maybe, but it's also a national embarrassment that most of the major population centers in the US Northeast seemingly cannot be connected by 350 km/h high speed rail such as what China has very rapidly built since 2010. Flights of 1-2 hour duration between many locations in North America should be replaced with rail in most scenarios.
either the political will or budget to do this apparently does not exist.
It's clear that the US cannot build high speed rail. Since 2009, California has spent tens of billions on HSR and has nothing to show for it. There are too many hurdles to overcome. Existing rail lines have turns that are too sharp for HSR, so the government must use eminent domain to take people's property. Construction is delayed by environmental reviews. There are issues with noise. You have to build train stations in urban areas where real estate is ridiculously expensive. Smaller towns along the route can threaten to block or delay the rail line unless they get political favors. And so on.
The easiest way to improve transport in the US would be to abolish the TSA and go back to pre-9/11 screening. That would reduce the time needed to arrive before a flight, making flying more competitive for shorter distances. When electric planes are introduced, they'll most likely be for shorter flights at first (since battery tech won't have the range for cross-country or cross-oceanic flights). Then we'll have similar travel times as high speed rail, similar environmental impact, and more flexibility than HSR (since it's easier to fly more/fewer planes to various airports than to build new tracks).
HSR in America is a victim of American oligarchy's obsession with de-taxing land.
Same reason why a 2 bed in SF is so absurdly priced.
Higher taxes on land will reduce its value - making land purchases cheaper. This will bring American HSR costs more in line with China's.
China also reduces land acquisition costs by building a lot of elevated HSR and reduces overall HSR costs through economies of scale - something that doesnt work when you limit HSR to one area.
Probably going to be the last thing to decarbonize.
Might be able to run off biodiesel or similar. Even if biofuel is double the cost of current dino juice, fuel makes up 20-40% of major airline’s opex, so it’s not like crude-free flying will kill the industry.
Might even be made up with increased aircraft efficiency, more intermediate stop operations (saving 15-30% in fuel by flying 2x medium haul instead of 1x long haul) and better load factors (“revenue management”).
Not necessarily, we could use plain hydrogen. (Could probably even do it with beamed power, but that’s a tech I consider to be insanely unwise to deploy).
Density is almost irrelevant, all that matters here is cost.
And one order of magnitude is more than enough. But yeah, besides planes and rockets, hydrocarbons are important in several industrial processes. Besides, we don't want to replace all of the cars, trucks and ships in a single decade.
