Hacker News Reader

Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

A quick google suggests that aviation accounts for 2% of global carbon emissions.

Everyone in this thread is pointing out how difficult the engineering is to convert aviation to something emission-free.

To me it seems obvious that we should focus on shrinking the 98% as fast as we can. While we should also work on decarbonizing air travel, I am pretty sure that if we decarbonized everything _else_ that the environmental impact of air (and space!) travel would not be enough to fuel global warming on its own.

Further, because the impact is so much smaller, it might be more feasible for air travel to eventually be required to perform offsetting direct carbon capture than to replace jet fuel with an alternative. That would make flying more expensive, which I think is fine, but it wouldn’t make flying _impossible_ which I think is at least highly undesirable.

View on HN

To me it seems obvious that we should focus on shrinking the 98% as fast as we can.

The other 98% is made up of lots of industries that account for 1% here, 2% there, 0.1% somewhere else, and so on. We can't afford to ignore something because it's 'only' 2% of the total because that would mean ignoring everything. The reality is that we need to shrink 100% of global carbon emissions, including what's caused by aviation, and everything else.

Shrink everything by 50% would be a more possible goal. While devoting more resources to carbon sequestering.

A quick Wiki suggests that including radiative forcing, the number may be as high as 5%. And given the lack of viable alternative fuels, and the growth of the industry, and potential reduction in other areas, that number may grow to 10, 15 or 25% by 2050, depending on who you listen to.

For individuals who fly, the carbon emissions due to flying makes a non-trivial contribution to their personal carbon budget. As earth becomes more middle class and everybody starts flying, that will become a non-negligible problem.

Nearly every article I've seen on this subject conveniently omits the proportion of aviation's contribution to global carbon emissions.

I'm starting to think it's intentional, and it's instructive to ask why.

A lot of railway-related lobbying, at least in western europe.

The submarine: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Aviation is a topic anyone can understand. It's mostly used as a luxury, so it's easy to justify lowering its usage.

It is 2.8% of global emissions but it is much more if you look only in europe or the US. If I remember correctly it should be around 6% in the EU.

It's even worse for the people who fly, half of the population in America doesn't fly in any one year.

You can make any statistic look worse by arbitrarily restricting the population you apply it to.

It's a tiny fraction of global emissions but, if you fly at all, it's probably a pretty substantial chunk of the emissions you're responsible for. Most people just don't fly and don't need to worry about flight emissions at all.

It's 2% right now, but it will be a larger share as overall emissions shrink. Aviation is so hard to de-carbonize that it was removed from even the non-binding Paris Agreement. We're already working on most of the other 98% but there's not even a vague plan or a goal for reducing emissions from planes yet. That's why it's still news.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com