More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

Re:More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights by postingawayonhn on Saturday February 15, 2020 @07:16AM (#22334786)

Aviation only makes up about 2% of total global C02 emissions. Hardly even worth worrying about. Results will be much better if resources are focused on the big emitters (road transport, electricity/heating, and manufacturing).

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Re:More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights by cantexplain on Saturday February 15, 2020 @08:52AM (#22335283)

I have read such arguments probably hundreds of times by now. Stuff like "Australia is only 1% of global emissions, why should we suffer the cost of going green?", "China and India produce way more CO2 than the US, the problem is not the US".

It's getting ridiculous; everybody is shifting blame to something or someone else because we all think small chunks and, obviously, each one of those chunks, individually, doesn't contribute much in terms of percentages. If you think this way, nobody will ever get anything done.

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Re:More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights by ced on Saturday February 15, 2020 @07:25AM (#22334842)

Aviation only makes up about 2% of total global C02 emissions.

Because the majority of humanity has never flown at all. What fraction of your CO2 emissions came from flying last year?

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Re:More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights by postingawayonhn on Saturday February 15, 2020 @07:36AM (#22334899)

Fair point, though I don't see any major problem even if air travel was to increase by 2 or 3 times, so long as we make significant reductions in other areas.

I took 6 flights (~3,000km each).

I would start with the immediate implementation of a tax (10%?, 20%?) on all new ICE vehicle sales. Revenue from this tax would be used to subsidize the purchase of EVs.

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Re:More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights by morsch on Saturday February 15, 2020 @08:21AM (#22335119)

At approximately 1000 kg COeq per 3000 km trip[1]. Your budget for the whole year was 2300 kg.

[1] https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight

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Re:More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights by postingawayonhn on Saturday February 15, 2020 @08:54AM (#22335298)

Where is 1,000kg coming from?

I looked up one of my flights (actually only about 2,400km) using that calculator and only got 230kg (83kg of C02 and 173kg of "contrails, ozone formations, etc."). This flight was on a A321neo.

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Re:More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights by morsch on Saturday February 15, 2020 @09:43AM (#22335562)

I took a random 7000 km flight and extrapolated. Sorry if that ended up off by such a large martin.

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