Flying away with our future
The Independent in Britain recently printed this excellent article about the environmental cost of the cut-price airline fad (hattip, bloggreen). It begins:
It might be cheap, but it’s going to cost the earth. The cut-ptrice airline ticket is fuelling a boom that will make countering global warming impossible.
The article includes some eye-popping “facts about flying”. Some of them are:
- Air travel produced 19 times the greenhouse gas emissions of trains; and 190 times that of a ship.
- Emissions at altitude have 2.7 times the environmental impact of those on the ground.
- Flying 1kg of asparagus from California to the UK uses 900 times more energy than the home-grown equivalent.
So, what can we do to combat this? A couple of suggestions:
- If you’re going on a week- or two-week family holiday somewhere else in New Zealand, take the train and/or ferry rather than flying there. You’ll get to see the beautiful countryside on the way. Of course, this would be made easier if better government funding of the railways brought about cheaper, cleaner services.
- Buy local produce. New Zealand makes wonderful fruit and vegatables. Buy the ones that are in season here, rather than going for overseas produce. That way, the food we’re eating isn’t travelling hundreds of miles in planes to get here.
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May 31st, 2005 at 2:54 pm
Is global warming really an issue given the probability that we will approach peak oil within the next 10 years? It astounds me that there seems to be regular media attention given to global warming, and relatively nothing to fossil fuel depletion. Resource contraints most likely will force us to curb our C02 output, and consume locally produced goods.
May 31st, 2005 at 4:33 pm
bayard Said: “Is global warming really an issue given the probability that we will approach peak oil within the next 10 years?”
Well yes, peak oil is exactly that - a peak in the extraction of oil. At that point approx half is gone and the other half will still be extracted and burned, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.
Given the “creative” fixes of some political and business leaders, expect a massive effort to use coal to fill the gap left by the fall off in oil production. Despite talk of sequestration, the only workable technology at this point is tree planting, and don’t expect this to mop up much of the emissions.
Welcome to the twin scourge of depleting oil (and a stagnating economy) plus accelerating climate change.
When your kids ask you in 2015, what you did about this in 2005, think now about how you will answer them.
May 31st, 2005 at 4:33 pm
Absolutely. The race is on, global warming versus peak oil, and I’m fairly certain Peak Oil is the winner.
The ability to travel by plane is a transitory phenomenon, and wont be available to most people in just a few years. Values of “few” may be five ten, twenty even, but not fifty or hundreds.
Airlines in America are queing up to go broke. Their cost base is as high as its ever been, but competition means that fares are (in real terms) at historic lows.
This is more than of passing interest to NZ, when mass air travel ceases, so does our tourism industry.
October 20th, 2005 at 2:36 pm
The Greens are urging Air NZ not to cut jobs, yet JF is on record for saying we need to reduce the number of tourists, which would obviously impact on Air NZ’s viability.
Frog Blog points out the evils of plane pollution.
Rod Donald urges the government (that’s effectively us taxpayers) to give AirNZ more money, by taking less dividends from AirNZ. Corporate welfare. Whose taxes go up to pay for this Frog?
Will your eco-taxes make AirNZ’s viability even more shaky?
Looks to me the Greens are busy covering their bets. They want AirNZ to continue, and it sounds good to the voters. I wonder if the voters notice the Greens want to use tax money to do it?
October 20th, 2005 at 3:12 pm
Zen-Tiger
There are non-taxpayer alternatives to saving the Air NZ jobs as outlined on another thread [Milking our Future]. In fact, they’re a win for Air NZ, a win for the 600 engineers, and secure new business from Latin America.
There is a mantra around tourism analysts which says ‘become a high yield destination, attract less visitors, extract more money, and reduce the environmental impact’ and the Green tourism policy plays into this scenario.
There’s another way of saying this ‘let’s just kill the goose that lays the golden egg’ and screw the ‘rich’ tourists.
It’s a simplistic answer because the alternatives need more study, which they’re not receiving.
Because time is such a valuable commodity, and tourism is actually based on time available for the travel and the experience, any means of transport that reduces time is favored.
