Aviation accounts for 9% [1] of US transportation co2 emissions (and as they're emitted at high altitude, impact is likely more like 13-14%)
[1] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
Energy usage for industry is 24%
Road travel is 11%
It seems aviation’s 2% is not the low hanging fruit.
There is no low hanging fruit. We need to address every sector. No individual solution is going to cut more than a few percent of total carbon emissions.
A buddy of mine worked for a startup a few years ago that promised to go into large plants and do some trickery with the harmonic losses with the very large AC motors in a lot of the big equipment. Apparently there is a lot of losses in such things. They would install equipment to improve the situation in exchange for a portion of the energy savings over time, which was considerable.
Is the same solution that cuts down on carbon emissions in making steel going to cut emissions when making fertilizer?
Few people want to be stuck on a passenger ship for weeks at a time, their objective is not to be sitting on a ship. It would make international travel completely infeasible for all but a minority. No one would be able to do simple things like visit family if it required a month or more of round-trip transit time.
Society has been organized around jet travel. It can be reorganized around the reality of international travel requiring large time investment.
An argument of "but climate change" is tone deaf and not very compelling when it is you getting thrown under the bus for the Greater Good. Economic realities can't be ignored when they are inconvenient.
The economic effects of climate change will be more catastrophic than making it take longer to move internationally, something that very very few people actually have a need to do.
Addressing climate change in anything more than a performative way will require massive increases in global industrialization, not less. Impactful eco-friendly infrastructure isn't going to build itself. Needlessly making this slower and more difficult than necessary just lends credence to the idea that climate change activists aren't serious about addressing the problem.
The promotion of non-serious solutions to climate change make it much more difficult to get by in from average people for supporting credible and substantive solutions. Which isn't helpful if the objective is to constructively address climate change.
And there's no precedent for the level of global cooperation -- which would have to transcend nation-level political realities -- required for meaningful change.
I'm long on humanity. But not because I think we're all going to wake up and fix the climate in a coordinated manner.
Zeppelins are tres tres romantique, though.
But seriously, why can’t you just tie the zeppelin down? Is there not any sort of cable material with enough tensile strength?
But eventually air travel's time will come, and HSR is the only alternative that's on the table.
It’s completely false, unnecessary, and counterproductive to spread FUD about climate change requiring substantial reductions in quality of life. People are smart and resourceful enough to solve these problems.
Which means you’d have to use hydrocarbon fuel. Which can be chemically produced from atmospheric CO2 and water if you have enough carbon-neutral energy. Or you could sequester an offsetting amount of CO2 if that would be more efficient.
Look at the article’s map. That empty distance between San Antonio and El Paso is nearly 900km of West Texas emptiness. There’s Del Rio and Van Horne as the biggest towns and Marfa as perhaps the most famous.
When last was San Antonio to El Paso an important trip for someone you know?
Also peak oil, a largely forgotten issue. As fuels get more expensive, more efficient modes of travel will become cheaper relative to air.
We may greatly reduce hydrocarbon fuel usage but it won't be because we ran out in my lifetime.
(Musk's Loop idea is basically another iteration of the PRT concept.)
Your thinking is out of date.
That said, the Musk Loop type plans where the cabs/cars only carry 1-4 people - which seems similar to this SkyTran - is obviously inefficient and not really a realistic alternative to cars or mass transit systems.
You only think that because you haven't done the math. Its frustrating to hear people talk about how something is "obvious" when by "obvious" they just mean "I haven't actually put any thought into it.
A single Skytran track has more capacity than 7 lanes of freeway or 3 tracks of light rail. Does that sound "obviously" inefficient to you?
A lane of freeway can move about 1500-2000 people per hour in single-occupant vehicles. If you're moving 2k people/hour in 4-person cars on a fixed guideway, you need to have about 10 seconds between vehicles. That's about 8 seconds for a car to physically clear the switch, the switch to physically move to an alternative position, and then the trailing car to cross the space needed to come to a complete stop should the switch fail to actually work. If you claim 7× the capacity, you need to do all of that in a little more than a second.
So, yes I have "actually put any thought into it." I've put sufficient thought to recognize standard gadgetbahn claims with standard gadgetbahn levels of evidence backing them up, and thus I can respond with standard gadgetbahn criticisms.
This ignores the existence of climate change. Air travel is not sustainable and air travel is least amenable to conversion to hydrogen or electric.
As you mention, the chief barriers to HSR in North America are political and bureaucratic, not practical. What's missing, then, is the political will to do hard things.
Governments used to be able to do things, when the situation demanded it.
http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly080730.htm