Aviation is Unsustainable, what do you think?

Húrin

George Monbiot wrote this and it can be found in his book Heat.


It is true that the government expects air travel passengers to double by 2030, by which time air travel will be the biggest contributor to global warming. However, it is also true that the airline industry can now create fuel-efficient planes. The Sustainable Aviation Group, which includes BA and Virgin, aims to introduce new aircraft producing 50 per cent less carbon dioxide than 2000 models.

This, as we shall see, is unlikely to happen: the airline companies’ projections resemble those of the motor industry, in that they appear to be designed principally for the purpose of public relations. Even if this improvement did take place, it would not counteract the rising emissions caused by the growth in flights, as Roddick herself shows. She is also sufficiently well informed to know that the other measures she purposes – emissions trading and tree planting – are not, under current circumstances, going to work, as I will explain in a moment and in Chapter 11. But her determination to suggest that long-distance tourism is sustainable as long as we distribute money and goodwill when we arrive supports my contention that well-meaning people are as capable of destroying the biosphere as the executives of Exxon.

Our moral dissonance about flying reminds me of something a Buddhist once told me when I questioned his purchase of unethical products. “It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it with love.” I am sure he knew as well as I did that our state of mind makes no difference either to the exploitation of workers or to the composition of the atmosphere. Thinking like ethical people, dressing like ethical people, decorating our homes like ethical people makes not a damn of difference unless we also behave like ethical people. When it comes to flying, there seems to be no connection between intention and action.

This is partly, I think, because the people who are most concerned about the inhabitants of other countries are often those who have travelled widely. Much of the global justice movement consists of people – like me – whose politics were forged by their experiences abroad. While it is easy for us to pour scorn on the drivers of sports utility vehicles, whose politics generally differ from ours, it is rather harder to contemplate a world in which our own freedoms are curtailed, especially the freedoms that shaped us.

I have heard people argue that less travelling from the rich nations to the poor nations could result in a narrowing of the public mind. This might be true. But it is also clear – as the public response to the Asian tsunami and the recent enthusiasm for tackling poverty in Africa suggests – that our compassion for other people can be stimulated just as well by effective use of the media.

More painfully, in some cases our freedoms have become obligations. When you form relationships with people from other nations, you accumulate love miles: the distance between your home and that of the people you love or the people they love. If your sister-in-law is getting married in Buenos Aires, it is both immoral to travel there – because of climate change – and immoral not to, because of the offence it causes. In that decision we find to valid moral codes in irreconcilable antagonism. Who could be surprised to discover that ‘ethical’ people are in denial about the impacts of flying?

There are two reasons why flying dwarfs any other impact a single person can exert. The first is the distance it permits us to cover. According to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the carbon emissions per passenger mile ‘for a fully loaded cruising airliner are comparable to a passenger car carrying three or four people’.

In other words, they are about half those, per person, of a car containing the average loading of 1.56 people. But while the mean distance travelled by car in the United Kingdom is 9,200 miles per year, in a plane we can beat that one day. On a return flight from London to New York, every passenger produces roughly 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide: the very quantity we will each be entitled to emit in a year once a 90 per cent cut in emissions has been made.

The second reason is that the climate impact of aeroplanes is not confined to the carbon they produce. They release several different kinds of gases and particles. Some of them cool the planet, others warm it. The overall impact, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a warming effect 2.7 times that of the carbon dioxide alone. This is mostly the result of the mixing of hot wet air form the jet engine exhaust with the cold air in the upper troposphere, where most large planes fly. As the moisture condenses it can form condensation trails which in turn appear to give rise to cirrus clouds – those high wispy formations of ice crystals sometimes known as ‘horsetails’. While they reflect some of the sun’s heat back into space, they also trap heat in the atmosphere, especially at night. The heat trapping seems to be the stronger effect. This means that subsonic aircraft, if all their seats are full, cause roughly the same total warming per passenger mile as cars. While the different warming effects are not directly comparable, because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for much longer than condensation trails or cirrus clouds, if were to multiply the carbon emissions produced on that round-trip to New York by 2.7, we would, of course, exceed our annual allowance on that journey by the same factor.

Supersonic aircraft, such as Concorde (which is now retired) and some military planes, are far more damaging. They fly not in the upper troposphere (where planes cruise at between 10 and 13 kilometres), but in the stratosphere, at between 17 and 20 kilometres above the surface of the earth. The water vapour they produce there ensures that their total impact is around 5.4 times that of the carbon dioxide alone. Discussing the small supersonic ‘business jets’ whose development is allegedly being pursued by NASA, General Electric and Lockheed Martin, the Royal Commission abandons its customary restraint.

The contribution to global climate change of this kind of aircraft would be so disproportionate that their development and promotion must be regarded as grossly irresponsible.

Aviation has been growing faster than any other source of greenhouse gases. Between 1990 and 2004, the number of people using airports in the United Kingdom rose by 120 per cent, and the energy the planes consumed increased by 79 per cent. Their carbon dioxide emissions almost doubled in that period – from 20.1 to 39.5 million tonnes, or 5.5 per cent of all the emissions this country produces.

Unless something is done to stop this growth, aviation will overwhelm all the cuts we manage to make elsewhere. The government predicts that, ‘if sufficient capacity were provided’, the number of passengers passing through airports in the United Kingdom will rise from roughly 200 million today to ‘between 400 million and 600 million’ in 2030. It intends to ensure that this prophecy comes to pass. The new runways it is planning ‘would permit around 470 million passengers by 2030.

You might wonder how the British government reconciles this projection with it commitment to cut carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. The answer is that it doesn’t have to. As the Department for Transport cheerfully admits,

International flights from the UK do not currently count in the national inventories of greenhouse gas emissions as there is no international agreement yet on ways of allocating such emissions.

This is a remarkable evasion. It is true that there is ‘no international agreement yet’. But a child could see that you simply divide the emissions by half. The country from which passengers depart or in which they arrive accepts 50 per cent of the responsibility. Are we really to believe that the civil servants in the Department for Transport can’t work this out? As 97 per cent of the greenhouse gases they expect planes to be producing by 2030 will come from international flights, this profession of incompetence is, to say the least, convenient. You need do nothing about the carbon emissions from aeroplanes as officially they don’t exist.

By way of remedy, the transport department suggests that the aviation industry should ‘pay the external costs its activities impose on society at large’.

This is an interesting proposal, but unfortunately the department does not explain how it could be arranged. Should a steward be sacrificed every time someone in Ethiopia dies of hunger? As Bangladesh goes under water, will the government demand the drowning of a commensurate number of airline executives? The idea is strangely attractive. But the only suggestion it makes is that aviation fuel might be taxed:

A notional 100 per cent fuel tax would lead to … a 10 per cent increase in air fares, assuming the increased costs were passed through in full to passengers. This would then have the effect of reducing demand by 10 per cent.

A few pages later, it admits that this mechanism is in fact useless, because the airlines will keep cutting the remainder of their costs. The government is also aware that aviation fuel taxes on international flights are more or less impossible to impose. They are prohibited under international law by Article 24 of the 1944 Chicago Convention, which has been set in stone by around 4,000 bilateral treaties. We environmentalists have been stupid enough to do what the industry wants, and loudly demand the taxes it has no cause to fear.

So the government relies instead on incorporating aviation into the European Emissions Trading Scheme. This, it hopes, will happen in 2008. In principle – though with the major caveats I mentioned in Chapter 3 – the idea is sound: an overall carbon limit is set for the participating industries, and the market is left to allocate emissions between them. The problem is that if government policy is still driving the growth of the airlines, and low prices continue to stimulate demand, either the emissions from every other industry within the scheme must contract at a much greater rate than before to accommodate aviation’s expansion, or it will break the system. The second option appears to be the more likely. Incorporating the industry into the trading scheme without other policies to reduce its growth merely defers the decision the government needs to take, while threatening the remainder of its climate-change programme.

