Conversation

I think passenger ships are going to make a comeback at some point in the next 50y. International air travel is one of the few big climate impact vectors with no reasonable substitute. Domestic you have possibility of better all-electric high-speed rail...
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Isn’t shipping responsible for much more co2 emissions than air travel? Like 17% vs <2% Making ships less dirty + simplifying supply chains would prob make much more difference
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Not on a per-pound-per-mile basis, plus air travel has higher impact emissions because stratosphere altitude emissions cause about 4x more impact for same amount of CO2.
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My sense is that air travel is going to take a long time to go after - there is so much upside from solar (&wind) for land based uses, cleaner shipping and supply chain optimization, construction/ building practices. Flying is a red herring
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I disagree. Air travel has leveraged impact, and huge optics and social engineering benefits (pushes the most privileged to visibly become part of the solution). Hitting that will open the doors to action on bigger pieces of the pie.
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Not to say it won’t become a political hot topic - but like plastic straws, or fox hunting in the UK, it’s a symbol and a proxy for a whole bunch of other things
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I knew you’d make plastic straw comparison 😆 The analogy is off. Plastic straw bs is based on misinformation around a rounding-error part of a problem (0.5% of oceanic plastic waste) Air travel is like 10% under proper accounting, and the thinking around it is mostly correct.
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Semi related I’ve for a long time been noodling on the idea of a calculator / search engine for environmental impact. It’s starts easy “how much emissions do i produce to go from London to Paris” but you can tune it - car / regular rail / high speed rail and so on down
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