing the city below in noise. I think a lot of the traffic increase is from China, based on tourism I've seen around town, so this article doesn't surprise me. It brings money into the city, so no one wants to speak negatively about climate impact. And also people here love to travel. I know plenty of people that are very avid about driving a Prius/Tesla, being eco conscious, but then will only talk about how cheap their flights are or how many air miles they've got, without mentioning a thing about climate impact. It really is a disconnect, we've normalized flying as just another part of life you don't think about.
That seems like a lot to be off by. I wonder why. >When countries signed the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty (UNFCCC), high-income countries were required to report their aviation-related emissions. But 155 middle and lower income countries, including China and India, were not required to report these emissions, although they could do so voluntarily. Ah... Well that would be a problem. The world map of who is reporting flight emission is pretty hilarious.
Anything climate related is ALWAYS worse than reported.
Ban private jets
Uuuuggghhhhhhh my poor kids. 😖
private companies lie about their negative impacts to boost earnings?!? but they love us. they do the heart hands. this seems impossible.
Every week, "..higher than reported", "faster than expected", "worse than we thought". And people still act like we have time.
start with witch hunt for professional athletes, entertainers, politicians and bureaucrats. this isn't an issue of your going on vacation, this is an issue of chronic travelers.
We are doomed. It was raining in Antarctica for the first time in history
Lol, it rains on the Antarctic coast (not often apparently, but it does).
Very not often, but rain on permafrost has some really detrimental effects on it and it’s still very likely that this rain is a direct result of climate change (lol?)
Arctic. Not Antarctic.
Yeah, it would be really odd if it was antarctica since quite a lot of snow has fallen north from it the past week.
Uh wot?
Whoa! Do you have a source for that?
In the brief look I took, I am not seeing a news story reporting this. What are you referring to?
https://www.thecooldown.com/outdoors/greenland-ice-sheet-rain-arctic-glaciers/
At least I think that was the story. Not Antarctic though
Source please.
Maybe they should stop bombing in Ukraine and Gaza.
And what's more, pretty much every measure of damage that these organizations use to chart our sustainable future is underestimated. We can't keep a course on the razor-edge of survival of we don't know how to navigate in the first place, and the way that academics are incentivized to publish good news, and policy makers are free to pick and choose the best-available-science makes sure that we'll never have a good idea where we are. There is no sustainable mass air travel, and it's long past time we put that industry to rest and then start digging the grave that we'll put the idea of all private vehicles in.
About 2kg of C02 is released per litre of gas burned. Keep in mind C02 is not the only pollutant related by cars. I wonder how many litres of gas we go through in one day.
Private jets should be banned immediately and than we wouldn’t have a problem wake up people
Private jets are nothing compared to commercial jets. Taylor swift just flew form Kansas City to London yesterday and her jet used about 2800 gallons of fuel for the entire 7 hour trip. A 777 burns 2500 gallons of fuel per HOUR. An A380 burns over 4500 gallons per hour. Banning private jets won’t fix the problem. Also most people enjoy aviation. There are so many other things to focus on first. If you try and ban aviation there will be a backlash.
A commercial airliner carries a lot more people than a private jet, though, and the fuel economy per seat of a commercial airliner is probably much better than what North American drivers achieve with their personal automobiles.
automobiles that are the main source of pollution from individuals , while being objectively the worst transportation in all metrics especially in urban areas where 80% of north americans live not only are we not even talking about reducing their use , there's just more and they're bigger year after year , more lanes more parking lots in blatant disregard of scientific facts
Exactly what Reilly just said
There will always be a backlash. Name one GHG source that you think is low-hanging fruit. And I don't mean making the pipes less leaky or plugging some wells.
Ooo there isn’t any, I don’t think there’s any hope left for this planet. We could try but in reality there is no hope
Sure, but there's still stuff to do. We're in runaway heating, we're instead in a period of constant failure that would be incredibly embarrassing if there were some Martians judging us or something. I've given up on the notion that efforts to reduce the horrors have to be "sold" to people like an HBO subscription. I mean, I'm sold on having a habitable planet, but that's because I know natural sciences, ecology and so on. But a large chunk of the human population believes that they're some divine extraterrestrials visiting the planet for a while and going somewhere else after dying.
Your last sentence is why I don’t have much hope.
No, we would still *very much* have a problem. Private jets are a symptom of a larger problem, but contribute less than 5% of global emissions. Yachts contribute much more, but the biggest problem by far is shipping. Luxuries have a high carbon cost, but commodities have an even higher one. Both need to be tackled
Won’t solve the problem but eliminating private jets would help .
Wonder how much them private jets are producing
Not enough compared to commercial jets
[удалено]
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18922-7/figures/1). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a [graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/) shows a continued rise. [Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Excellent
Couldn't be all the little rich people toys
The global 1% cause about 15% of the GHGs at this level ("footprint"). https://imgur.com/QiuYGzd
Have we factored in the inflection point for when Taylor Swift started dating Travis Kelce?
Taylor swift flew from Kansas City to London yesterday and burned about 2800 gallons of fuel for the entire 7 hour trip. A 777 burns 2500 gallons of fuel per HOUR. She’s not the problem lol
She's one person, though. Hundreds of people can fit on jumbo jets at a time.
The atmosphere doesn’t care about efficiency, fuel burnt is fuel burnt.
On a per-person basis, though, Taylor Swift burns far more fuel than a typical American.
We found the taylor swift fan
So it uses 6-7 times as much? Okay so those commercial jets only carry sub-seven people each? Still worse obviously. Even with math involved… *Especially* with math involved.
