Air travel is already quite efficient. If we break it down per passenger, the gas mileage is around 50mpg. Cutting total flight distance only cuts the amount of time that the aircraft is in it's most efficient travel regime (high level cruise). With no corresponding change to the amount of fuel used to climb up to cruising altitude.
Adding extra days to every trip is not cost free. Mode switching for travel is also not cost free. Creating gigantic airports at the nearest points between continents etc... Large scale, expensive and difficult to coordinate changes; which are trying to squeeze more efficiency out of an already optimized system.
Don't mean to sound overly critical, these are interesting ideas on systemic change.
> Adding extra days to every trip is not cost free.
Ah, it's a bit (read: very) terrible that the system we now live in focuses so much on work and "productivity" that for the most of us, we only get just a few days a year to enjoy our lives. Even less for Americans. And even less for the people working in slave-ish conditions.
Unless you're a billionaire, I guess, then life's a bit easier. Says me, who, with my middle class income, is part of the 1% in the global scale...
Too bad we used productivity gains to consume more rather than give us more leisure time. I think if I had Tim Bray flexibility, I’d be willing to do take nothing but bicycle touring vacations.
I’m not sure if it’s what the author intended, but I understood that to be talking about the actual trip being more expensive. I’ve looked into sea travel before for short (e.g. Melbourne to Tasmania) and longer (e.g. Melbourne to New Zealand), and it consistently ends up a good deal more expensive than air travel because it’s basically a hotel and restaurant for overnight or however many days or weeks or whatever, whereas with air travel that part is minimised, and accommodation and food at both ends can be much cheaper (e.g. free accommodation between one’s own home and friends’ homes).
>emissions tend to do more damage at high altitude than they do at ground level
I've always been a bit dismissive of aviation as a carbon emissions contributor because globally it only accounts for around 2%. Thanks for pointing this out, I was unaware of this fact. Is the relationship between altitude and warming effect known? Are we talking linear or something worse?
I know it's boring and too simple for people to cope with, but a carbon tax solves this problem.
At the correct carbon price, which would only be about 10% more for flights, you could just take whatever transport was cheapest and that's it. Job done, planet saved.
The trains and boats and planes would compete to offer faster, cheaper transport. Some people would choose to do other things.
It's systemic change we need, not individuals re-arranging their travel plans on what they vaguely feel is a better way.
Most of the changes are utterly boring, like apparently cargo ships can save money and carbon by going 10% slower.
Business cases for little plane sized hydrofoil boats will open up:
Or e-methanol powered ships or whatever. It doesn't really matter what the eventual solution is, what matters is that we start pricing in the externalities.
Luckily, we as a global society are actually doing this, and having far more impact than any individual ever could, but we could have done this faster and cheaper, and we still could accelerate it if we understand this.
On the particular topic of transatlantic flights, regional air mobility looks likely to be a thing, so this same plan could work just with electric planes at either end rather than/as well as trains. And carbon taxes would probably push us in that direction.
carbon tax applied across the spectrum has an outsized impact on the poor and working class despite a lower spend. an economic solution without considering class impact is risky
In Canada, it’s implemented as a carbon dividend, IIRC. The tax earnings are distributed to the entire population, so those who pollute less get more than they spent. Presumably that includes people who consume less because they’re poor.
Depends where you put the revenue. Use it to fund a UBI, if the tax is set to raise $100b and everyone on earth gets $12.50, then that benefits the poor.
that’s why I’m in favor of systemic change that doesn’t bias against the global south or working class, you can have both and better avoid capitalist whitewashing techniques that mask yet another form of working class oppression
From your replies you seem to be genuine, but I think you've probably picked up this ides that carbon taxes hurt the poor from someone who wasn't genuine and didn't actually care about the poor or believe a carbon tax would be bad for them.
I don't know where to start deprogramming you from this misinformation, but maybe just look into the actual discussions about the real carbon prices already in use im the world.
Not the politics when one is proposed in the USA, but the boring implementation details in the countries that have used them for decades.
A just transition and carbon pricing are in no way opposed.
Bear in mind that Covid has taught us what we can do when we need to, without commuting to work. I suspect a lot of CFOs are going to slap the big kibosh on routine business travel unless you can prove you can't do the job via videoconference.