The one certain means of preventing the growth of flights is the one thing the British government refuses to do: limit the capacity of our airports. It employs the ‘predict and provide’ approach which has proved so disastrous when applied to road transport: as you increase the provision of space in order to meet the projected demand, the demand rises to fill it, ensuring that you need to create more space in order to accommodate new projections. The demand would not have risen in the first place if you hadn’t created the space. The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee calculates that the extra capacity the government proposes means ‘the equivalent of another Heathrow every 5 years’. Twelve regional airports in the UK have recently announced expansion plans. Ministers are now beginning to promote new runways at Heathrow, Stansted, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

In 2005, Friends of the Earth asked the Tyndall Centre to determine what impact this growth would have on greenhouse gas emissions. The results were staggering. If we attempt to stabilise carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere at 550 parts per million (which roughly corresponds to the government’s target), and aviation continues to grow as the government envisages, by 2050 it would account for 50 per cent of our carbon emissions. If we tried to stabilise them at 450 parts (which is closer to my target) flying would produce 101 per cent of the carbon the entire economy was able to release. If the carbon emissions were multiplied by 2.7, to take into account the full impact of aviation on the climate, the figures would be 134 per cent and 272 per cent respectively. The researchers assumed that the fuel efficiency of aircraft will improve by 1.2 per cent a year throughout this period. This could be optimistic.

While the British government appears determined to turn this country into the nation Orwell envisaged in 1984 – Airstrip One – aviation is booming everywhere. Worldwide, it has been growing by about 5 per cent a year since 1997. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested it would account for between 3 and 10 per cent of global carbon emissions by 2050 (and that this impact could be amplified by 2.7 times). But the Royal Commission reports that the growth has so far been higher than it envisaged: the panel’s prediction ‘is more likely to be an under-estimate rather than over-estimate’.

Faced with both their lobbying power and the aspirations of their customers, hardly any government appears to be brave enough to stand up to the airlines. The British Department for Transport, like the airline industry, claims that expanding airport capacity is ‘socially inclusive’, in that it enables poorer people to fly. But as the Environmental Audit Committee points out, it seems to have conducted no research on this subject. An organisation which has – the Civil Aviation Authority – found that people in social classes D and E (at the bottom of the official economic scale) scarcely fly at all. Though flights are often cheap, they can’t afford to take holidays: even in the age of the 50 ticket, people in these classes buy just 6 per cent of the tickets. A MORI poll commissioned by the Freedom to Fly coalition (which is a lobby group founded by the aviation industry) found that 75 per cent of those who use budget airlines are in social classes A, B and C. Another survey shows that people with second homes abroad take an average of six return flights a year. But even if everyone in the rich nations were able to fly every year, the impact of aviation would still be regressive, as the people who are most vulnerable to climate change are the poorest inhabitants of the poorest nations, the great majority of whom will never board an aeroplane.

There are two means by which the growth in flights could be reconciled to cut carbon emissions. The first is a massive increase in the fuel efficiency of aircraft; the other is a new fuel.

The British government’s White Paper on aviation claims that

Research targets agreed by the Advisory Council for Aeronautical Research in Europe suggest that a 50 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide production by 2020 can be achieved.

This statement, as the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee has pointed out, is deliberately misleading. What the Advisory Council says is that its target, which is purely aspirational, cannot be met by improving the existing kinds of aircraft engine. It requires ‘breakthrough technologies’ which don’t yet exist. When you consider the design life of modern aircraft, you discover that the council’s ‘research target’ bears even less relation to actual performance. Planes are remarkably long-lived. The 747 – the Jumbo jet – was launched in 1970 and is still flying today. The Tyndall Centre predicts that the new Airbus A380 will still be in the air, though ‘in gradually modified form’, in 2070, and it will continue to use ‘high-pressure, high-bypass jet turbine engines that contain only incremental improvements over their predecessors.

A 50 per cent cut by 2020 means not only discovering a new technology and designing, testing, licensing and manufacturing the planes that use it, but also scrapping and replacing the entire existing fleet, and the tens of billions of pounds the aviation companies have invested in it.

As far as the aircraft engines are concerned, ‘breakthrough technologies’ appear to be a long way off. The Royal Commission reports that

The basic gas turbine engine emerged in 1947. It has been the dominant form of aircraft engine for some 50 years and there is no serious suggestion that this will change in the foreseeable future.

It is hard to see how major new efficiencies could be squeezed out of it. The proposals the aviation industry has put forward, the Royal Commission says, might improve fuel efficiency somewhat, but only at the cost of an increase n noise and local pollution cause by nitrogen oxides. I don’t believe that those who live under the flight paths (an increasing proportion of the population as aviation expands) will put up with this.

Worse still, as a report fro the European Commission by the aviation scientist Ulrich Schumann notes,

Recent experiments have provided evidence that contrails form at lower altitude and hence more frequently more efficient engines.

‘Contrails’ are the condensation trails largely responsible for boosting the impact of aviation on the climate, as discussed above. In other words, jet engines might be able to burn less fuel, but the warming they cause could remain constant or even increase.

The only technology which does offer a major improvement in fuel efficiency, creates few condensation trails (because it is used at lower altitudes) and is known to work is one plucked not from the future, but the past: the propeller plane. According to the industry coalition Avions de Transport Régional, the most efficient commercial propeller planes use just 59 per cent as much fuel per passenger mile as a jet aircraft. But as the ‘Régional’ part of their name suggests, they advocate its use only for short-haul flights. Short-haul flights are inherently inefficient, because of the higher proportion of the journey spent taking off and gaining height. They are also, on the whole, unnecessary, as there are other means of covering that distance: it would be better for the environment to travel by coach or by train. The table below gives the figures I provided in Chapter 8, with the carbon emissions from short-haul flights added.

No one in the industry appears to be giving serious consideration to the idea of returning to long-haul propeller planes, because they are much slower than jets. The most promising approach to redesigning the rest of the aircraft concept is called the ‘blended-wing-body’. Planes of this kind would have huge hollow wings in which some of the passengers would sit. By cutting drag, they could reduce the amount of fuel a plane uses by to 30 per cent. But, as the Royal Commission points out, it’s still just a concept, and ‘the stability and controllability of such an aircraft are unproven.’

There is some scope for reducing the amount of fuel that planes burn by improving air traffic control (so that they spend less time in the stack) and allowing them to take more direct routes. But this amounts to 10 per cent or so. If aircraft flew at lower altitudes, they would produce fewer condensation trails and cirrus clouds, but because the air is denser there – so the planes would be subject to more drag – they would burn more fuel. The net effect might be beneficial, but this remains uncertain.

The choice of alternative fuels for aeroplanes is similar to the choice of alternative fuels for cars. According a paper by researchers at Imperial College, London, it is technically possible to fly planes whose normal fuel (kerosene) is mixed with small amount of biodiesel. At low temperatures, oils go cloudy, and at a couple of degrees lower still they form a gel. This can block an engine’s fuel filters, fuel lines and plugs. Biodiesel’s ‘cloud point’ is much higher than kerosene’s. Even a mixture containing as little as 10 per cent biodiesel can raise the cloud point from -51° to -29°. This, because of the low temperatures in the upper troposphere, could stop the engines if the plane flew at normal heights. But if the fuel is repeatedly chilled and the crystals they form filtered out, a 10 per cent mixture raises the cloud point by only 4° (they don’t say how much energy the chilling would use). This would permit the plane to fly at up to 9,500 metres. Of course the biodiesel in planes is subject to the same environmental constraints as the biodiesel used in cars: it is likely to cause more global warming than it prevents.

Ethanol, the same paper suggests, would be useless: it is insufficiently dense and, in aeroplanes, extremely dangerous. Kerosene could be made from wood, but (aside from the enormous expense), its production will be limited by the land-use issues I discussed in Chapter 6: the trees we are able to grow would be better employed discharging the more necessary functions of keeping us warm. You will have guessed by now that this leaves only our familiar fall-back, hydrogen.

