For a quantitative comparison:
https://www.seat61.com/CO2flights.htm
For example:
London to Nice
Plane: 4 hours, 250 Kg CO2
Train: 8 hours by Eurostar+TGV, 36 Kg CO2
85% less
(BTW this site, seat61.com, is a great and very useful web site, if one likes train travel or wants to travel by train in Europe, one should seriously have a look!)
It gets pretty hard to defend the choice when the economics look like that.
The train ticket will never be one bit cheaper. No promo events, nothing; state-owned enterprises seem incapable of such thinking. The price is simply absurd - renting a car and putting enough diesel into it would've been cheaper even if you went alone.
Also, it's a little bit rich to listen to any sort of climate talk from anyone in cold countries¹. They emit so much carbon just to be warm. Well, I don't, because I live in California.
¹ Between 14% and 30% of total emissions are from heating in Germany for instance https://www.bmu.de/fileadmin/Daten_BMU/Download_PDF/Klimasch...
How does that work in practical reality so it doesn't just turn into a money making scheme with no real impact akin to Catholic indulgences?
> Also, it's a little bit rich to listen to any sort of climate talk from anyone in cold countries¹. They emit so much carbon just to be warm. Well, I don't, because I live in California.
How many emissions in the US come from the use of AC and heating due to basically zero federal building standards for energy efficiency? [0]
Afaik AC is generally considered way more inefficient, heating can be captured as a side-product from a lot of processes, cooling not so much.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328701132_A_compari...
As a matter of policy? Universal carbon-tax with increasing fee schedules. Everyone pays for their carbon emissions. The sum is then distributed back to everyone evenly as a Green Dividend minus admin costs. Net zero cash to the government, whopping undirected green energy subsidy possible by tuning amounts. It already worked for Sulphur Dioxide.
As a matter of personal preference? Well, I get nothing from this except the right to brag I'm carbon negative so really it could totally be equivalent to indulgences. As it so happens I do care to be doing my part, but you're right in that there's no incentive for that.
> How many emissions in the US come from the use of AC and heating due to basically zero federal building standards for energy efficiency?
Right, but I live in California and have no AC.
You are in denial about the destruction you do. No, you can't offset emissions. A single short flight will release as much as 400kg CO2 to the atmosphere. This amount of carbon was bound by huge forests about millions of years. It is not possible to undo that release by planting a tree. Ask a geologist if you do not believe me.
And I am not saying it is not good to protect forests. Of course it is. But if you have any rational choice between offsetting and not flying, offsetting and flying, not offsetting, not flying -- not flying is always the best option.
Coal is just carbon that is in the ground. Grow a tree, convert most of it back to carbon, and bury it. Roman-era technology.
This is completely tractable, the fact that we aren't doing enough of it is a matter of will, not feasibility.
If any planting even happens; trees for CO2 whitewashing is like the perfect scam opportunity because nobody cares if you deliver.
Of course, you still have to discount but it makes things much more feasible.
That's why you usually don't plant trees. You can do other stuff that wouldn't otherwise get done.
Chemically, it is the same. The difference between CO2 bound in coal or oil to the CO2 bound in a tree is that the former would very probably remain bound for millions of years while the carbon bound in a tree will, with an overwhelming probability, will be released back in the atmosphere when the tree dies and its organic matter decomposes. And this will also happen if you bury the tree in the ground. It might not happen if you make charcoal from the tree and place the coal thousands of meters under the ground, where no oxygen is present. But this process is itself so energy-intensive, and therefore carbon-intensive, that it will not reach a net reduction of carbon.
Yes, in the case of a tree, it is theoretically possible that a vanishingly small fraction of the carbon it contains gets fossilized. But, there are at least two major problems.
Fossilization is very, very, very rare, and it is very, very, very slow. Told plainly, it normally does not happen.