I’ve been traveling from Hamburg to Barcelona by bike for the last ~6 weeks. Total is about 2700km. It surely could be done faster but I’ve met people along the way and did some work.
Also you get to connect with locals and nature along the way. Another thing that’s totally lost when you do the airborne thing.
Crossing an ocean is ofc a different beast but I’m also
excited for a re-emergence of blimps!
> I have read that recovery from jet-lag takes on the order of one day per timezone crossed.
"She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage."
Our world will burn up to a crisp before anything like this comes to pass. Human Nature is borne in selfishness, and anytime I read the words ‘Save the Planet’ I begin to twitch.
Humans will continue to travel at the fastest speed to the most desired locations that they can afford as often as possible. Altruism is great as a neighborhood-level practice but as public policy, it is leading us to an extinction event.
Carbon needs to be priced at true cost upstream for any changes to happen. If it costs $100,000 to fly to Nice, guess what? You’re going to stay home and find a new appreciation for Vancouver. Or, if your desire is great enough, innovate a means of travel that you can afford.
More importantly, articles like this are deleterious to the actual work of degrowth and drawdown. These are existential problems at scale. We need to get real about human nature and stop imagining we can recycle or electric car our way out of the looming extinction event.
> Carbon needs to be priced at true cost upstream for any changes to happen. If it costs $100,000 to fly to Nice, guess what? You’re going to stay home and find a new appreciation for Vancouver.
The price increase from accounting for the true carbon cost is more like 10% than 10,000%.
I kind of agree with most of this (and made a similar comment) but..
> We need to get real about human nature and stop imagining we can recycle or electric car our way out of the looming extinction event.
Both recycling and electric cars are cheaper and better for the planet. If you put a price on carbon, both would be done more, which is good.
Individuals doing it aren't going to help, because nothing an individual does will help on a global scale, but systemic recycling and EVs are definately part of the solution.
It might be a nice idea if you have time to burn, but a pain point is making all the connections between different routes.
And honestly, if you're mostly going for the destination (maybe a meeting, a wedding, etc), rather than a nice 'road trip', you should include all the hotel stays in the carbon budget.
IMHO aviation will be fixed with sustainable synthetic fuels. And in any case, it doesn't deserve it's current demonization, compared to say deforestation for cattle feed, etc, or just agriculture generally.
However, I do think trains, and sleeper trains are an overlooked option for land travel compared to planes. Unfortunately, they're often more expensive than a short-hop flight.
> I do think trains, and sleeper trains are an overlooked option for land travel compared to planes.
I don't see how sleepers would ever be a viable alternative. Trains stop being competitive with planes after only a few hundred miles, and that's too short for sleeper cars to make sense to put on the trains.
If I’m taking a weekend trip, I’d be happier to wake up in the destination city from a sleeper train than to take an 0600 flight to arrive around the same time.
If I have a need for transit and a need for sleep anyway, I’d rather the sleeper train take 8 or 9 hours. (I did basically this with a Eurail pass in college. I’d often plan to visit cities that were 8+ hours apart by train and just sleep (in regular train seats) rather than pay for a hotel.
Very off topic, but if the author considers Narita and Heathrow unpleasant experiences, I believe they had the pleasant luck of never having to use LAX or JFK.
100%. I do LHR-JFK fairly regularly, and getting back to Heathrow is always a reminder of what a major airport should be like. Excluding current staffing/baggage issues.
> Earth can’t afford for everyone to routinely hop on a jet-fueled aluminium cylinder and fly ten hours at a time.
Flying is expensive enough that it's already not something that everyone does routinely. And once we get electric planes, then Earth will be able to afford that.
> we decided incorrectly that we needed to travel one time-zone per hour.
That wasn't incorrect. I'd rather put up with some jet lag than for all of my travel to take several times as long.
Um, the technology outlook for electric planes that can cross the Atlantic/Pacific at 900km/h is not very promising. Maybe with green hydrogen? But really nothing rivals the energy density of petroleum fuels. It's a hard problem.
> really nothing rivals the energy density of petroleum fuels
This isn't actually true, and gets said a lot more than it really should.