In this case, it would be burnt not in fuel cells, but in combustion engines similar to those used in planes today. Carrying liquid hydrogen seems to be a more viable option for planes than for cars, but the energy cost (about 35 per cent) of keeping the temperature below -259° remain unchanged. Several planes have already been flown with one engine running on hydrogen. In principle, jets could use this fuel today, if instead of carrying passengers and freight they carried only hydrogen. Though it is lighter, it contains four times less energy by volume than kerosene. But if this problem could be overcome, the researchers at Imperial College suggest, the total climate impacts of planes fuelled by the gas ‘would be much lower than from kerosene’. Unfortunately, they appear to have forgotten something.

When hydrogen burns, it creates water. A hydrogen plane will produce 2.6 times as much water vapour as a plane running on kerosene. This, they admit, would be a major problem if hydrogen planes flew as high as ordinary aircraft. But if, they suggest the aircraft flew below 10,000 metres, where condensation trails are less likely to form, the impact would be negligible. What they have forgotten is that because hydrogen requires a far bigger fuel tank than kerosene, the structure (or ‘airframe’) of the plane would need to be much larger. This means ti would be subject to more drag. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution – which as usual appears to have thought of everything – points out that the ‘combination of larger drag and lower weight would require flight at higher altitudes’ than planes fuelled by kerosene. In fact, hydrogen planes, if they are ever used, are most likely to be deployed as supersonic jets in the stratosphere. This would be an environmental disaster.

A hydrogen-fuelled supersonic aircraft flying at stratospheric levels would be expected to have a radiative forcing [which mean climate-changing effect] some 13 times larger than for a standard kerosene-fuelled subsonic aircraft.

And that is, I’m afraid, is it. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change discovered,

There would not appear to be any practical alternatives to kerosene-based fuels for commercial jet aircraft for the next several decades.

Even the British Government, which at other times manages to find its way to the conclusions the aviation industry requires, admits that ‘there is no viable alternative currently visible to kerosene as an aviation fuel.’

There is, in other words, no technofix. The growth in aviation and the need to address climate change can be reconciled. Given the most likely possible efficiencies are small and tend to counteract each other or to be unacceptable for other reasons, a 90 per cent cut in emissions requires not only that growth stops, but that most of the planes which are flying today are grounded. I recognise that this will not be a popular message. But it is hard to see how a different conclusion could be extracted from the available evidence.

The obvious next question, then is this. Are there other means of covering the same distances at the speeds with which we are now familiar?

Commercial airliners such as the Boeing 747 or the Airbus A321 have cruising speeds of around 900 kilometres per hour. The fastest form of mass transit across the surface of the earth is the ultra-high speed train. The French TGV – Train à Grande Vitesse – holds the record for a wheeled train, of 515 kmph. Locomotives that are suspended above the track by magnetic repulsion – maglaves or magnetic levitation trains – can beat this. In 2003, the test train in Japan managed 581kmph. But fastest working train in the world is the TGV from Lyons to Aix-en-Provence. It covers in 290 kilometres in 66 minutes, an average speed of 263 kmph. Trains are not – or not yet – as fast as planes, but when the check-in, boarding and waiting times and the travel to and from the airports are taken into account, they can cover journey of a few hundred kilometres in roughly the same time. Given that they are generally more convenient and relaxing than planes, it might be possible to persuade people of the advantages of using ultra-high-speed trains for journeys of up to about 2000 kilometres, even though these would take longer. Beyond that point, the journey, for people accustomed to moving at Faust’s speed, would start to drag: 8,000 kilometres – from London to Beijing for example – takes 31 hours at 260 kmph. The companies and governments proposing new ultra-fast lines hope to draw people away from planes by raising average speeds to 350 or even 500 kmph.

The first obstacle you discover is the cost. The 30-kilometre maglev system between Shanghai and its airport costs $1.2 billion. The link between Edinburgh and Glasgow, on which the bullet train some politicians have been proposing would run, would probably cost over £4 billion, or around $7 billion, for 71 kilometres of track. The cost of the 500-kilometre maglev line which might one day cut through the mountains between Tokyo and Osaka has been estimated at $165 million per kilometre. The French have been able to build TGV lines for much less, however. The Méditerranée link cost about €23 million ($28 million) per kilometre, and the Atlantique €10 million ($12 million). An 8,000-kilometre track, if the price could be kept as low as the Atlantique’s, would cost $96 billion to lay.

It would also take a long time. Public inquiries should be held in the countries though which the line might travel. Rights of passage must be negotiated and the land bought, then a massive engineering project undertaken. With a sufficient sense of urgency the construction of a series of trans-continental TGV lines could be completed within the timeframe considered by this book. But should it be done?

You will not be surprised to see me report that there is a problem. Though trains travelling at a normal speeds have much lower carbon emissions than aeroplanes, a discussion paper by Professor Roger Kemp of Lancaster University shows that energy consumption rises dramatically at speeds over 200 kmph. Increasing the speed from 225 kmph to 350 kmph, he reveals, almost doubles the amount of fuel they burn. If the trains are powered by electricity, and if that electricity is produced by plants burning fossil fuels, then a journey from London to Edinburgh by a train travelling at 350 kmph, Kemp’s figures suggest, would consume the equivalent of 22 litres of fuel for every seat. An Airbus A321 making the same journey uses 20 litres per seat.

Trains, of course, don’t produce condensation trails, so the total global warming effect is smaller. But we are still seeking a 90 per cent carbon cut. The 350 kmph link between London and Scotland that Tony Blair appeared to endorse in 2004 would, by comparison to flying, deliver a 10 per cent carbon rise. Even if speeds were confined to 250 kmph, Kemp’s graph suggests, trains would still consume 14 litres of fuel per seat, giving us a carbon cut of just 30 per cent. In reality, the effects of ultra-high-speed trains would be worse than this, for they would draw people not only out of planes, but also out of slower trains and coaches.

Ultra-high-speed trains, in other words, can be part of the solution only if they run on electricity and it is provided by renewable power and fossil fuels combustion with carbon capture and storage. As they are likely to use only a small percentage of a nation’s total power, this should be possible, within the limits set by this book. Trains of this speed powered by engines using their own fuel must be rules out altogether. But if we are to keep using the railways for passenger transport, the cheaper and more environmentally responsible approach is to keep the average speed of our trains to below the current maximum (in the United Kingdom) of roughly 180kmph. High performance and low consumption are, again, at odds.

The fastest ocean-going passenger ships cruise at about 30 knots, or 54 kmph. They could go faster. A company called BGT Industrial claims to have made the engines for a freighter which can travel at 70 knots (130 kmph). Even if passenger ships could travel this fast, however, it is still just one seventh of the speed of an airliner. And it is not clear that ships offer carbon savings anyway.

It is remarkably hard to obtain comparative figures for fuel consumption, but George Marshall of the Climate Outreach Information Network has conducted a rough initial calculation for the Queen Elizabeth II, the luxury liner run by Cunard, which cruises at between 25 and 28 knots (45-50 kmph). It has to be said that the QEII does not exactly optimise its space. It contains seven restaurants and seven lounges, a branch of Harrods and dozens of other shops, cabins big enough for dinner parties, and 920 crew members to serve just 1,790 passengers. But even taking all this into account, the figures don’t look good. Cunard says the ship burns 433 tonnes of fuel a day, and takes six days to travel from Southampton to New York. If the ship is full, every passenger with a return ticket consumes 2.9 tonnes. A tonne of shipping fuel contains 0.85 tonnes of carbon, which produces 3.1 tonnes of carbon dioxide when it is burnt. Every passenger is responsible for 9.1 tonnes of emissions. Travelling to New York and back on the QEII, in other words, uses almost 7.6 times as much carbon as making the same journey by plane.

