> in 2023 are we still saying “why not” when someone comes up with another cool way to burn hydrocarbons

This is solvable with synthetic fuels and offsets.

> work on ways to reduce travel altogether

Good luck forcing quality of life reduction as an explicit policy goal. Or betting on less contact widening of our circles of empathy in the way we must to address global, long-term problems like climate change.

> This is an entirely solvable problem, between synthetic fuels and offsets.

I wish. But unfortunately, both synthetic fuels (e-fuels) and offsets are severely lacking in terms of actually contributing to solving the problem. We do not have enough energy to produce enough synthetic fuels to cover the same amount of oil and gas that we use today. And carbon offsets are in most cases not a reliable way to actually keep carbon out of the atmosphere long-term.

> Good luck forcing quality of life reduction as an explicit policy goal

Climate change will be the greatest quality of life reduction that humanity has ever faced.

Part of the problem is that people consider being able to travel that much as "quality of life". There is nothing in human psychology that requires us to be as mobile as we are today. In fact, it is harmful that this degree of mobility is deemed "normal" by our western culture. This has to change.

> do not have enough energy to produce enough synthetic fuels to cover the same amount of oil and gas that we use today

We’re not jetting around at Mach 9 today. Or tomorrow. Rotating detonation engines [1] are closer to basic research than commerce. The earliest this could be technologically viable is in the 2030s; commercially, the 2050s. (That is ambitious.)

At the point we might consider scaling such kit, our options will be less limited (or we’ll have consigned ourselves to doom). If they aren’t, we can choose not to use it for passenger travel.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_detonation_engine

> This is solvable with synthetic fuels and offsets.

https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/50689/carbon-...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...

https://www.zeit.de/zustimmung?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zeit.de...

https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/the-era-of-the-great-...

> Good luck forcing quality of life reduction as an explicit policy goal.

Either we chose to do it willingly or we'll be forced to do it.

One is chose frugality, the other is forced poverty, either way we'll eventually get there

I agree our current offset regime is a scam. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do right, or that doing it right shouldn’t be a precondition to scaling something like supersonic travel. (Would note that linking to Greenpeace seldom strengthens one’s argument.)

> we chose to do it willingly or we'll be forced to do it

These outcomes are distributed differently.

What's the problem with Greenpeace?

Because I'm funding their actions since 20 years now, and I wonder if I should switch to something else, like Exxon maybe.

Or... I should stop giving indirectly any €€€ to Exxon and alike, and give all the gains to Greenpeace instead.

So your argument is based on a scam program and fuels we don't really have yet

That's not very convincing. In a perfect world with perfect people and infinite money we could indeed do a lot of crazy things, but then again we have to deal with reality

> your argument is based on a scam program and fuels we don't really have yet

Your problem is based on a Mach 9 proposal and technology we don’t really have yet. We’re both necessarily speculating.

Inflation is forcing quality of life reduction on people. The problem is that hasn't correlated with carbon reduction. So it's not the way to do it. What OP is suggesting, directly adressing high carbon sources, is the way to go.

> This is solvable with synthetic fuels and offsets.

Well, until it is solved (and it clearly isn’t- carbon offsets are basically bullshit), maybe we should work on that rather than making the amount of stuff to offset even bigger?

Forcing quality of life reduction is going to be hard enough without the world’s 1% (i.e. us) finding new ways to spew out carbon by jetting around at Mach9

> we should work on that rather than making the amount of stuff to offset even bigger

False economy. Developing e.g. rotating detonation engines requires solving flame front, detonation mechanics, additive manufacturing and materials science problems. (Off the top of my head.) Do you really not see any interdisciplinary applications for any of those?

This is the failure of top-down industry planning and scientific regulation: you miss the unexpected stuff.

Then let's see the unexpected stuff we can get by developing carbon reduction and cheaper transport technologies.

This is the failure of lack of scientific regulation: you go head first in the wall.

> Then let's see the unexpected stuff we can get by developing carbon reduction and cheaper transport technologies.