This same argument was made for EVs, and here we a short time later, and it turns out that EVs are much more efficient as was predicted by nerds who did the sums before it was practical as a business.
But, you'll say, what about trucks or busses, they need much more fuel and therefore it's still all about energy density?
And I'll say, no, electric busses and trucks are being rolled out right now, because they are cheaper than diesel busses. Because they are more efficient.
Okay, but what about planes, you can't make an electric plane can you, so it's all about the energy density.
Except people are making electric planes, and their pitch is that they're going to be cheaper, because they're more efficient.
We could do shipping etc. but I think you get the point, so we'll skip to:
Wait, you say, really long distance flight that's not possibly with heavy batteries is it, so I'm still right.
Well, no, because you were attaching some magical properties to a fuel that we semi-randomly use today because we found a bunch of it lying around and didn't have anything better.
If kerosene didn't exist, and you had the tech to make it (which we do) why would you make it? Well, it's got the most energy density, right. Except methane and hydrogen score higher on gravametric energy density, so you could make those instead.
But you say, those need cooled and pressurised, not realising that this disproves your own claim that the only thing that matters is energy density. It's the whole system efficiency and cost that matters, just like the familiar EV story.
We mostly use fossil fuels for historical path dependency lock-in reasons. We'll continue to use synthetic versions of them in jets for the same reason, nobody wants to redesign working planes just to save some energy on fuel.
But at some point, new planes, and new air transport systems, will get designed around what is actually the cheapest form of energy we have lying around, and avoiding the externalities of carbon, NOx, and high altitude condensation and they'll probably look quite different than they do today and energy density will be only one of many factors.
A neat anecdote to summarise this, there's a company making 19 seater jets that are electric. They asked a few people in the business, do you fly any planes that size, and they all said no. But one regional airline said, no we don't, but we used to fly planes of that size all the time. We switched because the fuel cost economics for short flights was worse than long flights. We changed what we did, flying further in bigger planes, for cost reasons. They're now attempting to go back to more smaller planes.
> Is there really a market for 19-seater electric aircraft?
> A few decades ago, 19-seater aircraft were very common. Since then, the large acquisition and maintenance cost of turboprop jet engines have made 19-seaters uneconomical. Whereas regional planes averaged at 20 seats in the 1980s, today they average 80 seats.
> Why don’t airlines fly as many 19-seaters anymore?
>When the engine cost-of-ownership can be the same for a 19-seater and a 70-seater, and engine wear is the same whether you fly a 100 km as a 1000 km route, flying short hops with small turboprop aircraft is simply not profitable to airlines.
> How does going electric change the economic equation?
> Our electric motor is about 20 times less expensive than a similarly-size turboprop, and about a 100 times less expensive than the cheapest turbofan. More importantly, maintenance costs are more than 100 times lower. These lower operating costs will make 19-seater electric aircraft competitive to 70-seater turboprop aircraft.
> A neat anecdote to summarise this, there's a company making 19 seater jets that are electric.
The ES-19 is propeller-driven, not a jet. Its no-reserve range is projected to be 250 miles. That may make for a suitable island-hopper, but is neither a jet nor a jet-substitute.
That was just a mistake, I know they are planning short range propeller planes.
My two points that got kind of mashed together are:
1) that the current jets run on kerosene and will run on synthetic e-kerosene in the near future but if you have to synthesize the fuel from scratch anyway then long chain alcohols or methane or whatever will also be on the menu as potential fuels to synthesise, and we can evaluate them on multiple dimensions (toxic, volatile, cheap) to see what's best.
2) Once you throw the old paradigm out, there's no reason to expect the same thing to appear but electric/carbon neutral. An EV doesn't have to ape ICE cars in every respect, even though that was the initial reference point. It can be both better in some dimensions and worse in others, like iPads vs laptops. The reboot allows for some (re-)exploration of the design space of the whole transport system as well as the individual vehicles. Smaller cargo boats and planes will probably make more sense for the reasons given around low maintenance and fuel costs as well as increased automation. We know sythetic e-fuel jets are technically possible, but will they make business sense compared with something new?
> Flying is expensive enough that it's already not something that everyone does routinely. And once we get electric planes, then Earth will be able to afford that.
Having just booked a train ticket this morning let me tell you a story.