Short-haul shipping could be even worse. An initial calculation Roger Kemp made for a car ferry to Norway suggests that at 48kmph the carbon emissions per kilometre are roughly twenty times greater than those produced by a train travelling at 200 kmph and several times greater than a plane’s. Again, car ferries are an inefficient means of shifting people, as the vehicles they carry weigh more than the passengers; even so, his estimate gives us further cause to be gloomy about ships. There are some technical measures – such as designing the hull to create air pockets or coating it with slippery polymers, or using a ‘towing kite’ – which could reduce a ship’s emissions; but most are speculative and, it seems, their possible application are limited. Unless we are prepared to travel very slowly, as much of our freight does, shipping is not the answer.

Becoming rather desperate now, I have looked into airships: craft kept aloft by gases that are lighter than air. In some respects they are quite promising – according to the Tyndall Centre, their total climate impact is 80-90 per cent lower than that of aircraft. (This is not the same as an 80-90 per cent carbon cut, however, as it takes into account the other emissions jet planes produce.) This could be improved with better engines or possibly even hydrogen fuel cells. Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre points out that if they were suspended by means of hydrogen rather than helium, the gas could be drawn out of the ballast as they travel and could be used for fuel. This is quite a neat proposal. At present, airships become lighter as their fuel is consumed, and therefore harder to control. Anderson’s proposal, if workable, could allow them to retain roughly the same buoyancy throughout throughout the trip. Despite the residual public memory of the Hindenberg disaster, they appear to be safe. They have a range of up to 10,000 kilometres. But, though faster than ships, their top speeds are currently confined to around 130 kmph: a flight from London to New York would take about 43 hours. They also have trouble landing and taking off in high winds and making way if the wind is against them. This makes both take-off times and journey times less reliable than those of jets. But if we really have to cross the Atlantic, and we are to prioritise the reduction of carbon emissions, airships, surprisingly, might be the best kind of transport.

But now I really have run out of options. Not only is there not means of cutting emissions from planes to anything resembling the necessary level, but there is no form of transport which achieves much more than a quarter of their speed without producing comparable quantities of carbon. There is simply no means of tackling this issue other than to reduce the number, length and speed of the journeys we make.

If we were to overlook the additional climate-changing effects of flying and assume – perhaps optimistically – that a 20 per cent improvement in fuel efficiency is possible by 2030, we would need to cut the number of flights we make by 87 per cent to meet my target. But if we take the other climate impacts into account, and remember that fuel efficiency is likely to be counteracted by vapour formation, we must cut flights by over 96 per cent. If long-range propeller planes took the place of jets, however, and flew below the level at which condensation trails are formed, we might be able to get away with a smaller reduction. The alternative is to cut the carbon emissions produced by other parts of the economy by more than 90 per cent in order to accommodate a greater contribution from flying. To do this, we would have to argue that flying is more important than heating or lighting. As it is practised only by those who are – in global terms – rich, this argument would be difficult to sustain.

Again I feel I should remind you that this is not an outcome I have chosen. If you don’t like it, you must find a means of proving me wrong, and it had better be more persuasive than the proposal to transport people by means of cosmic energy that one of my readers sent me.

So I offer you no comfort in this chapter. A 90 per cent cut in carbon emission means the end of distant foreign holidays, unless you are prepared to take a long time getting there. It means that business meetings must take place over the internet or by means of video conferences. It means that trans-continental journeys must be made by train – and even then not by the fastest trains – or coach. It means that journeys around the world must be reserved for visiting people you love, and they will require both slow travel and the saving up of carbon rations. It means the end of shopping trips to New York, parties in Ibiza, second homes in Tuscany and, most painfully for me, political meetings in Porto Alegre – unless you believe that these activities are worth the sacrifice of the biosphere and the lives of the poor. But I urge you to remember that these privations affect a tiny proportion of the world’s people. The reason they seem so harsh is that this tiny proportion almost certainly includes you.

Recognising that it was possible for a human being to fly; then that it was possible for a human being to fly long distances; then that it was possible for many humans to do so; then that it was possible for you to do so, required a series of imaginative leaps. It required the construction by the people of the twentieth century of a possible world which did not exist before. No one in Europe ever thought of shopping in New York or visiting friends in Australia before planes allowed them to do so. Recognising that while it is still possible for a human being to fly, it will no longer be possible for many humans to do so, indeed that it will no longer be possible for you to do so, requires a similar series of imaginative efforts. But if it was possible to construct one alternative world, it is surely possible to construct another, and to adjust ourselves to that world (scarcely conceivable as it now seems) just as we adjusted to the other – even less conceivable – existence.

I do not pretend that this will be easy, or that my finding will win me any friends. Those whose freedoms must be curtailed happen to be members of the world’s most powerful classes. Worse still, they happen to be us. The promises we have been made – of tropical sunlight in the dead of winter, of one-week safaris in the Maasai Mara, of heroic missions to rescue the bridgeless people of the Peruvian Andes, of the sampling of pleasant fruits and princely delicates throughout the new-found world – have shaped our expectations, the pictures we carry of our future lives. We have come to believe we can do anything. We can do anything. Accepting that we no longer possess the powers of angels or of devils, that the world no longer exists for our delectation, demands that we do something few people in the rich world have done for many years: recognise that progress now depends upon the exercise of fewer opportunities.

Rationing alone will not make all the necessary decisions for us. If airport capacity is permitted to keep expanding, indeed if it is not deliberately reduced, then flying will break the rationing system just as it will, on current projections, break the Emissions Trading Scheme. The gulf between what we could do and what we should do would simply be too great: the political clamour to expand the allocation to permit us to make use of the growing opportunity insuperable. Even before a rationing scheme is in place we must lobby for a moratorium on all new runways. This campaign in many rich nations – including the United Kingdom – has already begun. Climate-change campaigners have joined forces with the people who live close to where the runways might be built, who fear that their lives will be ruined.

I have sought the means of proving otherwise, not least because it would make my task of persuading people to adopt the proposals in this book much easier. But it has become plain to me that long-distance travel, high speed and curtailment of climate change are not compatible. If you fly, you destroy other people’s lives.

Oilrig

And the alternative is...

therecklessone

And the OP's opinion is?

Unless you are George Monbiot...

cp251

:mad:His solution is there. We are no longer to fly. We must all stay at home and only see the world in pictures sent back by the lucky elite who are allowed to fly. His comment on contrails are nonsense. Contrails only occur in a certain band. On many days you see no contrails at all or the ones that exist dissipate almost immediately. He obviously never actually looked up at the sky.

His comments on the the fact that 75% of those who fly are from social classes A B and C and that those from classes D and E hardly ever fly. This is true and he uses this statistic to prove the cheap airfares are of no real benefit to poorer people is again nonsense. Until the era of cheap airfares, people in the C category rarely flew either and the B's flew much less. The D's and E's I suspect are the unemployed and unemployable and they could never fly even if they were paid to. I also have a suspicion the class C is the biggest category and encompasses the average worker.

This is all very well and good if you believe that the current spell of global warming is caused by humans in the first place. If you don't then this is all very sinister.

Those whose freedoms must be curtailed happen to be members of the world’s most powerful classes. Worse still, they happen to be us.

So there it is. He wants to take away your freedom to travel. They don't want you to fly or drive your car. That's agenda here. Your freedoms must be curtailed! George Orwell, where are you now?

Remember too that right now we have people like that in our government. People who want to curtail our freedom for their....sorry our own good.

IRLConor

There are two main contributors to aviation:

1. Business travel
2. Holiday travel

For business travel, there are very few acceptable substitutes to high-speed jet travel. Any time spent in transit is wasted money to the business unless you're traveling on your own time for work (which is quite unpleasant) or can work effectively in transit. You can replace some of the travel with phone/videoconferencing but they're very poor substitutes, sometimes you just need to be in the same room as the person.