For shorthaul travel into NZ, we should be looking at superfast ocean cruise vessels using safe renewable fuels which can travel from Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane to Auckland and Wellington in 24-30 hours.
Effectively an overnight service. Far healthier than flying too.
Similar cruise vessels could service any Pacific port within 2500 miles of Auckland, Sydney and Brisbane with a maximum travel time of 60 hours, and much less to Fiji, Tonga and New Caledonia.
Worth doing a cost/benefit analysis? And add in environmental and social values to the model.
For those wanting to travel faster, then increasingly more expensive air travel remians an option.
Sounds like a good green business opportunity worth exploring. And, ZenTiger, no taxpayers dollars are needed, if the business case stacks up.
Yes, there are alternatives, and we can still enjoy travel.
Of course, it helps if we begin to look a little differently at how valuable really, is time. Not every culture shares our viewpoint of clock watching. Time can be as expandable as we want it to be.
October 20th, 2005 at 3:25 pm
Zeppelins!
October 20th, 2005 at 3:50 pm
That all sounds very interesting DR, and I suspect if business cases stack up, then it will happen, with or without government.
Meanwhile, Rod was still quoted suggesting the tax payer steps in. Pity he didn’t take the opportunity to mention the non-tax payer funded options, and the messages from the Greens making print remain mixed. Or perhaps the news media are guilty of selectively quoting?
The cruise ship idea sounds nice, but 24-30 hours is not “effectively overnight”. It’s about 7 hours from Wellington to Sydney CBD for me by plane, often monthly. Taking 24 hours each way is a bit of a hit, and with food and accommodation overheads, I’m not sure of the price. The balancing factor will be availability of fuel and cost of internet access on-board (and other pro-business factors to enable work to get done during the trip).
I like BJ’s idea about Zeppelins. I did a post on them a while back. The problems of the Hindenburg are all resolved, and we could use these for point to point travel, with a couple of stopping places to bypass traffic. Cool.
I’ll be sure to read the other thread - “Milking our future”
October 20th, 2005 at 4:26 pm
Zen-Tiger - could you point me to where JF is on record as saying we need to reduce tourism? Not prepare for a reduction due to increased cost of flying, and not support long-stay rather than short staytourism as a reaction to that foreseen reduction?
October 20th, 2005 at 4:46 pm
I was actually serious. In terms of fuel efficiency airships should nearly equal ships, have more carrying capacity than aircraft, be less dangerous and not require big landing fields to disembark passengers or cargo… the downsides are vulnerability to weather and difficulty with mountains. The entire point is that the plane uses fuel to stay aloft… the wing coefficients dictate how much is needed for that and how fast the plane flies dictates the rest (slower higher flying planes are most efficient). The airship and the ship both float. The speed of the ship is limited by weather, skin drag and wave drag (based on hull length) but it is sturdier. Skin drag is the principle cost of speed for the airship. Bulk goods may wind up getting at least partially wind powered ships… slower but cheaper. Airships don’t have that optionl (the energy for a sailboat is extracted from the interface, the airship doesn’t have one to work with).
As fuel costs rise, so will the price of haste. Trips will of necessity become less frequent and/or more leisurely. Goods from far away will be non-perishables or shipped in freezer containers. That’s absolutely going to happen.
The balance of efficiency vs speed vs cost is going to push over to favoring better efficiency. The transport mix will be VERY susceptible to a change in the technology being used. There is going to be a lot of interest in this technology over the next 20 years.
A decent airship should be able to cruise at something over 100 Kt and reach Sydney in 12 hours or less… and pick up and drop passengers IN the CBD….or freight from anyplace to anyplace without the trouble of driving through the dust… or shifting containers from truck to train to ship…
However, it could be a real nightmare for MAF. That part has to be thought through a bit
respectfully
BJ
October 20th, 2005 at 4:58 pm
Warming IS still an issue. There is a lot of warming “already in the pipeline” as the driving conditions have been met but the results do not appear for many years. We could quit producing CO2 completely tomorrow and the benefit would start showing up in about 20 years… or more.