Munich - Berlin, just shy of 600km, in a country that's supposed to be not completely shit in regards to train infrastructure (I personally disagree, but that's another topic).
It cost me 180 EUR and it's 2 times 4h. Because I need to be there at noon on my arrival day I basically only have the choice of 2 different trains, I really hope there's no problem. Oh, and I had to pay to reserve a seat. I don't remember ever having to stand in a plane.
Just for fun I actually asked for the flight price, which was... 140 EUR. 2 times 1h10 or something. (I know, I know, it's not completely realistic, but the airport is actually closer than the main station for me, probably 1:1 in terms of time to get there). (both prices incl. return, btw).
But the main problem? I don't trust Deutsche Bahn that I will arrive on time. Of course there are no proper overnighters anymore, just some "oh of course you can take a 9h trip in a seat where you will sit uncomfortably".
I just checked -- you can buy a ticket from Munich - Berlin today, for any day you want in December, for € 17,90. Direct ICE train, travel time between 4h30m - 5h20m (depends on the departure time).
Of course, the reliability of Deutsche Bahn is another question.
It's August. I don't want to travel to Berlin in December, I want to travel today or tomorrow.
However if you do want to book stuff months out, advanced purchase tickets are a staple of the airline industry. From Berlin you can get to a host of locations for about €20 each way, including Venice, Milan, Budapest, Madrid etc - far further than a domestic train.
Yeah I know there are some methods, but in my case it's in September, 3 weeks out and for reasons out of my control I could not book in May already. I'm not even taking "spontaneously tomorrow", and last I checked even 1-2 months in advance can still be more like 60 rather than 20 :(
>> we decided incorrectly that we needed to travel one time-zone per hour.
> That wasn't incorrect. I'd rather put up with some jet lag than for all of my travel to take several times as long.
You just have different opinions. OP is claiming that, for them, taking half a week to travel 10.000kms is OK, should be the default and the rest of our lifestyle should accommodate that. And I tend to agree with them: it would be much cool to have 5-6 weeks holidays instead of 3 and spend 7/10 days to go and come back, which will be an enjoyable part of the holidays as well.
> it would be much cool to have 5-6 weeks holidays instead of 3
I get 30 days paid holiday per year. I could take all my holiday in one lump and spend 6 weeks travelling there and back. But I'd massively prefer to have more, shorter, holidays and not spend half my precious holiday time travelling.
And, obviously, I'm lucky. I work for a German company. When I worked in Australia the standard was 20 days, which makes a 10-day travelling time completely unworkable.
There are advantages to killing off bulk tourism, I'll agree. But I also don't think we want to go back to a world where only the idle rich get to travel.
No, but I'd like to go towards a world where most people can and want to slow-travel (with more holidays, better train networks or electric planes doing 2h max flights)
I don’t think electric planes means the “Earth can afford that”. It may not survive the mining, and processing of the resources for producing electric planes or the disposing of used up batteries. I think the only way the “Earth survives” is for their to be far fewer people or far less consumption per capita. Neither of those is going to happen in the intermediate future though.
This made me realize that 'saving the planet' is actually 'we need to save ourselves and in order to do that we need to save the planet'. The earth and mother nature will certainly adapt (which they already do!) with or without people.
100% this, and this is why it's so dumb when people say things like "everyone needs to stop having kids to save the earth". Future generations are the only reason we should care about any long-term environmental issues. If humanity were about to go extinct, I don't see any issue with the last surviving human burning all of the remaining fossil fuels just for fun.
Yeah I think people think remarkably short term about the earth. If we are really assholes about climate change and acidify the shit out of the oceans and cause a mass extinction event, in 1000, years the ocean will just be back to life teeming with whatever life is best suited to survive in those conditions.
I'd happily sacrifice the speed of plane travel for a slower forms of travel with none of the hassle and discomfort of being stuck at airports while flights are delayed or canceled, or the lack of personal space while in transit, regardless of the need to reduce our ecological footprint. But only so much - taking a week to travel what takes 20 hours now doesn't seem so bad, but a month would be crazy.
I had to drive about 45 miles on a donut tire between Provo and SLC, and decided to put on my flashers and drive about 10 miles per hour to reduce the wear on it.
