I don't know what circles you hang out in, but I've heard this many times. The focus is on road vehicles and land power consumption because that's where the low hanging fruit is. And airlines do already have a profit motivation to decrease fuel consumption, which equates to reduced emissions. I'd like to see a CO2 tax to help align incentives.
Cleaner burning fuels might be an option at some point.
> But there is no electric airplane.
(I assume you're talking about commercial airplanes. Electric airplanes do exist, but have limited range and/or speed, and thus limited commercial application, due to reduced energy density.)
That could change, if batteries get a lot cheaper and lighter. Or you know, kerosene gets more expensive (government-enforced pricing of the externality of CO2 emission). Some of both.
It's obviously more viable for short-haul flights than long-haul, but even that would help.
Since then Boeing refreshed all their other planes (some might call it "stapled new wings and engines on") and called them -8 and -9 models.
But the problem is that the more efficient the tech is, the more of it people use. An extra 500 miles of range opens up decentralization of routes, which means more planes flying.
The batteries could be free. Until they literally burn up so the plane can get lighter and therefore can land, it's pretty much a non-starter for anything over a few hundred miles. The max takeoff weight of a Boeing 787 is 50 tons more than it's maximum landing weight, which will probably damage the gear in some capacity.
I honestly don't know, but could this be part of the design simply because the engineers know the plane will weigh less on landing? Seems like that design would change if so much mass from fuel was no longer lost/burnt.
here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSq9r05lVTo
In comparison the A380 has a max landing weight of 386 Mg. Clearly the 787 is not up against a hard practical limit in terms of landing weight. Yes, stronger gear weighs more.
We agree that weight of batteries impacts their usefulness for aircraft. That's why I mentioned it in the quoted sentence :-).
The 787 can operate out of many airports the A380 cannot.
I don't understand what that sentence means.
> The 787 can operate out of many airports the A380 cannot.
Yes? I said batteries would have to be a lot lighter and kerosene a lot more expensive before they are a practical replacement. I think we agree, but I think you think we disagree?
The second aspect of it is that economies of scale are on the last leg, most airline companies use smaller planes, with a hub and spoke model, and a highly energy inefficient system, because it's better in their overall profit making system.
They are there to make money first, carrying passengers is the hoops they have to go through to get people's money (but by cleverly worded passenger carrying contracts, they are more and more getting around the issue), and fuel price is a variable in the system.
Not for consumer use, but they exist.
Ethanol production doesn't tend to be carbon neutral either, though maybe it's closer than petroleum pumped out of the ground.
You could stop the world from flying tomorrow and it wouldn’t make a dent in your PPM growth.
If aviation busts the carbon budget, so will most everything else, and by vastly larger margins.
Better to direct your limited resources at lower hanging fruit, unless you'd prefer the perfect to kill the good.
Can't store solar at night? Turn atmospheric carbon into oil. It doesn't have to be cheaper than oil (it almost certainly can't be unless it gets too hard to drill), but we can subsidize it within some kind of range.
EDIT: Oh cool, some people are trying this.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/407748/making-gasoline-fr...
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/09/feature-there-s-too-...
Hydropower? The primary materials used are concrete and steel, and dams last for centuries with minimal upkeep. As long as appropriate measures (such as fish ladders) are taken, the local and global environmental impact is negligible.
And here's the attendant public policy: Tax the turbojects' users enough to offset the negative ecological externalities incurred by their use. That will likely make commercial SST unprofitable.
Not to mention the parts of the economy that rely on air travel ;)
Most people prefer to say they want to fight global warming as opposed to actually doing anything. If the average person really wanted to fight climate change, they'd:
• Stop eating meat
• Buy as few new items as possible
• Never get on an airplane again
• Not have kids
And even then one person's actions really can't do a damn thing so who can blame them for just enjoying their life and doing whatever they want?
Something as simple as flying low enough to create low level cloud cover would more than reverse the net effect of NOx and CO2 produced by planes. It's just more expensive because it takes longer and consumes more fuel.
Agreed. And that's not even mentioning the climate angle of it.
I've done some reading lately about the effects of air travel on climate. I was very depressed by what I found. Basically, air travel is terrible for global warming. Besides emissions of greenhouse gasses CO2 and NOx, the trails of water vapor ("contrails") form cirrus clouds that contribute to warming.
Unlike the electric car, there is no emerging technology that can save air travel from this environmental impact. Meanwhile, air travel is growing at ~5%/year. At this rate, by mid-century air travel alone will consume the world's entire emissions allowance, if we want to keep global warming to 2 °C or less. And supersonic travel appears to be even worse for the climate.
For all the talk about fighting global warming, I almost never hear about this. It seems like the most inconvenient truth of all: if we want to fight global warming, we have to fly less. This is a hard pill to swallow. Tesla is built on the idea that we can have cleaner cars without having to give up anything (because electric cars can be luxury items). But electric airplanes exist only as research curiosities -- they aren't up to the task of their fuel-burning counterparts. Right now it looks like the democratization of fast, world-wide travel might be a late 20th - early 21st century phenomenon that we can't get back. :(