Do both. Does this investment in hypersonic transportation somehow prevent others from pursuing carbon reduction and cheaper transport technologies?

100,000 flights a day, every single day of the year

2% of emissions.

Coal power plants 25% of emissions.

So many people going after aviation, it explains how we got this far into the problem.

Carl Sagan warned everyone about coal 40 years ago.

https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI

So, instead we talk about aviation

Yes but most people around the world never fly. Lots of people use electricity generated from coal.

Yes, but sort of irrelevant. If you want to fix a problem, start with 25% of it and not 2%.

The people who plug something into the wall won’t know the difference if the electricity is generated from something other than coal.

And please don’t wait 40 years to fix the problem.

That delay likely increased climate change by a decade or so.

> Yes, but sort of irrelevant. If you want to fix a problem, start with 25% of it and not 2%.

Those 25% from coal are themselves composed of several smaller percentages from different sources. The tricky part about climate change is that you have to start basically everywhere and look for opportunities to optimize, reduce, or completely eliminate emissions.

Not really. if you know 20-25% of emissions come from one source,…

Sure, kicking the can down the road requires more miracles now. That “we need to do everything at once” is what people say after spending half a century off basically ignoring the problem.

"one source" is a misrepresentation. Coal is burned in many regions of the planet. But each of these regions has different structural characteristics. It is not possible to solve one big "coal problem", because it is actually many individual energy supply problems that need to be solved.

Of course we need to do everything at once, that's how any change of this magnitude has to work.

I assure you the people who suggest flying should be limited to reduce carbon emissions are not the same people "kicking the can down the road" for half a century.

This assumes we can't do both simultaneously.

Don't apply eco-morals to someone else's business plan. It doesn't scale - if something is profitable, there will always be someone doing it behind closed doors.

Instead, work to change the regulatory environment so that a non-eco business plan isn't profitable.

That most likely means carbon taxes, carbon caps, or carbon trading.

> Don't apply eco-morals to someone else's business plan.

> Instead, work to change the regulatory environment so that a non-eco business plan isn't profitable.

Huh? But the first step in identifying which regulations to put in is to apply "eco-morals," as you call them.

Carbon taxes yes. Provides a direct incentive to get off carbon and those taxes should be invested directly into meaningful alternatives. Difficult to figure out what the pricing actually should be.

Carbon caps maybe but it might cripple industry as opposed to taxes which just become priced in. Maybe start with carbon caps 20% higher than today’s levels and bring them down over time. Still, unclear how to enact it. Is it per industry? How do you define that industry? What about companies in multiple industries? Is it for a single country? The price of carbon might sky rocket and you’ll get weird secondary effects like making oil companies richer yet.

Carbon trading no. I used to think it was an interesting idea to explore but it’s extremely difficult to avoid scams: well I was going to clear cut a forest, but I didn’t so now I get carbon credits. Or “donate $X while flying to offset your emissions” and it’s completely unclear where that $X actually goes (not to mention you’ve still emitted carbon and that $x hasn’t necessarily lowered carbon utilization somewhere else nor led to extra carbon sequestration.

I think ultimately we need a carbon tax that subsidizes creation of more green energy capacity from sources like solar, wind, nuclear (~30%) + long distance power distribution (HVDC) and investment in startups doing sequestration or making nuclear even cheaper (~70%).

Jet fuel's global tax exemption, which dates from 1944 before affordable air travel, really has to end. Despite IATA lobbying. https://www.iata.org/contentassets/ebdba50e57194019930d72722...

Something the EU could trivially implement - but rather than taxing the fuel directly, tax the fuel

Countries like the U.K. already charge poor tax on airlines - fly 20 people from london to paris in a 747 and you pay far less tax than than flying 100 people on an a319, despite causing far more pollution.

Instead charge based on the length of flight the the efficiency of the plane, regardless of how many people are actually on.