It was a lovely drive, and I saw so many things along the road that I had just sped by before.
While driving I had the strange thought: "Only the very rich, and the very poor, can afford to travel slowly."
The flashers make me cringe a bit. I'm not quite convinced slow should come at the expense of safe driving.
Not sure about Provo / Salt Lake (the interstate may be the only option there). Personally living in France, so if I'm not pressed for time, I go off of the highway completely and either drive on "Nationale" (kind of a free / slower highway), or just let the GPS pick some more scenic route. There are plenty of nice rural corners around that are often worth a few minutes of a detour.
I drove on back roads, not the freeway. Most cars had a very easy time passing me or going around me as traffic was light, and there was plenty of room on the road.
Even if the 'bug' of limited time off is solved, I think people's valuation of their time is still pretty high. The trains/airships would have to be quite nice (read: heavy, expensive, possibly less efficient) for you to be willing to spend so much time in them.
On a sillier note, I wonder what the fastest speed you can reach is, in terms of timezones/hr.
My guess was a polar route like ANC-HEL, but there don't seem to be any direct passenger flights. Condor flies ANC-FRA seasonally, which is pretty much exactly 1 hour time difference per hour of flight. Another possibility is TAS->URC, at 1.2.
The author's routes, YVR-LHR and YVR-NRT, are both 0.8-0.9 hours difference per hour flight time, depending on direction.
SI6604/5 between Jersey and Rennes is scheduled for 40 minutes and crossing a single zone, so 1.5 hours per hour.
In the US, South Bend Indiana to Chicago is only about 90 miles, but is scheduled for an hour, and has a 1 hour difference. Driving is far faster.
Flying between the diomedes is a 21 hour difference for a 3 mile trip, although I wouldn't advise it at the moment, a helicopeter could presumably do the trip in a minute or two, with a difference of about 100 hours per hour.
If you're willing to walk instead of flying you can cross 2 hour borders instantly quite easily at many places in the world. 2.5 or 3 hour differences probably exist too, but the big one from Afghanistan into China or 3.5 hours is not really a something you can do.
> In the US, South Bend Indiana to Chicago is only about 90 miles, but is scheduled for an hour, and has a 1 hour difference. Driving is far faster.
That's an interesting route. There is a direct Interstate connection, direct flight connections, and a direct passenger rail connection.
Driving is the fastest option, except when there is traffic and there is frequently traffic. 2.5 hours is not an unusual amount of time for the drive. Also, it feels like the interstate between the two cities is in a permanent state of construction.
The train is around 2-2.5 hours (and strangely the train station in South Bend is in the airport terminal), but there is currently construction along a lot of the route that when finished will shave 10-15 minutes off the time. There are more future improvements planned that will also reduce the time.
It makes a lot of stops and has a lot of very slow sections. And in one city, the line runs down the middle of a street - with no separation whatsoever (construction is underway to eliminate this)
I think the solution to the transatlantic problem is quite simple: A nuclear ocean liner. Such a ship could make the trip in around three and a half days, which is slower, but I think is highly competitive when you consider the dramatic improvement in comfort and productivity. These kinds of ships are highly sustainable and the necessary technologies are fully mature.
Problem of nuclear shipping is cost and liability.
Although in terms of pure CO2 emissions it's great, risk insurance is almost impossible (although the chance of accident is small, the possible cost of it is pretty close to infinite). Also, good luck convincing commercial ports to accept privately owned nuclear reactors.
There's a reason that nuclear marine propulsion is mostly the domain of nation states and armed forces.
Nuclear ocean liners would need substantial government support, but this has been true of all international travel since at least 1900. The ocean liners of the golden age were financed by governments, and modern jet travel is supported by large state investments into things like air traffic control, R&D, and airports. All that is really needed is the political will, which is a much better situation than the alternatives, which require extreme engineering that comes close to the limits of physical possibility.
We can get similar speed from a conventionally powered ship if we have to. There isn't much motive at the moment, so cruise ships do about 20-25 knots. If we revived the liner, we could go substantially faster. The record was set in 1952 by the SS United States, at 34.5kn average speed and a crossing time of three and a half days. CO2 is an issue which is already being looked at, with designs based on hydrogen and on ammonia - I suspect that the latter will win out as being easier to store.