For holiday travel, sure you can try and persuade people to not fly to their destinations and either holiday at home (which sucks for Irish people) or travel by some less-polluting means (which effectively means traveling to nearer destinations). Either forbidding or penalising leisure air travel would be deeply unpopular and hence no politician worth his/her salt will go near it.

pclancy

New fuels, new ways of propulsion and new attidudes to climate change will sort the whole thing out in the future. We're way to far away from running out of oil (my guess 2060-80) for big business and their government bedbuddies to actually pull their fingers out and doing something. Oil and its spinoff fuels plus the whole hybrid world have a long way to go before they run out and i'm sure we will see new technologies suddenly appear in the future and give enviormntally friendly forms of travel for all types of vehicles.

Air travel won't die, it will adapt and both airlines and aircraft manufacturers will respond to the need to buy and buiild aircraft that will eventually be emission free.

Right now the delay is money and capitalism. Big business wants another 50 years of oil money and the motor and aviation industries have too much invested in oil related products to just suddenyl start pumping money into other possible fuel types except for a few companies attempts at oilhybrid and electric vehicles, big governments have their greedy fingers in everything oil related too so they're not under much pressure to change. The smaller or poorer countries governments do want this change but they simply lack the policital clout on the world scale to do much.

So we wait. As activism about climate change builds pace over the next 20 years I think we'll see more and more investment in climate related issues and certainly this time 100 or even 50 years from now i'm sure none of us that are lucky to alive will have been able to predict how aviation turned out. But it will be there.

Reducton in aviation= less "foreign" experience = more misconceptions of people far away= re-introduction of mistrust, racism, and wars to Europe.

Reduction in aviation: not an option. Next.

Húrin

cp251 wrote: »

His solution is there. We are no longer to fly. We must all stay at home and only see the world in pictures sent back by the lucky elite who are allowed to fly.

You are the elite. The majority of the world population are the ones who have to stay at home.

His comments on the the fact that 75% of those who fly are from social classes A B and C and that those from classes D and E hardly ever fly.

I don't really think this clearly Marxist argument makes any sense. Even if flying was some sort of great workers' liberation, it would not be justified.

This is all very well and good if you believe that the current spell of global warming is caused by humans in the first place. If you don't then this is all very sinister.

If you don't believe the overwhelming scientific consensus, that is? Those of us who live in the real world, as opposed to the ideal world, find deniers sinister.

So there it is. He wants to take away your freedom to travel. They don't want you to fly or drive your car. That's agenda here. Your freedoms must be curtailed! George Orwell, where are you now?

In World War II people's freedoms were curtailed. And I don't just mean in Germany. I mean Ireland, Britain and America too. It had to be done to win the war.

We can't let doing what is *nice* get in the way of doing what is *necessary*.

pclancy

I think your arguments above are correct but the world as we know it would fall apart without aviation. Tourism, business and social travel would suffer beyond imagination, especially for Island nations like our own. Its just not possible. As I said, I'm extremely confident an environmentally friendly form of aircraft will one day roam our skies, not for a long time but it will happen and until then continual improvements will reduce emissions considerably.

Húrin

pclancy wrote: »

Tourism, business and social travel would suffer beyond imagination, especially for Island nations like our own. Its just not possible.

Permitting climate change is just not possible. Everything would suffer beyond imagination. And no, I don't think that aviation should either be targeted uniquely, or halt entirely. But it is a luxury, let's face it, not a necessity in the great majority of cases.

The problems caused by a lack of cheap flights are hardly beyond imagination. Unless you are incapable of imagining what life was like before Ryanair. People in Ireland did travel, and still do travel overseas without flying.

As I said, I'm extremely confident an environmentally friendly form of aircraft will one day roam our skies, not for a long time but it will happen and until then continual improvements will reduce emissions considerably.

I also think that there is a future in environmentally friendly aircraft. Airships and large versions of gliders may offer solutions. But 'until then' it would be irrational for policymakers to allow current levels of jet aviation - let alone encourage growth. There just isn't the time to tolerate those kinds of CO2 emissions.

Manufacturers boast of increasing engine efficiency, but efficiency is offset by growth. And most new aircraft will probably be in the skies for another 30 years from today.

cp251

Húrin wrote: »

You are the elite. The majority of the world population are the ones who have to stay at home.

Elite? Only in the context of the entire world and the history of civilisation. Having three meals a day makes me part of an elite too. In my own part of it I'm a bottom feeder. At best I fly perhaps twice a year as a passenger. Being a pilot I fly more often than that of course. Elite:D That'll be the day.

I don't really think this clearly Marxist argument makes any sense. Even if flying was some sort of great workers' liberation, it would not be justified.

Marxist:rolleyes: First time I've I've been accused of that. For your info it's not Marxist to believe that people on lower, incomes earned through their work in the captialist system, be allowed to spend it as they choose. Marxism is when some self appointed elite decide for the masses, what they believe is good for them. Environmentalists and greens are for the most part notably middle class and left wing and suffer badly from the 'ideal world' mentality.

If you don't believe the overwhelming scientific consensus, that is? Those of us who live in the real world, as opposed to the ideal world, find deniers sinister.

I don't believe the so callled 'overwhelmng scientific consensus' because I live in the real world. There are many other people like me. People like me who question what we are told by the elite group of 'scientists' and greens and politicians. That group would have us change the way we live our lives because they believe a theory only tested on a computer model.

That we are in warm phase is undeniable. But the jury is still out on whether we caused it or not. In the real world, I find the 'overwhelming scientific consensus' rather sinister. I also find your phraseology rather sinister. 'Denier' has a nasty ring to it. Denier of the consensus. Should I be looking over my shoulder? Will I be outed as a denier of the consensus?

In World War II people's freedoms were curtailed. And I don't just mean in Germany. I mean Ireland, Britain and America too. It had to be done to win the war.

This isn't World War 2, this is the opinion of a group of people who, on the basis of a theory and a prediction based on a very short term analysis of the Earth's climate, want to curtail our freedom.

We can't let doing what is *nice* get in the way of doing what is *necessary*.

That is a quote worthy of Stalin or Adolf Hitler or any dictator.

cp251

But it is a luxury, let's face it, not a necessity in the great majority of cases.

Everything is a luxury beyond shelter and food. How far do you want to go in restricting our freedoms. Everything manufactured adds to climate change. Anything that needs to be transported from place to place is another nail in the coffin of Mother Earth. Just how far do you want to go?

pclancy

Húrin wrote: »

Permitting climate change is just not possible. Everything would suffer beyond imagination. And no, I don't think that aviation should either be targeted uniquely, or halt entirely. But it is a luxury, let's face it, not a necessity in the great majority of cases.

The problems caused by a lack of cheap flights are hardly beyond imagination. Unless you are incapable of imagining what life was like before Ryanair. People in Ireland did travel, and still do travel overseas without flying.


I also think that there is a future in environmentally friendly aircraft. Airships and large versions of gliders may offer solutions. But 'until then' it would be irrational for policymakers to allow current levels of jet aviation - let alone encourage growth. There just isn't the time to tolerate those kinds of CO2 emissions.

Manufacturers boast of increasing engine efficiency, but efficiency is offset by growth. And most new aircraft will probably be in the skies for another 30 years from today.

Lol well first of all why not look at our 4 wheeled friends and our factory and power station emissions before you go knocking on aviations door for a solution and some change... .Aviation only accounts for a tiny amount, (13% of UK greenhouse gasses, 4% of world carbon) so why the focus on aircraft instead of cars or industry? Its ridiculous. Would you say that aviation should be curtailed but car ownership should not? What about focusing on removing fossil fuelled power stations from the world first before aviation? George Monbiot may have filled your brain with anti-aviation sentiment in this case but I dont think thats what he's getting at in the wider picture. Look at other problems first.

cp251

Here is some light reading for Huren and other enthusiasts for global warming. (Shamelessly lifted from another forum)

http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/iWeb/Global%20Warming%20Politics/A%20Hot%20Topic%20Blog/438A03B9-976A-41EB-8849-B54B15413494.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/science/01tier.html

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080103/94768732.html

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/01/06/br_r_r_where_did_global_warming_go/

I could list endlessly. I think we will soon see the end of this nonsense. I think we have reached a turning point, (a tipping point:rolleyes:) not in climate change but in peoples attitude to the nonsense we have been fed for too long. Climate change is real, it's getting cold. An inconvenient truth.:eek:

IRLConor

TBH, the various debates on whether global warming exists and if so whether it makes any real difference on our climate are largely irrelevant to this discussion.