You’ll probably have to cap the tax on longer flights east otherwise everyone would transfer via Istanbul or ME3, but it wouldn’t require taxing fuel, or having airlines fuel up at the other end

> rather than taxing the fuel directly, tax the fuel

Did you mean “tax the flying”?

Even without an agreement to not tax jet fuel, few economies would have an incentive to tax jet fuel.

There are big benefits to being global transit hubs. Cheaper fuel is one way to become that.

I don’t follow your argument - yes of course, the only way to put a stop to this madness is by global legislation, but that shouldn’t stop us naming and shaming those who keep doing it in the meanwhile.

If slave labour is legal in North Korea that doesn’t mean we can’t criticise someone posting in hacker news about their new startup that will offshore UI testing to Pyongyang slave workshops

Tbh as society we don’t care that much about the environment and we like flying long distances in planes that go fast.

We say we care about the environment, but none of our actions (again, as a society) recently back that up in a real way.

Until the effects of climate change are felt in a very real way by people currently alive with something meaningful to lose, then there’s not much hope for people to do anything but look for another cool way to burn hydrocarbons.

Data backs this up. World oil production has been ~100 million barrels per day, and gradually increasing for many years (except the covid year).

People like to have recycling bins and eco friendly water bottles, but they don't think twice about driving a few hundred miles in a gas guzzling truck, producing as much CO2 as tens of thousands of water bottles.

Nor do they worry about firing up the AC or heating, burning loads of natural gas, far outweighing the little solar panels they put on the roof to look eco friendly.

It's all for show.

> they don't think twice about driving a few hundred miles in a gas guzzling truck, producing as much CO2 as tens of thousands of water bottles

This is a strange complaint to levy while the world’s largest economies aggressively electrify their transportation systems.

That's one of the few places where what one does 'for show', and what might be an effective strategy overlaps...

> one of the few places where what one does 'for show', and what might be an effective strategy overlaps

Heat pumps [1]?

[1] https://electrek.co/2023/03/31/heat-pump-sales-2022/

ah ok then well that's settled

Burn fewer hydrocarbons in this case.

Even if it burns fewer hydrocarbons per mile, the shorter travel time means that more people will want to use it.

The hypothetical plane can only carry a dozen people at a time and burns a lot more fuel per mile than a comparable subsonic aircraft, so the tickets will be very expensive. Most people will not be able to justify the cost, even most business travelers.

Yes, but fast forward 10, 20 years into the future.

Unless the cost of oil goes down dramatically, the only way for hypersonic flight to become affordable for the masses is for new technology to achieve drastic fuel savings. If that happens, there would be no reason to oppose it any more than one might oppose "regular" air travel today.

Commercial airlines have an extremely strong incentive to reduce carbon emissions, more so than virtually any other industry. I wouldn't worry too much about aviation tech moving in the less efficient direction.

Does it say that in the article?

Sounds implausible. Fuel usage increases drastically with speed.

Its a bit of linguistic pedantry: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/fewer-vs-less

Except they didn't even correct correctly. GP said "We need to find ways for people to burn less carbon," which is totally correct. "Carbon" is being used as a mass noun.

I don't know if you are referring about my comment "fewer hydrocarbons", but it was a direct reference to the post I was referring to, "cool way to burn hydrocarbons". I wasn't trying to be pedantic or correcting anybody. Maybe I should have said less, but... I just didn't. The point is simply that higher efficiency doesn't directly equate to more usage; though it can in some cases.

My bad, I misinterpreted the intent behind the emphasis. Sorry :)

That rule only exists for prescriptive wannabe grammarians anyway.

Generally these planes fly very high and encounter reduced air resistance.

Okay, but 9 Mach is a lot. And flying higher also burns more fuel to reach that altitude. Not sure which of the effects dominate though.

All in all, I'd be extremely surprised if this technology reduces fuel consumption.

The only mention in the text about fuel usage is that they need to use a special engine with lower fuel consumption to even be able to put people and equipment on the plane. Why don't regular jets have that problem? Because they don't consume that much fuel.