What Do We Do about Air Travel?
Denver, Colorado
For trips of more than a few hundred miles, most of us fly. And considering the hassles of TSA security screening, flight delays/cancellations, cramped seats, rude passengers, and the wildly-fluctuating prices of tickets and sneaky add-on costs, flying has become a giant pain-in-the-ass. And, oh yes, flying is also responsible for more climate-changing carbon emissions per mile that any other form of transportation. Consider, for example, the following graph from BBC News (“Should you Drive, Fly, or Take the Train”, https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49349566). The article compares forms of transportation in Europe but is applicable on the other side of the Atlantic as well.
Some items of interest
in the graph:
- Shorter domestic
flights generate more greenhouse gas emissions than longer flights per
kilometer (or per mile). This is because
of the relatively huge amount of fuel consumed each time a plane takes off and
lands. Therefore, maybe we should try to
drive for shorter trips, especially if we are taking passengers in our cars.
- Train travel
generates 1/5 or less of the greenhouse gases emitted by flying. Note the differences between “domestic rail”
and “Eurostar”. The latter train runs on
renewable electricity primarily generated by French nuclear power plants while “domestic
rail” trains rely on electricity which could be generated by natural gas or
even coal. Or, in the case of the U.S.
outside the Northeast Corridor, trains are powered by diesel-electric
locomotives which emit more CO2 than electrics but are considerably
more efficient than the internal combustion engines of planes or cars.
- Bus vs. coach? I assume the graph is contrasting emissions
for city buses as opposed to the long-distance buses which are called coaches
in Europe.
- Cruise ship
emissions are not shown on the graph, but the BBC News article suggests that greenhouse
gases generated by cruise ships are similar to those from flying. Ferries generate much less unless you are
transporting your car on the ferry.
It’s seems like the graph is suggesting we limit air travel to long-distance trips, take direct flights when possible, and use other forms of transport for shorter trips.
Still we fly, but why? North Americans just don’t have other good options for long trips. Trains and buses take forever and travel by car isn’t much better. And for travel overseas, we really have no choice.
So what do we do? Give up travelling? Actually, some people think we should. Consider, for example, a recent essay in The New Yorker which presents a really negative view of tourists and tourism (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-case-against-travel). Still, I’m not about to stop travelling (including flying) and am not suggesting you do either. I am suggesting that we become more aware of the collective effects of flying on the earth’s atmosphere and think about how we can personally lessen our impacts.
For those of us who are going to continue flying, there is a way to mitigate the effects of our actions. We can purchase “carbon offsets” also known as “carbon credits”. The idea is to contribute to (buy credits from) organizations which have programs that reduce the carbon in the atmosphere. The most common example of these programs is planting trees in various locations around the world but also includes providing more energy-efficient cooking stoves in poor countries, installing solar panels, and furnishing communities with wind turbines. So, for example, for a given trip, you buy enough credits to plant the number of trees needed to remove a volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere equivalent to the volume of CO2 generated by your flight or flights.
If my partner, Judy, and I fly from Denver to Fort Lauderdale, Florida to visit her mother, our 1842 mile flight x 2 (round trip) x 2 people generates 1.52 tons of carbon. According to Conservation International’s website (https://flightcalculator.conservation.org/), the price of offsets to cover this trip for the two of us is $32.08.
An article in Condé Nast Traveler (https://www.cntraveler.com/story/how-to-purchase-carbon-offsets-for-your-next-flight) explains more about carbon offsets, noting that some airlines now have programs that let you purchase them when you buy your ticket.
From the 1980 movie, “Airplane!” Source: wallpapersafari.com.
Some people even purchase offsets to cover their personal carbon generation for all their activities over a given year. One organization that will enable you to do this is Terrapass (https://terrapass.com/about-us/terrapass-difference/). Judy and I have bought carbon offsets from the Southern Plains Land Trust which has been purchasing thousands of acres of livestock grazing land in southeastern Colorado and converting it to prairie wildlife habitat (https://southernplains.org/).
There is a cautionary note about carbon credits from Grist, a climate change website. I’d suggest that you see the article, “Carbon Offsets are Riddled with Fraud” before making a purchase (https://grist.org/regulation/carbon-offsets-are-riddled-with-fraud-can-new-voluntary-guidelines-fix-that/).
I invite comments from readers on the subjects of flying and carbon credits.
- Have you been flying
less in recent years? Is it because you
are concerned about the environmental impacts of flying, the annoying nature of
flying, or both? Have you been using
other forms of transportation as an alternative to flying?
- Do you have any personal
experience with carbon offsets?
