Planes are an easy target because they're so big, but the industry as a whole is hyper-focussed on efficiency. If you want to rail against emissions, don't look at the plane, look at the endless procession of single-occupancy 2 ton cars the plane is flying over.
And you can get a lot of parcels on a plane like the 747F. Amortised by unit the emission numbers are in fact very good. It's almost certain that your last fast food run or uber trip used much more gasoline than it took to get your last parcel all the way from China.
But why let the facts get in the way of some good old righteous outrage!
How bad it is depends on what you're comparing it with. The shipping industry might have relatively retrograde attitudes towards pollution, but air freight still uses something in the order of 100x more carbon per tonne km than sea freight which is often a close substitute. 1990s 747-400s brought back into service aren't exactly the most energy efficient aircraft either. On the other hand, you could still fly a tonne of stuff for a few hundred miles for the estimated carbon cost of a single Bitcoin transaction...
A fast food run (on the ground local transport) can become electrified and run on renewables. Flight transported goods is much harder to make run on renewables. Even if a flight runs on 100% biofuels, the high altitude climate forcing effects of the emissions seems to be unavoidable and are as big as the CO2 emission itself.
To avoid going over the average 2C temperature rise we are going to need to cut all these emissions. Air transport emissions will become a hard nutt to crack.
One could make just as vaild of an argument for the other way around.
Telling people to "just don't click the 1-day shipping option" is like saying "just ride the bus" it's not that simple and while it's not straight up tone deaf it's a far cry from perfect pitch.
* get a smaller car, one that uses less gas and pollutes less
* share a ride
* ride the bus, take a train/tram/trolley/ferry/etc.
* ride a bike, e-bike, scooter, motorcycle
* and another million improvements or alternatives
Meanwhile, if I'm Romania and I want to order something from Japan, as an individual or company, I either order by plane, in which case it probably arrives in a few days, or I wait a few months.
If I want to fly over there, my only realistic option is flying...
The gap between "must have" and "nice to have" is much, much higher between land transport and air transport.
You're comparing things that aren't comparable. Of course single occupancy cars are inefficient, but that shouldn't obscure the fact that long distance transportation is a major source of emissions that should be severely limited. The fact that the industry is efficiency focused is also irrelevant at best, because they are high emitters in spite of it.
Airplanes account for 5% of global emissions. Ground transport, 40%. Presently, the low hanging fruit is ground not only because of its much larger share of emissions, but also because transitioning to renewables is easier (at least today) for road than air vehicles.
Noone is going to "severely limit" air transport due to its emissions. Doubling the cost of oil, maybe, but not emissions.
Ironically a heavy push to electrified cars would reduce demand for gasoline, potentially dropping the price of oil and saving money for airlines and reducing ticket prices. The final result would be increased air travel and CO2 emissions from air travel.
Overall still a win for the environment, but not as much of one as people would want.
> Noone is going to "severely limit" air transport due to its emissions
If no one does it (and many other radical changes), we will have 4+°C warming and a major global catastrophe. I'm not optimistic, but that's what should be done.
it seems like people in countries like mine (rich, western) find it very easy to blame the supply side of the equation rather than the demand side of the equation -- e.g. companies are to blame for wrecking the environment because they ship stuff in planes to save money / save time. but the general public are also to blame as the source of demand.
what might make a huge positive difference for the environment would be rolling out policies to help reduce population growth (or the absolute population count) of people such as myself with relatively affluent polluting lifestyles, but we might have to wait until there is mass suffering right here right now due to environment reasons across many countries with political power before there is substantial change.
>>...the general public are also to blame as the source of demand.
Yes, but companies have absolute control over what mode of transport is used to do shipping, not consumers. Demand is good for the economy, so you do not want to quash it. You DO want companies to satisfy demand responsibly.
In the maritime trade industry, we can absolutely fuel global shipping 100% on GHG emission-free renewables using H2 fuel cells. The tide is starting to turn, albeit a little too slow for my taste. Granted, the challenge is exponentially harder for extreme high power density kWh consumers like aircraft. Ships are very high kWh consumers, but don't have the power density of aircraft, so much lower density/higher weight fuels and engines can be employed that makes the problem significantly easier to solve.
...Also, Thanos, please count me among one of your childless population growth inhibitors. I don't dissagree with you there.
Carrying large tanks of compressed hydrogen on merchant ships isn't safe or practical. Sustainable carbon-neutral liquid bio-fuels are a more likely long term solution. Those can be used with minimal changes to our existing transportation systems once the production cost comes down.
H2 fuel is absolutely practical and we're integrating it into designs as we speak. However, we are using Cryogenic Liquid H2 (conforming to IMO IGC(1)) which msy be stored at atmospheric pressure, not compressed gas, although additional regulations for shipboard H2 storage are emerging as the popularity grows(2). It's not dissimilar from carrying LNG.
Biofuels still release GHG's (2), not just carbon), and it's arguable how much is recovered. The Nitrogen released still contribute to acid rain. Why go through this messy hassle and guessing game when we already have a perfectly environmentally clean cycle of breaking down H20 into H and O2 via renewables, then recombining the H with free O2 in fuel cells to produce e- and exhaust only water?
Breaking down water into hydrogen and then processing it through a fuel cell is very energy inefficient. Unless we have some breakthrough efficiency improvements, hydrogen fuel will probably never be economically viable on a large scale.
I hear this argument all the time, and asside from being unfounded, it makes absolutely no sense. Even in it's infancy, H2 cost is just a little higher than gasoline at the pump (1).
From someone who works in the sector on a daily basis, H2 production from offshore wind powered electrolosis is (and will continue to be) growing to meet increasing demand.
The energy to perform electrolosys comes from renewables like wind and solar, the efficiency of which (primarilly concerning the fully burdoned CAPEX/OPEX of renewable power plant to shipboard fuel cost - i.e. tnhe "cost at the pump") is certainly competitive with diesel fuel prices when you factor in efficiency gains of fuel cells over diesel engines over the full range of power loading. Not too mention the indirect envoronmental gains cost avoidance engine integrators realize by not having to buy additional pollution abatement systems (e.g. EGRs, Scrubbers, SCRs, etc).
We have to be careful with massive new demand for biofuels. Even small changes to e.g. ethanol policy have caused food shortages (well, higher commodity food prices, but at some level these are equivalent) in the past.
i agree. it is likely this change to use air freight instead of some plausible alternative form of freight is more profitable and more polluting, so i agree it is likely a change in the wrong direction.
i suspect air freight has a relatively minor impact compared to other sources of emissions. e.g. for energy estimates (not emission estimates), the without hot air book estimates that passenger plane flights burn far more energy per capita per year than the energy used to transport "stuff": https://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml
it'd be helpful if there was a global (or pseudo-global) tax on carbon so that climate impact could be priced in and could have greater influence in commercial / economic / government decisions, but alas.