The first is that you would have to plant so many trees that you would retain, as an extremely small fraction of the biomass of the tree, the amount of carbon released by your flight in geological deposits. This would take millions of trees and also millions of years, and is clearly infeasible. Nobody is even promising that, and suggesting that by planting a tree you could bury carbon permamently is just self-deception by people who buy such schemes.
And by that account, carbon-offsetting is just a scam. You pay money to extract the carbon you released by taking the plane from the atmosphere, but you can't permanently extract the carbon you released, at least not at a price that anyone is actually going to pay. It is a scam.
> Coal is just carbon that is in the ground. Grow a tree, convert most of it back to carbon, and bury it.
There is another factor which I find at times even more shocking. You suggested trees as a means to bind carbon. In fact, the fossil fuel from your plane flight is from oil and this is in large parts formed from marine sediments, also formed over geological times. What can be formed from trees is coal. Now, much of the large coal deposites we used today were formed in the carboniferous geologicial period, which was 358 million years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
Now, the thing is that the geological conditions in which these coal deposits were formed do not exist any more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous#Rocks_and_coal
Basically, trees use lignin. At this time, lignin was something new on our Earth and there were no fungi which could decompose lignin, so the biomass of the trees could not decompose. Only later, lignin-eating fungi evolved.
That means that these coal deposits can never be re-created, even over a time of millions of years.
But that's hardly necessary. I can just pay you the minimum necessary to get you to shift off fossil and I make some good savings.
Air travel is easily replaceable by low-carbon alternatives that exist today. When you do the accounting of carbon offsetting/carbon sinks capacity, it becomes quite obvious everything unnecessary must go.
Intercontinental and cross continental travel are a bit harder to replace with low carbon alternatives.
Europe has a functional high speed rail system due to its high population density, but the distances between some city pairs in the are hard to replace with rail or other low carbon alternatives. Think of Los Angeles to NYC, or San Francisco to Paris.
Many of these flights could be replaced by video conferencing, but if one really has to travel that distance, rail is a hard sell. It's not unpleasant to take Amtrak across the continent, but it's not fast either.
2) Again, fast travel across the globe is a luxury, not a necessity. More than 80% of the world's population has never been near an airplane.
And that's for a single pair of cities, with no cost overruns, no tunnels, straight line distance. It also excludes things like stations, rolling stock, and maintenance.
It's not impossible to build, but having high speed rail throughout the US is an investment that would be a multiple of the costs of building the entire interstate highway system.
Mind you, I'd love it if that were to happen, riding high speed rail is much more pleasant than flying. Speaking as someone who has gone across the continent a few times on Amtrak and enjoyed riding high speed trains in Asia and Europe, it's just hard to see it happening. Recent US infrastructure projects have had massive cost overruns, and there is a seemingly low political appetite for building large infrastructure compared to the 20th century.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/764486/cost-construction...
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+between+los+a...
Great, that's about 2 thirds of the yearly US defense budget! You have the workforce, the discipline, and as a bonus the defense industry can be repurposed for building rails and trains. Once the transition is achieved, you can build such a line every year at no added cost to the taxpayer.
(I know, that's completely unrealistic... it shows the priorities of the US government...)
But much of it is either for leisure or can be replaced by videoconferencing while saving money.
Regarding leisure, it might feel great to do fast intercontinental travel. But realistically, it is not something which will make you a happy person. Most people who are living today could not afford that luxury and are still living a happy life. Maybe even happier than the average American if their culture is a bit less materialistic.
In the light that it is going to devastate our planet, travel for leisure is not necessary at all.
All of which will be released again when the oak dies.
Net effect: Zero.
Heating is a large factor in emissions but if you fly several times a year, it is without doubt the largest source of emissions.
I'm having a hard time understanding this sentence.
In any case, I think its fair to say over time trains win out over airplanes on emissions, but it isn't that cut and dry especially early on.
400k seats a day, or 150 million a year, for an average 10kg co2 per seat in construction costs over the first year.
456km London to Paris is is about 100kg co2 each way per seat.
So construction emissions isn’t even a dent in the first year.