You can go to the bottom of this article to “enter comments” to leave us your thoughts. Or you can send me an email at wbmahoney@gmail.com and I will publish your comments anonymously adding your first name and city.
Flying about the same amount, just feeling more guilty about it. No personal experience with carbon offsets. Found this article which gives a pretty nuanced assessment of their effectiveness. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/18/climate/offset-carbon-footprint-air-travel.html Electric planes are coming eventually. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/14/1069724/futuristic-electric-planes-evtols/#:~:text=The%20future%20of%20flight%20will,its%20electric%20plane%20by%202025.
ReplyDeleteYour reference to an article on electric airplanes reminded me of another environmentally-friendly skies development: Sustainable aviation fuel. A company called SkyNRG produces the stuff which is made from "waste and excess raw materials" and can be blended with tradition jet fuel. The manufacturers claim that their sustainable fuel has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions from flying by 80%. American, JetBlue, and Alaska Airlines have committed to use it. For more information, see https://www.treehugger.com/environmental-impact-flying-vs-driving-5116489.
DeleteClimate crisis??? Really??? Isn’t that what climate does is change? Did all the cars of the Jurassic cause the death of the dinosaurs???
ReplyDeleteWhy doesn’t anyone talk about our very real crisis of dumb x 10 politicians?
Brent
Southwestern Louisiana
Yes, climate does change but the geologic record indicates that changes in the past have occurred very slowly over thousands of years except as noted below. The changes we are currently experiencing have taken place in only a few decades.
DeleteAs for the extinction of the dinosaurs, it took place around 66 million years ago at the end of what is now called the Cretaceous Period (80 million years after the end of the Jurassic Period). For the past 40 years, it has been generally accepted by geologists that the sudden and simultaneous mass extinction of around 75% of the earth's plant and animal species at that time was caused by the impact of a huge asteroid (6 to 9 miles wide) in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. The resulting ejection of vaporized gypsum into the atmosphere had long term effects on the earth's climate and food chain.
Regarding the dumb times 10 politicians that Brent mentions, remember that "we the people" elected them.
I have been passionate about clean energy professionally for over three decades. For your information, United Airlines is foremost in promoting sustainable aviation fuels. Though it still emits CO2 and hydrocarbon vapors, its source is renewable energy. United also offers passengers an option to pay extra to contribute to the cost of sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs). Most importantly, because of the Inflation Reduction Act along with many state level credits, the cost of SAFs is coming down!
ReplyDeleteRavi
Denver area
Will, with your new blog focus, thought you might be interested in the attached paper. Here is a brief intro to the material in the 47 page file attached:
ReplyDeleteWilliam Happer, professor emeritus in physics at Princeton University, and Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), argued that the claims used by the EPA to justify the new regulations are not based on scientific facts but rather political opinions and speculative models that have consistently proven to be wrong.
“The unscientific method of analysis, relying on consensus, peer review, government opinion, models that do not work, cherry-picking data and omitting voluminous contradictory data, is commonly employed in these studies and by the EPA in the Proposed Rule,” Mr. Happer and Mr. Lindzen stated. “None of the studies provides scientific knowledge, and thus none provides any scientific support for the Proposed Rule.”
Hot stuff considering what I generally read in the main stream media.
Jeff
Denver area
The "Proposed Rule" referred to is the EPA's Proposed Fossil Fuel Power Plant Rule. It covers “New Source Performance Standards for Greenhouse Gas Emissions From New, Modified, and Reconstructed Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; Emission Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Existing Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule”. He is a link to Happer and Lindzen's 47 page letter of July 23, 2023 to the EPA administrator:
Deletehttps://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Happer-Lindzen-EPA-Power-Plants-2023-07-19.pdf
I did a bit of research on Happer and Lindzen and have learned that they are part of the 3% of climate scientists who do not accept the science regarding human-caused climate change. If you would like a summary of their ideas (without all the technical arguments presented in the 47-page letter referenced above), you may want to read their short article in The National Review from April 2021: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/climate-emergency-not-so-fast/.
As I stated previously, a premise of this series of posts is that human-caused climate change is a reality. I am exploring, with the help of readers, what we as individuals can do about the climate crisis. Therefore, I am not going to get drawn into an argument about the merits of Happer and Lindzen's work or their conclusions that the climate crisis is a hoax.
Dear Will:
ReplyDeleteThis is the hardest question you can ask me, because I have a FAA pilots license.
There are generally speaking 2 types of fuel used in aviation.
1. Aviation gas (Avgas) used in small planes.
2. Jet fuel in planes that have jet engines. By the way, the cost of a jet engine is something in the 5-50 MILLION dollar range.