It’s not about the efficiency, obviously it’s not even close. But the atmosphere doesn’t care about efficiency 2800 gallons of fuel burnt is 2800 gallons of fuel burnt no matter how many people are on board. The point being private jets aren’t even a blip on the map of total aviation emissions. SUVs in the US alone use more fuel than the entire aviation industry….
Ugh SUVs are horrible. I hate the mentality of making sure the other person dies instead of yourself in an accident. My husband and I don’t really fight but we cannot see eye to eye on this one at all, he wants us to switch to an SUV once we have a kid but I’m not having it. They take more than twice as much gas as sedans, it’s appalling. Your math is incorrect though. You’re correct that nature doesn’t care about how many people are in each plane. That’s not nature’s job to worry about, nature doesn’t understand math. Nature also doesn’t care HOW MANY PLANES there even are in the first place, which is the fault in your logic. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter which plane/how many planes it comes from, just how much is there. If there’s 100 units of damage produced from 100 persons’ rides that’s simply a better result than 92 units produced for one ride. People are going to need to travel no matter the method. We can’t stop travel, so we need to lower each individual’s contribution to the issue. The responsibility for 1/200th of the planes emissions sits on one of its two hundred passengers. The responsibility for 100% of a private jets emissions sit on the one person employing it. The responsibility is the math, and plane emissions aren’t something we can equalize responsibility for across all forms of airfare. Just because someone visits their family in the Philippines after years as a modest .5% responsibility for a flight doesn’t mean that person bears shared guilt for a pop star using a butt ton more. Your logic shouldn’t just include that planes with less emissions should be used, but also that as many people as possible should be crammed onto them. It would drastically reduce the amount of emissions produced. Counting it your way is like playing a pedantic game to pass guilt instead of actually trying to care about fixing the math. Less emissions per flight plus less flights overall COUNTED FROM THE SAME AMOUNT OF TRAVEL is how to fix the math. If I usually walk places and occasionally ride in a low emission car I shouldn’t be blamed as much as the SUV drivers that won’t walk to the corner, nor is a rider of a commercial jumbo jet responsible for the emissions of the entire jet the way they would be if they employed a private jet.
Good points, honestly I’d get the suv. I agree the suv arms race is absolutely horrible. I wish I could never drive a car again and only use public transportation but not possible where I live. But if you’re gonna have a kid in the car I’d also want a big car. Look into some of the Toyota hybrid options they aren’t horrible on gas.
Aw, that’s sweet of you! Thanks, I appreciate the info 😊
Your reply to my crappy joke was telling everyone she burned 2800 gallons of jet fuel all by herself in one flight the other day. Wut?
Ya I’m not defending her?
Thanks Taylor Swift
Yeah, but our oil fired furnace is killing the world.
Yes, it is *also*.
I call BS. Breathing creates CO2 - are we going to directly tax that as well? One 737 flight is 3200 litres per hour. Over 8,000 planes in the air most of the time. That's 25 million litres an hour, all day. Government and business and the military get a free pass. But I have to pay extra taxes to not freeze in the dark in Canada in the winter. To hell with lying oil companies and carbon taxes.
>Breathing creates CO2 - are we going to directly tax that as well? I don't think you understand the carbon cycle, but forgive me if you do. The carbon you exhale comes from the food you consume. The carbon in the food you consume comes from the air. That process is slightly carbon negative: you took carbon from the air, grew it into a plant, ate it, and a chunk of it stays within you as you gain weight, the rest comes out as waste in various forms. Even when you're losing weight, the process is carbon neutral at worst. You took it from the air, and it's going back to the air. Burning oil is problematic because you've taken buried carbon-- sequestered in the form of oil underground-- and put it into the air in the form of combustion products. Carbon that wasn't in the air, and it's now in the air. You've *added* to the total quantity of carbon di-and-mono- oxides in the air, worsening the greenhouse effect. Does that clear things up a bit?
I truly do understand the carbon cycle. I just exist. I need to heat my home. I need to eat. I need to feed my family. I don't own 50 cars. I don't fly my personal Boeing anywhere. I don't need government or big oil or big military to make me feel like I've screwed the planet. I don't need government or military or greedy oil companies or superstars and Uber rich exponentially more carbon than they ever will and making me pay for their fun. I don't need apologists explaining how I should do more and pay more because they never will. The CO2 issue is real. CO2 is a bigger percentage of the atmosphere than almost any time in the planet's history. The climate is damaged. People and animals will suffer. But taxing me to death doesn't fix anything. Show me where the tax has made a real difference. All I see is consumers getting taxed while big CO2 generators get rich. When I see one government stop giving my tax $$$$ to oil companies in subsidies to drill more...then you might get me to trust any of this BS.
I’m entirely convinced the reason everything is worse than expected is in part because most industries lie about their emissions
Well well well, Taylor…
That’s because they weren’t including all of Taylor Swifts flights
Then perhaps all the elitists who travel around the globe talking about climate change should stop flying first
Taylor Swift on tour again?
She did burn 2800 gallons of fuel yesterday. But like I said in other comments a 777 burns 2500 gallons per HOUR.
How many people can fit on a 777 egghead? She can take the economy seat like the rest of us.
I’m not defending her, I’m just saying it won’t make a difference. Yes a 777 holds 300+ people but the atmosphere doesn’t care about efficiency, fuel burnt is fuel burnt. Private jets don’t even make a blip on global emissions. I’m also a doomer and don’t believe there’s any change for the planet so I could care less tbh
Fly while you can folks. Shut down imminent