There are three ways of reducing the impact of the flying that humans do:

1. Persuade people to fly less
   
   This is extremely hard, if not impossible to do. The business side of aviation won't change at all because it's viewed as a necessity. The leisure side of aviation is also unlikely to change voluntarily. There are very few people who will give up their precious sun holiday for the environment. There are some who would be willing to waste some of their holiday days using more environmentally friendly transport but I doubt there'd be enough of them to make any real difference.
   
   
2. Force people to fly less
   
   This can be done either by dictatorship or by heavy taxation. The dictatorship approach is not really an option (at least I hope you all agree with me on this). To make the change by taxing flying out of reach of most people is socially unjust (back to the days of only the super-rich flying), impossible to sustain (any government imposing such taxes would be sent packing at the next election) and would make Irish business less competitive globally. So, forcing people to fly less is not a realistic option.
   
   
3. Make less harmful ways of flying
   
   This is the only method that you'll get any real, broad support on. Not just that, it's a productive change which generates jobs and will probably produce spin-off technologies which are useful outside the realm of aviation. The downside is that there is no guarantee of eco-friendly aviation technology being available any time soon or at all. It might just not be within our technological reach in any reasonable time frame.

cp251

Copy of a letter sent to the UN

http://www.nationalpost.com/most_popular/story.html?id=164002

Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations

Dec. 13, 2007

His Excellency Ban Ki-Moon

Secretary-General, United Nations

New York, N.Y.


Dear Mr. Secretary-General,

Re: UN climate conference taking the World in entirely the wrong direction

It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables. We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis. While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC's conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions. On top of which, because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.

The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line









by *government *representatives. The great *majority of IPCC contributors and *reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.

Contrary to the impression left by the IPCC Summary reports:

z Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability.

z The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.

z Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today's computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.

In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is "settled," significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming. But because IPCC working groups were generally instructed (see http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/wg1_timetable_2006-08-14.pdf) to consider work published only through May, 2005, these important findings are not included in their reports; i.e., the IPCC assessment reports are already materially outdated.

The UN climate conference in Bali has been planned to take the world along a path of severe CO2 restrictions, ignoring the lessons apparent from the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, the chaotic nature of the European CO2 trading market, and the ineffectiveness of other costly initiatives to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Balanced cost/benefit analyses provide no support for the introduction of global measures to cap and reduce energy consumption for the purpose of restricting CO2 emissions. Furthermore, it is irrational to apply the "precautionary principle" because many scientists recognize that both climatic coolings and warmings are realistic possibilities over the medium-term future.

The current UN focus on "fighting climate change," as illustrated in the Nov. 27 UN Development Programme's Human Development Report, is distracting governments from adapting to the threat of inevitable natural climate changes, whatever forms they may take. National and international planning for such changes is needed, with a focus on helping our most vulnerable citizens adapt to conditions that lie ahead. Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems.

Yours faithfully,

Húrin

cp251 wrote: »

Elite? Only in the context of the entire world and the history of civilisation.

That will do. As am I. It is fortunate that you agree that we are in the elite of the world. Neither Monbiot nor I mentioned that flying should be the preserve of some 'lucky elite'.

Marxist/ First time I've I've been accused of that. For your info it's not Marxist to believe that people on lower, incomes earned through their work in the captialist system, be allowed to spend it as they choose.

I was calling Monbiot one. Not using at as an insult really, but pointing out that he was letting a Marxist priority (improving the living standards of 'the workers') get in the way of en environmentalist one.

Environmentalists and greens are for the most part notably middle class and left wing and suffer badly from the 'ideal world' mentality.

Correct. Martin Luther King (among others) 'suffered' from it as well.

I don't believe the so callled 'overwhelmng scientific consensus' because I live in the real world. There are many other people like me. People like me who question what we are told by the elite group of 'scientists' and greens and politicians. That group would have us change the way we live our lives because they believe a theory only tested on a computer model.

So where's your science? Why is the northern ice cap smaller than ever? Why did a hurricane hit Brazil for the first time ever in 2005? Why are the needed glaciers of the Andes and Himalayas in retreat? The evidence for climate change goes far beyond computer models. Again, just because the news is not good, does not mean it is not true.

That we are in warm phase is undeniable. But the jury is still out on whether we caused it or not.

Lie. The IPCC report demonstrated that climate change is indeed anthropogenic.

In the real world, I find the 'overwhelming scientific consensus' rather sinister. I also find your phraseology rather sinister. 'Denier' has a nasty ring to it. Denier of the consensus. Should I be looking over my shoulder? Will I be outed as a denier of the consensus?

Shiver in your boots all you like, the facts stand.

This isn't World War 2, this is the opinion of a group of people who, on the basis of a theory and a prediction based on a very short term analysis of the Earth's climate, want to curtail our freedom.

You clearly know nothing about climate change at all. Climate change is not a theory. It's a reality.

www.realclimate.org

That is a quote worthy of Stalin or Adolf Hitler or any dictator.

That is a flame. And a Godwin to boot.

Húrin

IRLConor wrote: »

TBH, the various debates on whether global warming exists and if so whether it makes any real difference on our climate are largely irrelevant to this discussion.

There are three ways of reducing the impact of the flying that humans do:

1. Persuade people to fly less
   
   This is extremely hard, if not impossible to do.
   
2. Force people to fly less
   
   This can be done either by dictatorship or by heavy taxation. The dictatorship approach is not really an option (at least I hope you all agree with me on this). To make the change by taxing flying out of reach of most people is socially unjust (back to the days of only the super-rich flying), impossible to sustain (any government imposing such taxes would be sent packing at the next election) and would make Irish business less competitive globally. So, forcing people to fly less is not a realistic option.
   
   
3. Make less harmful ways of flying
   
   This is the only method that you'll get any real, broad support on. Not just that, it's a productive change which generates jobs and will probably produce spin-off technologies which are useful outside the realm of aviation. The downside is that there is no guarantee of eco-friendly aviation technology being available any time soon or at all. It might just not be within our technological reach in any reasonable time frame.

I agree that volunteerism will not work; dictatorship is an unacceptable and dangerous solution. I agree with the use of environmentally friendly aircraft. But I also think that we don't have 40 or 50 years to wait for their invention. Nor can we wait 10 or 20 years for peak oil to price people out of the market.

I favour carbon rationing for each citizen. It is a reasonable, fair and effective solution. That way if you are smart (i.e. don't spend it elsewhere) you can afford a plane ticket on your ration.

IRLConor

Húrin wrote: »

I favour carbon rationing for each citizen. It is a reasonable, fair and effective solution. That way if you are smart (i.e. don't spend it elsewhere) you can afford a plane ticket on your ration.

Depending on how large the carbon ration was, I'd do pretty well out of that kind of scheme. Virtually all of my CO2 producing activities are taken up by flying.

How would carbon rationing work for business flying? I assume you wouldn't be using your personal ration for that?

Would your proposed rations be transferable? Could one sell unused portions?

kraggy

I think there is too much emphasis placed on aviation as a cause of CO2 emissions.

Aviation is less culpable than many other industries:

Percentage of global CO2 emissions produced by industrial emitters

Electricity 24%

Cars 14.5%

Manufacturing 11%

Shipping 4.5%

Refineries 4%

Aviation 2%

Even if traffic/emissions doubled by 2030, that'd still bring it's contribution to CO2 emissions to just 4% of the overall figure.

Green energy is going to be important and also vegetarianism. Yes, vegetarianism.

If you were wondering where the other 50% of global emissions comes from, well an astouding 20% of it comes from Methane, partly produced from cows' farts.