There are almost no jet engines available in small planes. They run on aviation gas. The problem with aviation gas is that it contains LEAD (Pb) which has been banned in gasoline for US cars since 1 January 1996. Lead cannot be banned in small aircraft engines because they would eventually blow up. This is because they have to get a small plane from the earth's surface to as high as 20,000 feet in a time span of 15-20 minutes and need the lead as an additional piston lubricant.
For years, aviation experts have been trying to get the Pb out of aviation fuel. The US makes about 16 million gallons of aviation fuel for small planes. This is less than 0.1% of jet fuel used. Jet fuel does NOT contain lead.
A lot of work is done to build planes using electricity. You can buy electric planes now. The range is about 80 miles before you need to recharge the battery. Compare this range with that of the Cessna 182 I owned which had a range of about 1000 miles. So if your goal is only to fly from Centennial Airport south of Denver to Colorado Springs with one passenger, you could look into buying an electric single engine plane. In the future, we hopefully will get lighter batteries, perhaps charged by solar panels. Solar charging may work in Colorado with a fair amount of sun, but never in Alaska in the winter because there is not much sun and the distances are great.
André,
Las Vegas, Nevada
I grew up in Detroit and recall that whenever the local politicians advocated for better mass transit the big 3 automakers marshalled formidable opposition. This opposition is now national. Big auto and big oil partially explain why the US lacks rapid train service. Other sources of resistance may be linked to the individualistic aspect of American culture.
ReplyDeleteI don't think we can 100% suddenly go off fossil fuels. Thanks to Exxon and Shell, BP, Chevron, the Seven Sisters, and countless politicians the past 40+ years, we have all ended up in a bad situation. Stopping fossil fuels needed to begin in the mid to late 1970s. If we suddenly go to net zero the impacts on civilization will be catastrophic. Today, a new video came out showing that the heat generated by things like cars and furnaces and stoves also adds heat-energy to the atmosphere above and beyond the CO2 emissions. There is also the aerosol masking effect, which will stop if CO2 emissions cease, decreasing the earth's alibedo to the extent that the planet might jump 1 degree C in a matter of days.
https://youtu.be/9vRtA7STvH4?si=QVnd8vI08K8CrAjS
ReplyDeleteStrikes me as pure virtue-signaling. That plane is flying whether or not little old me is sitting in it.
ReplyDeleteBob, it is not my intention to portray myself as virtuous with anything I say in this blog. In fact, at my age, I really couldn't give a damn about what people think of me. However, if I can get a few people to become more aware about possible solutions to the climate problems we are facing, I will feel some sense of accomplishment.
DeleteI agree with your statement that the plane is flying whether you are sitting in it or not. However, if we could get thousands of people to either fly less or do something like purchase carbon credits to plant trees, etc., it seems like we could have an positive impact.
Here is an article questioning the legitimacy of carbon credits: https://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/billions-at-risk-legitimacy-of-carbon-offsets-questioned/
ReplyDeleteJudy
Denver
Judy, Thanks for the link. I read this short article which points out that there have been abuses in some carbon credit (offset) programs particularly by big corporations trying to "greenwash" their carbon usage. To me, it says we need to be careful about purchasing offsets for air travel, etc. if we don't know exactly how they are going to be used.
DeleteRecently, I’ve been going to the local airport to buy newspapers in Dutch, French, and German while staying with my daughter and her family in Geneva, Switzerland. I see a lot of feel-good articles from climate activists. I just read one from a British guy who went by train from England to Marrakech, Morocco. The trains and ferries took him three days and two nights in nice hotels. The flight to Marrakech would have taken four hours and cost about $200.00. His train trip cost $600. I liked his effort and report but his CO2 reduction (train versus flying) was essentially zero.
ReplyDeleteI've wondered what science has to tell me about climate change. I started by looking up Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) who wrote that famous book in 1798, “Essay on the principle of population". He was a very misanthropic scientist and was later to be proven wrong. The number of errors in many scientific publications has not changed much since 1798. Maybe there is hope that someday we will get the correct/honest answers to the legitimate questions we have about climate change.
There is an old saying in medicine that the best treatment for a disease starts with the correct diagnosis. All we do now is treat the symptoms of climate change. If a person has a toothache and you give them an aspirin, he/she will tell you that they feel much better. But the only real cure is to refer them to a dentist who will do a root canal. But that's too emotionally stressful for most people to hear.
André
Las Vegas, Nevada
Whether you need a root canal or some serious efforts to address the climate crisis, I suppose that Al Gore's assessment applies. Both are "inconvenient truths"!
ReplyDelete