I also doubt they make up a substantial part of the rail traffic, if we go about it that way we there's a whole bunch of vehicles with horrible CO2 emissions that only have gotten barely viable electric alternatives in the last handful of years, like excavators, bulldozers and all kinds of other construction/hauling/maintenance vehicles.
However, railway vehicles tend to last for decades, so it might take a long time for everything to be electric. The people buying them can both afford and have the expertise to purchase reliable, repairable equipment. It's then run on a perfectly smooth "road" without much rough handling.
Why would you use a super-heavy diesel train to pull night-train carriages? Use a little electric one.
I have no idea about the numbers, but it wouldn't surprise me if including building the railroads and maintenance would make plane and (electric) train equal. You don't want to know the amount of diesel smoke that's coming from the nearby railroad reconstruction.
I wonder where could one find this data
It's not possible to create a new destination, add additional capacity to an existing destination, or maintain existing capacity without additional costs to all major parts of the infrastructure, for both trains and planes.
These buildings are very similar. The major difference is that while a capital city train station handles around 10-40 trains at a time with short arrival-departure pause (e.g. Prague main station handles around 10-15 concurrent trains), capital city airports are often handling many dozens of concurrent flights (with longer arrival-departure pause and smaller groups per vehicle) -> the airport takes more area but isn't technically sophisticated at all; the train station is denser, but railroad switching at a station isn't easy. So let's just keep stations separate. Of course buildings required by the machines should be included.
It most definitely is possible to build an airport without any costs other than construction of the runway and a fuel pump, and a 2-4 km stretch of dirt is more than enough. If you want airliners landing there then simply pour asphalt or concrete over it, smaller planes can handle dirt. You'll want to bring fuel - a truck that already often drives nearby (to supply gas stations) will bring it to you, and nothing fancier than the simplest second hand fuel pump and a tank is needed.
It is also most definitely possible to add significant capacity to an existing airport with nearly zero costs and it is routinely done - every year from May to September hundreds of tiny airports all around the world start serving (sometimes) more flights than the country's capital city, bringing in thousands of people from dozens or even hundreds of different destinations all around the planet, with flights coming in every 30 minutes from 8 to 22. Usually a travel agency finds a place they like (that probably never had a single airliner fly over there before), they call it and make a deal, and it's done. They'll set up their own ground handling service if they have that many flights daily to improve efficiency - that's as easy as parking a few cars next to the airport and placing staff they already employ there, and it's not needed if it's just a flight per hour or so.
The thing that's hard about capital city airports is that everyone wants to go to a different destination and be there on time, everyone goes to the airport by their own means, the security theatre, etc. I don't know much train stations with numbers of car parking places comparable to airports, and these that do still don't like cars being parked for weeks there. The travel agency has it simpler because they're moving the whole group either by plane or by bus, and they can do whatever they like with the schedule. Many smaller cities have airports that handle few flights per week and that kind of airport is at most a single building next to the runway, nothing like FRA or the new BER.
Maintaining existing capacity - I already talked about the runway pour... That's about it. The fuel equipment will need a refresh every 20 years or so.
You have drifted so far from a reasonable comparison for long distance passenger travel that continuing the discussion is pointless.
The airport eventually lost its Ryanair connection because - allegedly - one day the plane approaching called air traffic and got no response. The air traffic controller had slept in late....
Also, it is not my particular field of engineering but there is likely no scenario where fuel efficiency of planes is better than trains. That you can find sources for pretty easily.
Also, the emissions of building railroad track are also on a similar order of magnitude to building highway, so even if the goal is to displace cars instead of planes, it is still more than worth it to build.
I can imagine it being a net negative in the US where trains travel only every few hours, or in some cases only a few times a week, except maybe in the Boston-NYC-DC corridor. SF to LA is only once a day for goodness sake, which is incapable of displacing cars or planes. Compare to Japan or China where service between major cities is every few minutes. Once a day service from a city like SF to a city like LA would be unthinkable in Europe or Asia.