* Transportation infrastructure is a societal investment that produces benefits, it's not just about its cost. Investing in terrestrial transportation like trains, even if it is more expensive can give rise to proportionally greater societal benefits than air travel--think, a long-haul train has multiple stops, providing connection points for economic activity (smaller towns and cities connected through train stations) that planes clearly cannot. I actually think it's totally OK that trains require more investment because they may create larger network effects in the big picture.
* In some sense, all societal spending is make-work. If we're going to have make-work programs, we might as well spend it on the best long-term strategy, which in my honest opinion, having lived in Europe for a number of years, is cities being well-connected with cheap and fast rail, subways, and trams.
* Climate change is a real thing, and it's due mostly to CO2 emissions. It's gonna cost money to fix. We need to stop deploying the "but itz mah dollarzzzes" as an excuse not to act. We need to start thinking about paying back the absolutely massive debt we racked up from cheap and easy energy.
* Carbon offsets are a shell game that we can play in the short run, but ultimate we need to get to zero carbon footprint, which cannot be accomplished with offsets alone.
In summary, we better start paying up.
Works fine if it’s recycled vegetable oil, but that doesn’t scale. I love a truck that emits a French fry smell.
> Corn & soybeans are global commodities, so to suggest it competes with food is not an accurate reflection of how food is priced.
Food goes to whomever will pay the most for it, same as fuel. If there is greater demand for it as a fuel than those at the bottom affordability rungs for crops, there are no regulatory mechanisms to ensure those who need food get it instead of those who would burn it in vehicles.
* trains are long
* trains travel slower than airplanes, and drag is proportional to the square of speed
* making conclusions solely based drag coefficients from the density of the air is sound reasoning
One of these statements is false. I get that hackernews is just a forum for casual discussion of various technical topics, but overly categorical statements based on a reasoning in a vacuum (no pun in intended) just force the conversation into unproductive threads like this one. I'm kinda sorry I took the bait at this point.
I hear this sentiment a lot, and I don't understand it. Trying to speak the truth isn't just optional outside formal contexts. There's no situation so casual that I it suddenly becomes appropriate to make up bullshit and present it as facts.
That is to say, I agree with your larger point: if nickff wants to make the claim that trains consume more energy than aircraft, he'd better come up with a reasonable source for that information.
I think if you want to make this analysis come out you need to include starting/stopping losses (and maybe fuel hauling, empty car overhead, etc...) to the train trip or somesuch. Naively trains are going to win and it's not even close.
citation needed. It helps a lot that (electric) trains do not need to carry their own fuel. Also, trains can run on low-carbon energy, whereas there is no viable alternative to jet fuel at the moment, and producing that from net-zero-carbon processes (akin to biodiesel) is not economical.