I sh1t you not.

Anyway, my tuppence is that aviation is unfairly targetted as one of the main culprits of global warming when other industries/emitters are more culpable.

IRLConor

kraggy wrote: »

Green energy is going to be important and also vegetarianism. Yes, vegetarianism.

You can take away my flights to foreign shores, but try to take meat out of my diet and you'll have one hell of a fight on your hands!

(And what about all the farts from bean-eating vegetarians? )

kraggy

IRLConor wrote: »

You can take away my flights to foreign shores, but try to take meat out of my diet and you'll have one hell of a fight on your hands!

(And what about all the farts from bean-eating vegetarians? )

I just hook my ass up to a hose each day for a couple of hours. Said hose leads to gas tank which provides gas for the boiler. House heated.

Cause beans beans are good for the heart the more you...

kraggy

IRLConor wrote: »

You can take away my flights to foreign shores, but try to take meat out of my diet and you'll have one hell of a fight on your hands!

(And what about all the farts from bean-eating vegetarians? )

I just hook my ass up to a hose each day for a couple of hours. Said hose leads to gas tank which provides gas for the boiler. House heated.

Cause beans beans are good for the heart the more you...

cp251

You clearly know nothing about climate change at all. Climate change is not a theory. It's a reality.

That kind of comment makes me believe you are very young, my friend. Your certainty and trust is touching but ill judged. You will learn the hard way not to trust the word of anyone claiming to be an expert. You will also learn that the consensus is not always what it seems. Reality is what transpires, not what is forecast by people with all the flaws and subjectivity.

But to be pedantic, climate change is not in dispute. Climate change is normal and ongoing. As long as the Earth has existed there has been climate change. That is reality. The argument is as to whether or not we caused it. I believe we didn't cause it and many people more qualified than me believe it too. That is sufficient for me to doubt the consenus.

Sorry to be patronising and all. The vice of middle age, I'm afraid.

Húrin

IRLConor wrote: »

Depending on how large the carbon ration was, I'd do pretty well out of that kind of scheme. Virtually all of my CO2 producing activities are taken up by flying.

How would carbon rationing work for business flying? I assume you wouldn't be using your personal ration for that?

Would your proposed rations be transferable? Could one sell unused portions?

No, under such a scheme businesses would also get some sort of ration.

Here's a good explanation of it

http://www.marklynas.org/2006/10/23/why-we-must-ration-the-future

The idea is to make it possible to sell unused rations to the post office where others could buy it if they want.

I think this would be both effective if implemented by a large number of countries, and financially beneficial for me.

Another scheme which our own government may implement next year is called cap-and-share. In order to sell petrol, a company such as Shell would need to have sufficient permits. It would need to buy these from Irish citizens, who would then find themselves receiving £100 or more in the post in order to offset rising prices at the pump.

However petrol prices have doubled since the decade began and yet Ireland is driving more than ever. So I don't know how effective that would actually be.

kraggy wrote: »

I think there is too much emphasis placed on aviation as a cause of CO2 emissions.

Aviation is less culpable than many other industries:

Percentage of global CO2 emissions produced by industrial emitters

Electricity 24%

Cars 14.5%

Manufacturing 11%

Shipping 4.5%

Refineries 4%

Aviation 2%

Even if traffic/emissions doubled by 2030, that'd still bring it's contribution to CO2 emissions to just 4% of the overall figure.

True, but aviation is the fastest growing source of emissions. Also, who would argue that electricity, cars and buses are less necessary for our civilisation than flights?

It is wrong of you to imply that aviation is being targeted uniquely; environmentalists and others are pointing out and tackling carbon emissions from all of the above sources.

Green energy is going to be important and also vegetarianism. Yes, vegetarianism.

I never suggested that aviation be targeted uniquely. But this isn't the coal-fired electricity forum, is it?

If you were wondering where the other 50% of global emissions comes from, well an astouding 20% of it comes from Methane, partly produced from cows' farts.

I sh1t you not.

This is true. Most of the rest comes from the burning of forests which largely happens in Brazil and Indonesia. Much of this is done to clear land for grazing cattle.

However I don't think this is reason to mandate vegetarianism. Eating meat is an ancient tradition. However, it is easy to see that most westerners over consume meat. So a reduction in consumption, but not a total cessation, is in order.

Anyway, my tuppence is that aviation is unfairly targetted as one of the main culprits of global warming when other industries/emitters are more culpable.

This is no reason to stay silent on aviation. Globally it's only 2% of emissions, but that is because most people in the world don't and will never fly. In Britain, for instance it accounts for 13% of emissions.

Not only is aviation less essential than cars, buses, etc but it is also much easier for our own governments to control than distant deforestation.

Húrin

cp251 wrote: »

That kind of comment makes me believe you are very young, my friend.

Does it matter? I'm informed. You appear not to be, as your argument rests on your own arrogance. The rest of your post is pathetically typical of one who knows he has lost the argument but is too proud to concede the point.

You will learn the hard way not to trust the word of anyone claiming to be an expert.

So your argument is your own intuition?

Reality is what transpires, not what is forecast by people with all the flaws and subjectivity.

Rapid climate change is transpiring as we speak.

But to be pedantic, climate change is not in dispute. Climate change is normal and ongoing. As long as the Earth has existed there has been climate change. That is reality.

There is no precedent for the current spell of change. It is happening far faster than any previous spell.

The argument is as to whether or not we caused it. I believe we didn't cause it and many people more qualified than me believe it too.

You said yourself; don't trust the word of experts.

That is sufficient for me to doubt the consenus.

You wishful thinking?

IRLConor

Húrin wrote: »

No, under such a scheme businesses would also get some sort of ration.

Good.

Húrin wrote: »

Not only is aviation less essential than cars, buses, etc

Depends on who you're talking to. I don't drive a car and I use buses rarely (<5 trips per year) and yet for 2004-2007 aviation was vital for my business. Just because something is not essential to you doesn't mean it's OK to target that for tax penalties.

Húrin

IRLConor wrote: »

Depends on who you're talking to. I don't drive a car and I use buses rarely (<5 trips per year) and yet for 2004-2007 aviation was vital for my business. Just because something is not essential to you doesn't mean it's OK to target that for tax penalties.

So your income comes from aviation. How do you think that the people who make and sell you the things you buy with your income travel to work? How do you think their raw materials travel?

You're not really that individualist or self-centred are you? In which case you were wrong to assume that I am.

I don't drive or take many buses either, but I can see by observing the country around me that for the majority of Ireland's people and businesses, and thus, economy in general - the internal combustion engine is of far greater importance than the jet engine.

Frankly I am flabbergasted that you would try to argue otherwise.

IRLConor

Húrin wrote: »

So your income comes from aviation.

Very, very remotely. My income comes from software development and sometimes my customers are in other countries and I have to go see them.

Húrin wrote: »

You're not really that individualist or self-centred are you? In which case you were wrong to assume that I am.

I don't drive or take many buses either, but I can see by observing the country around me that for the majority of Ireland's people and businesses, and thus, economy in general - the internal combustion engine is of far greater importance than the jet engine.

Frankly I am flabbergasted that you would try to argue otherwise.

I wasn't trying to argue that aircraft are more important than cars. I'm not stupid.

What I was trying to say is that it's not OK to say "Aviation is less important than all this other stuff and it's easy to target so lets whip the crap out of it now".

The way I look at the emissions reduction problem is like this: It's like optimizing a computer program. You profile it to see which components are causing performance issues (polluting most) and you start at the biggest one. You never touch a 2% component unless you've exhausted all bigger ones because it's not worth the time and effort.

Electrical power generation and cars are the biggest contributors right? Start there, even if they're the hardest, because you can make a real difference there. If kraggy's numbers are right, electricity generation out-pollutes aviation 10:1. How easy is it to get a 10% improvement in electric power emissions compared to removing all of the aviation emissions?

