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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

For what it is worth, Boom is claiming that their jets will be carbon neutral.

The jet cannot be carbon neutral. The operations of the jet can be if the operators choose to offset the carbon. Boom is not an airline, so it can't say whether or not the jets will be carbon neutral.

It could contractually require buyers to offset carbon emissions but that's a dubious idea.

Carbon offsets aren't the only way to do carbon neutrality; Boom is ensuring compatibility with synthesized fuel (they specifically mention Prometheus Fuels). This is where hydrocarbons are basically used a an energy storage medium for renewably-generated energy, extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere for fuel production and emitting it back into atmosphere when the fuel is burned.

Any more details on this? Will they use captured co2 to make the fuel?

https://www.boomsupersonic.com/sustainability

We could just as well choose to burn biodiesel in today's jet aircraft.

Actually, I find worrying that you can build a plane that creates trust from breaking long carbon chains into CO2 and, at the same time, publicly announce that it will be "carbon neutral" some day.

It is doubtful that we'll find fuels that are carbon negative anytime soon. So hey, neutral is better than positive.

Neutral would be good, but I doubt that they are serious about this.

Otherwise, they wouldn't build their plane around gas turbines, which create trust from burning carbon compounds.

For downvoters: it's a fine project, but I don't think they can fly planes at higher speed, lower cost, and lower carbon emissions, without a major technology shift. It is hardly controversial.

Most likely: they do care, but it is not their main priority.

Not good enough. About 2/3 of aviation climate forcing is from non-CO2 effects: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-calculating-the-true-...

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