Hard to believe we'd be pushing that idea at the very moment we're trying to encourage shipping vessels to slow down by 10% because of the dramatic reduction in fuel consumption that provides.
I've taken the Queen Mary II (the only current ocean liner) between NYC and Southampton. I thought it was a very, very nice way to cross the Atlantic, even though the carbon and general pollution footprint could be dramatically improved.
You can, but it results in non-linear increases in fuel consumption. A nuclear reactor can be run at a high power output continuously without substantial reductions in efficiency. It also allows for infinite range and reduces cost and turnaround time caused by refuelling. Using Ammonia would have none of these benefits, require expensive infrastructure, and involve enormous energy losses.
That's a viable strategy for bulk commodities, but this was a discussion of passenger transport, and people are unlikely to use sailing ships for point-to-point travel.
I think there can be nice overlap with "slowmads" and this.
The issue of insufficient holiday can be remedied by working fully remotely, but that's not without drawbacks:
- 1/3 of your time (assuming an 8h day) travelling is actually working. If you're stuck in a train it's not too bad, but otherwise you're sacrificing travel time to work.
- Your destination and transit methods MUST have internet access. There are few async/remote roles that would work without internet access in terms of communicating and being able to work.
That being said, I don't think that crosses out this method of travel entirely. As with other "alternative" forms of living (eg tiny homes, van life, homesteading), you always have to make compromises for what you want.
Also, not overly compatible with parenting school-age children. If you pull kids out of school, you generally want to be efficient with your travel. And if you elect to homeschool, it's difficult to work or fully experience the destination at the same time.
> Suppose you believe, as I do, that we have to slash our carbon emissions drastically and urgently to ameliorate the worst effects of the climate catastrophe that is beginning to engulf us. And that you believe, as I do, that travel is a good thing for individuals and societies, and that in principle every human should enjoy the opportunity to visit every neighborhood around our fair planet. Can these beliefs be reconciled?
Yes, without any change actually, given that passenger air traffic is only 2% of the emissions in the world.
It's again the big industries that actually are responsible for the vast majority of pollution displacing the blame on the individuals to get a "get out of jail free" card for themselves.
Oh, there are plenty. First of all, actual energy production with fossil fuel. Second, better insulation/ventilation of existing houses to reduce heating/AC costs. While we are at it, we can fit solar panels on roofs, it will give us more electricity hence less fossil fuel to burn. Electric cars too, the tech is already there. Steel production (and other heavy industry) accounts for 8% of global emissions afaik. Meat production estimates vary a lot: from 9% to 35% or so.
I know it is very controversial, but I'd rather go vegan than give up air travel.
From the top of my head is a two digit number, but I’m currently suffering from the aforementioned jetlag… so let check with that French guy jancovisi. He has a utterly pragmatic approch.
">emissions tend to do more damage at high altitude than they do at ground level
I've always been a bit dismissive of aviation as a carbon emissions contributor because globally it only accounts for around 2%. Thanks for pointing this out, I was unaware of this fact. Is the relationship between altitude and warming effect known? Are we talking linear or something worse?"
We should target industries where going 100% green only increases costs and doesn't result in a worse product or service, e.g., switching power plants from fossil fuels to renewables.
This is a pretty hilarious attempt to reconcile different incompatible dogmas. It helps make it clear that hustle-culture capitalism, climate personal responsibility woke-ism and experiences-over-things, muli-cultural citizen-of-the-world-ism just cannot be mixed in any sane way. Something, somewhere will have to give eventually.
I have found that private charter, first class, or business class, at least partially solve the misery side of the experience. You will be jet-lagged at the end of the flight, but you won't have a terrible night of sleep on top of the jet lag (something I find harder to recover from).
OTOH, the idea of minimizing the flight distance is smart - and it also makes it easier to electrify - there is no viable alternative to 10,000 nm routes (yet), but for shorter ones it's easier to imagine.
Adding extra days to every trip is not cost free. Mode switching for travel is also not cost free. Creating gigantic airports at the nearest points between continents etc... Large scale, expensive and difficult to coordinate changes; which are trying to squeeze more efficiency out of an already optimized system.
Don't mean to sound overly critical, these are interesting ideas on systemic change.