Moreover, peak OIL doesn’t address dead dinosaur abuse… ( Frog, I sense that there’s a morality joke hidden in that phrase that can be turned against the Nats
but I haven’t pulled it together - lets have a contest? )
… because there’s a lot of coal that hasn’t been burned yet too. The global recession that we all are expecting will make Kyoto redundant in many ways, but the warming will still be coming on.
It is really dumb to burn a lot of oil to ship wood and other vegetables from place to place. Some maybe… but driving next to a big truck loaded with logs that were to be transferred to a freighter bound for someplace else it struck me that the value of the diesel being burned in this pursuit was probably not going to actually be recovered by whatever the logs were going to be turned into.
respectfully
BJ
October 21st, 2005 at 9:59 am
bjchip - “We could quit producing CO2 completely tomorrow” Are you volunteering to go first? Pop round my place and I’ll cut out your lungs!
Seriously, all human activity will create CO2 pollution - reducing it to pre-1990 levels is the goal of Kyoto but with that likely not to happen as long as the western would refuses and the rest is exempt then we need to plan with how to deal with it.
Rather than flogging the dead Kyoto horse as the ‘masses’ don’t want to change lifestyle the green movement should promote lower pollution technology - hybrid cars, more fuel efficient jets, solar water heating, etc. The issue is to keep the new technologies economic - a high capital cost will put off initial purchase, even if the running cost repayment is very quick.
October 21st, 2005 at 11:22 am
Michael
Lifestyles are going to change. They will change by political-economic law or they will change by physical law. It is the difference between using your brakes or hitting the wall. Greens DO promote lower pollution, fuel-efficiency, solar water heating etc. We do it all the time. It isn’t ENOUGH. There are probably about 2 billion MORE people on this planet than it can sustain in the long term and about 5 billion more people than it can sustain if we don’t change anything. The difference between economic disaster and planetary catastrophe is thus about 3 billion dead bodies…. and a dead Kyoto treaty.
Kyoto is not dead. It is dead in other people’s imaginations but yesterday the business pages of the Herald contained an editorial in support of it… because the alternatives are even WORSE. I know the arguments, but I will give you one. It is longish but stick with me.
Right now, the USA is looking down the barrel of a revolutionary cannon. The NeoCons (soon to mean new prison inmates, see the news about DeLay?) have F’d up the country so much that almost everyone realizes that there is a problem at the top. Worse, the housing bubble is due to burst before the midterm election, which looks to make a serious change in the makeup of the house and senate. I certainly hope one or both changes back to Democrat control.
Say perhaps the Democrats get control of the House at 12:00 on 21 January 2007… I would expect the investigation and impeachment procedings will start at roughly 12:01… the tide in the USA is turning against the neocon movement, and their fall will open the doors to reconsideration of Kyoto compliance and activities. PARTICULARLY if Wilma puts a third of the state of Florida underwater and the economy tanks and gets people looking hard at the numbers and who’s been profiteering. Note that the economy going into the toilet is going to make Kyoto dead easy to accomplish. It isn’t a GOOD thing but there is a good side to it.
Now there are two possibilities for the political environment at that point. Either NZ is still leading the effort to bring Kyoto goals into reality, or NZ has abandoned the treaty. In the first instance people who are trying to get the US to shoulder its responsibilities and quit mucking about with other peoples real-estate will be able to point to a working albeit weak system that the world is trying to use to cope with what our overexuberant production of CO2 producers has produced. The opposition will have little to respond with. In the second instance however, the chances for sensible action by the USA are nearly nil, as the forces opposed are not weak and will not neglect to use the rejection by “Clean Green New Zealand” as a reason to reject it in the USA as well.
So your qualification “as long as the western world refuses” is actually part of the problem for US. Our job is, insofar as possible, to persuade our partners to dance with us.
As for the exemptions, the next round of talks will bring those people into the fold as well.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step… so you are saying it is wrong to start walking? Maybe we should all just start building boats.
respectfully
BJ