Now, I'm not saying that we should ignore the impact of aviation. We should make an effort to invest in both green technologies for the future and modernising current fleets of aircraft to more modern cleaner designs. We can try persuading people to limit their air travel, but if we do this via taxation then realistically the only ones who'll suffer are the poorer leisure fliers and the smaller businesses. The rich leisure fliers and the big businesses will simply buy their way out of it. In other words: make an effort but focus on the big polluters.

cp251

Húrin wrote: »

Does it matter? I'm informed.

You appear not to be, as your argument rests on your own arrogance. The rest of your post is pathetically typical of one who knows he has lost the argument but is too proud to concede the point.

Ah, the certainties of youth. How I miss them. You believe you are informed and accuse me of arrogance. Clearly you are not as informed as you believe. Don't assume I haven't informed myself and come to a conclusion. I believed in human caused global warming for a long time until the inconsistencies began to appear. Now I have changed my mind and become alarmed at the way global warming is no longer about science and has become a political and social issue I am also alarmed at the way our freedoms are being subtly eroded in the cause of environmentalism.

This is not merely a pedantic argument nor is is mere sophistry. This is fundamental to our lives in the future and how we are to be allowed to live it.

So your argument is your own intuition?

No, I said I don't trust people people claiming to be experts and I particularly don't trust people like journalists and politicians interpreting science for me, then using their interpetation to take money out of my pocket and reducing my hard earned freedoms. I also know that being an expert doesn't make you right.

Rapid climate change is transpiring as we speak.

Indeed but not as rapidly as you seem to believe. Nor is there proof it's our fault.

There is no precedent for the current spell of change. It is happening far faster than any previous spell.

So you say. But is it? The last fifty to a hundred years is a mere blink of the eye in the scheme of things. It's like looking outside on a wet day and concluding that it's never going to stop raining unless we do something about it.

You said yourself; don't trust the word of experts.

I don't, neither should you. But eventually you must make up your own mind. Dissenting scientists have everything to lose and nothing to gain from their stance. The problem with human caused climate change is that it has become an article of faith like a religion. As Al Gore says 'The debate is over, climate change is a reality'. Is it? What gives him and you the right to tell me what I should and should not believe and how I spend my money?

You wishful thinking?

No, me doubting the consensus.

That link you gave for carbon rationing is simultaneously hilariously implausible and sinister. There are so many flaws in it. I don't know where to begin. For example, I need a car to travel to work. There is no alternative, no bus, no train. Do I get more carbon credits or do I have to buy some so I can get to work from my neighbour who lives next door to the job? Inevitably the richer you are the more credits you can buy. Inevitably you will tell me to move closer to my job or get a job closer to home. The usual simplistic solution. Will the whole world agree to this policy? LOL No they won't.

Would they average man and woman agree to this or are they even aware that plans like this exist? I very much doubt it. Certainly no Irish government who wishes to be re-elected would ever consider such a move. It's outrageous.

That kind of thing is precisely why I have severe reservations about the whole climate change issue. Even if human caused climate change is real. Just how far are you willing to sell the freedoms hard won by our ancestors over the centuries. If it's not real well...........................

Húrin

cp251 wrote: »

Don't assume I haven't informed myself and come to a conclusion.

I have every reason to believe so. You have presented only a string of denier cliches, and no evidence that the scientists are wrong.

I believed in human caused global warming for a long time until the inconsistencies began to appear.

Which inconsistencies outweigh the big picture?

Now I have changed my mind and become alarmed at the way global warming is no longer about science and has become a political and social issue

The study of Climate will always be about science. Why should the conclusions of that study be hidden or ignored from the rest of us? When there is evidence of social implications why should it not be a social issue?

I am also alarmed at the way our freedoms are being subtly eroded in the cause of environmentalism.

As somebody who thinks about people besides myself I am alarmed that not only the freedoms, but the basic welfare of many people are being eroded by Western inaction on climate change.

This is not merely a pedantic argument nor is is mere sophistry. This is fundamental to our lives in the future and how we are to be allowed to live it.

You are expecting us to make the most extraordinary gamble: to do nothing about the climate change we are very likely to be causing, despite all the signs of the human disaster and economic collapse it can potentially visit upon us.

No, I said I don't trust people people claiming to be experts and I particularly don't trust people like journalists and politicians interpreting science for me, then using their interpetation to take money out of my pocket and reducing my hard earned freedoms. I also know that being an expert doesn't make you right.

So what does make somebody right, on a scientific issue, if not experience and knowledge of researching in that field?

www.realclimate.org

Indeed but not as rapidly as you seem to believe. Nor is there proof it's our fault.

look up what the arctic ice cap looked like in september 1979 and look up what it looked like in september 2003. look up years in between as well. You will find this stuff. It is just one of many indicators of rapid global warming.

So you say. But is it? The last fifty to a hundred years is a mere blink of the eye in the scheme of things.

This is physics not metaphysics. Changes in ice cores from Greenland can be observed to well within this range of time.

I don't, neither should you. But eventually you must make up your own mind.

Based on intuition again?

Dissenting scientists have everything to lose and nothing to gain from their stance.

Correct:

The Union of Concerned Scientists found that 58% of the 279 climate scientists working at federal agencies in the US who responded to its survey reported that they had experienced one of the following constraints.

1. “Pressure to eliminate the words ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’, or other similar terms” from their communications.

2. Editing of scientific reports by their superiors which “changed the meaning of scientific findings”.

3. Statements by officials at their agencies which misrepresented their findings.

4. “The disappearance or unusual delay of websites, reports, or other science-based materials relating to climate”. 5. “New or unusual administrative requirements that impair climate-related work”. 6. “Situations in which scientists have actively objected to, resigned from, or removed themselves from a project because of pressure to change scientific findings.” They reported 435 incidents of political interference over the past five years

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/04/10/the-real-climate-censorship/

The problem with human caused climate change is that it has become an article of faith like a religion.

Where does this come from? Climate change activism is drawn from science not faith. Where is the god of the climate change 'religion'? If not the true living God?

From my p.o.v. you seem to be treating your 'rights' as a religion, impervious to reason, with yourself as the deity.

As Al Gore says 'The debate is over, climate change is a reality'. Is it? What gives him and you the right to tell me what I should and should not believe and how I spend my money?

Would it be objectionable to declare the debate over on the shape of the earth? The arguments of climate change deniers have shifted from "it's not happening" to "it's happening, and it will be good", to "it's happening, and it will be bad for us, but it wasn't caused by us" and I notice a recently emerging new claim that "it's happening, it was caused by us, but there's nothing we can do about it!"

The whole business just smacks of dishonesty. Business as usual is just too convenient or profitable for a lot of people to let us face reality in a rational manner.

That link you gave for carbon rationing is simultaneously hilariously implausible and sinister. There are so many flaws in it. I don't know where to begin. For example, I need a car to travel to work. There is no alternative, no bus, no train. Do I get more carbon credits or do I have to buy some so I can get to work from my neighbour who lives next door to the job? Inevitably the richer you are the more credits you can buy. Inevitably you will tell me to move closer to my job or get a job closer to home. The usual simplistic solution. Will the whole world agree to this policy? LOL No they won't.

Then the government has a duty to help you out, by building better public transport systems for instance.

Would they average man and woman agree to this or are they even aware that plans like this exist? I very much doubt it. Certainly no Irish government who wishes to be re-elected would ever consider such a move. It's outrageous.

Let's pretend that we both agree that climate change is caused by man. Would it not be justified to use all means necessary (and morally sound) to cut carbon dioxide emissions? Whether it was popular or not?

Even if human caused climate change is real. Just how far are you willing to sell the freedoms hard won by our ancestors over the centuries.

As much as pragmatically necessary seems to be the sensible answer.

Environmentalists are not asking for much. How were freedoms won in Europe? Why not look to WW2? In that case men were asked to give up their lives and the people were asked to give up nearly all luxuries in order to put all resources into crushing Nazism.

Asking people to give up holidays in Thailand is a comparison so ludicrous as to be insulting.