Out of 15,000,000,000 litres that they did use.
Their fuel costs were $5.649 billion.
They reduced the cost to $5.649 billion.
They reduced their fuel usage from 15 billion litres to 15 billion litres.
They justified some high-paid execs salary.
https://japantoday.com/category/features/ana-asks-passengers...
"All Nippon Airways is taking its weight-saving efforts to new heights, asking passengers on some of its flights to visit the restroom before flying."
hell at work that is one thing they want to get back in office for is face to face. they have mandated cameras for all managers working remote and looking to do the same for other workers. Still there are teams that are doing one day face to face meetings.
(coming soon to your local district)
Why do you need a toilet for that? I understand there are disabilities that may call for it. But in the 10-15 years I made that flight regularly, I never saw someone use the toilet an extreme amount. It was more for convenience. I have to assume that those short-haul flights could save a ton of fuel by eliminating toilets.
But I also have a young(ish) bladder and young(ish) digestive system. So maybe I'm just too self-centered.
Possibility of plane unable to take off at the scheduled time but holding on the runway to make the next available slot.
The problem with cutting some things out is that, even though it might not be utilized 95% of the time, that 5% when you need it, you really need it.
Similar to the backup generator for your data center and justifying it along with the maintenance and tests that go along with it to your boss.
My worry with the direction that engineering is moving, lean, is that we are reducing our safeties below a good level. I see the philosophy moving to other areas, such as finance, creating a race to the bottoms where everyone is leveraged as much as possible. Then when a crisis hits, everyone is unable to survive and we have to turn to government bailouts.
Lean philosophy has recently been targeting healthcare, as a way to reduce cost and reduce adverse outcome while improving quality. While I do think this is important, looking at what is going on in the middle of a pandemic. Is a contributing factor of hospitals running out of masks and ventilators due to lean inventory management practices?
I read a lot a about food wast and how we over produce, it seems logical that there will be a push for lean practices there as well. I could see it being made as a strategy to reduce the amount of CO2 as well as farm land. But conversely, with climate change and the risk of crop failure, is that a good idea?
As for the rest - I am completely, and 100% over lean philosophy/training/gurus. That has been a major focus in higher education in recent years.
And it has just led to top-down, money based decisions instead of student focused discussions and choices.
I am with you, I think we are just removing safety from areas that may not be appropriate to remove them from.
100% with you here. Especially the ones preaching 'optimizing' your personal life by getting rid of any capacity beyond what you use in your daily life. Once you peel back the glossy cover they almost always, in real terms, translate to "save money by mooching off your friends' equipment and work space".
Accommodations for other people's physical needs is a pretty serious Chesterton's Fence situation.
In other words asking grown-up people to just “keep it in” doesn’t work, just ask Tottenham player Eric Dier for the latest example (am on mobile, too lazy to link, but a quick web search should give you the whole story).
I guess you could alleviate the embarrassment factor by making it a total passenger + baggage max so people could weigh themselves AND their carryons at home before they arrive to confirm and offset anything.
Interesting idea though!
Maybe you buy "x kg plus or minus 5 kg" and they weigh you and penalize/refund if it's changed since buying the ticket.
Ha, good one.
I think the backlash to them charging extra if you and your total bags comes in “overweight” would be too high to work. Even if people weren’t offended, you wouldn’t really be able to have a good idea how much extra you’d be hit with until you were at the gate. But if they did some sort of discount refund or maybe a voucher for future flights, that might work. Start weighing the checked bags and noting the exact weight (instead of just over-under 50 lbs) and then stepping on a scale with your carryon luggage (with no outward display) and totaling them. If you are under the average, you get a voucher credited to your account on a sliding scale by how much you are under. If you are over the average or you choose not to be weighed, nothing changes and you have only paid the full fare like normal.
If we are serious about cutting CO2(-equivalent) emissions, we must tax all emittors equally. Airlines should not be able to escape it, or we will keep seeing this kind of oddities in that high pollution industry.
*addendum: apparently Canada has implemented or is planning to implement a carbon tax on aviation fuel.
(I only want to cover the liquids, not coal or wood)
It is very easy if you travel by plane several times per year, even on short distances, and you just stop to do that. In fact, it is probably the most effective thing you can do to reduce your own lifetime carbon footprint. A single two-hour flight produces around 400 kilograms of CO2 per person. This is equivalent to several months of heating in a cold country.
And don't start me harping about "offsetting" carbon emissions. Carbon has been captured in the course of hundreds of millions of years. There is nothing humans can do which can store it again for the same time. Almost all carbon from a tree is released when the tree dies.
In fact, it is even worse for coal. The coal deposits which we still exploit today, against all better knowledge, have mostly been formed during the carboniferous geological period. In this period, there were NO bacteria and fungi which could decompose lignin, the main structural component of wood. In other words, the wood from trees could not decay, which was the base for the coal deposits from the carboniferous period, which still form most of the coal today. The consequence of this is that burning coal is irreversible even in the course of tens of thousands of years, because the conditions under which this coal has been formed - an absence of fungi that can decompose lignin - simply do not exist any more. We are not only doing massive damage to the next generations of human children, but we are profoundly and irreversibly changing the conditions for life on Earth.
It's indeed the case that the comparative lack of rotting during carboniferous contributed to the available biomass to turn into coal, but that sort of coal doesn't form without heat and compression. It's got as much to do with the earth being more geologically active at the time, and more low-lying wetlands.
But coal is forming today from peat -> lignite -> bituminous coal -> anthracite (then eventually graphite). E.g. Germany's electricity generation was ~30% lignite burning in 2015[1], and those deposits formed mostly during the tertiary period.
So you're five to six orders of magnitude off if you think coal hasn't been forming since the carboniferous.
None of which is to say that these deposits are renewable in any practical sense. We can imagine digging them all up and burning them in the next 500 years, and then having to wait around the time since the T-Rex walked the earth for meaningful regeneration.
This is simply untrue.
Grow woody biomass, and combust it in a reducing environment, and you get carbon. It's biologically inert. Bury it.
It's not difficult, or impractical, and even if you mix it into soil, it will remain sequestered for centuries or millennia.
It's just... charcoal. Why would we have to make coal in the way it was made in the carboniferous? Your doom posting doesn't make any sense.
If such a carbon reduction is desirable, then taxes on air travel need to be raised.
Not so much.
It makes me feel like just putting the right economic incentives in place, will rapidly lead to savings no one imagined possible before.
As you point out, motivating individuals to reduce their carbon footprint is incredibly inefficient, as it is very difficult for individuals to make much difference if the goods and services they consume are not also optimized to become more carbon efficient.
But if 770000 liters of kerosene can be saved by making the inflight magazine lighter, can you imagine what other low hanging fruit are out there, if incentivized by the right kind of carbon taxes and other incentives? Businesses can very rapidly adapt and make changes with outsize impact like this, far more than individuals can.
This hit home.
770000 litres of jet kerosene translate to 2100 tons of CO_2 emissions[0]. That's the emissions of more than 200 average Germans or 50% of the emissions of over 400 people. Cutting one's emissions by half is most likely not easy at all, so maybe even more people would be required for an equivalent reduction in emissions.
Now: if someone at an airline thinks that the inflight magazine feels cheap now and that it should be printed on better paper again, it would wipe out any emission savings that hundreds of people could ever hope to achieve personally. Makes one feels a bit helpless, doesn't it?
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosin (Look for "Kohlendioxidemissionen bei Verbrennung").
Edit: the point I wanted to make is that a willy-nilly decision of someone with sufficient influence can have way more effect that intentional decisions of average people could ever have.