In the discussion thread of the post Climate crunch carbonsink @ 131 linked to Monbiot’s 2006 piece on air travel. Here’s an extract:
…while the mean distance travelled by car in the UK is 9,200 miles per year, in a plane we can beat that in one day. On a return flight from London to New York, every passenger produces roughly 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide: the very quantity we will each be entitled to emit in a year once the necessary cut in emissions has been made.
Also he says that the other stuff emitted by planes means you have to multiply the CO2 output by 2.7 times.
So even if air travel may be competitive with multiple people travelling in a car this is blown out of the water by the facility with which we can flit around the planet in a plane for serious or trivial reasons.
You’ll notice that he talks about a personal entitlement.
Monbiot’s piece must be seen in the context of his 2006 book Heat. The commonly accepted notion at the time, and you still see it, is that the earth system can absorb 5gt pa of carbon benignly. That’s 18.35gt of CO2e (C times 3.67). Monbiot found a research piece (Jones, 2003, from memory) that said the carbon sinks would reduce to 2.7gt by 2030, that’s 9.9gt of CO2e, say 10. He divided this by the projected 2030 population of 8.2 billion and came up a personal allocation of 1.2 tonnes of CO2 per capita pa.
As it happened this was exactly what India was putting out in 2004, ranking 133 out of 206 countries.
Monbiot, ever concerned about social justice, calculated that each person on the planet could have an allocation of 1.2 tonnes of CO2 pa. That is for all needs, including grid electricity, the inherent CO2 in food and shelter. His 90% by 2030 applied to Britain’s share of permissable output. Australia’s task in those terms, with roughly twice the emissions, would be a 95% cut.
2030 is chosen as the earliest pragmatic time we could get things into gear.
Since then the task has gotten harder. We know now that we are committed to overshoot, if you don’t think, as I do, that we have already overshot, so we need to go to negative net emissions.
We now know that ocean acidification is a problem.
Gwynne Dyer in writing his book Climate wars talked to top scientists and policy makers in a dozen countries in the first half of 2008. He came to the conclusion that we needed to take emissions down in 20 equal steps on average over 20 years. That’s 5% of current emissions in 2010 and repeated in quantity, not percentage, every year to 2030. Even then we might get caught by nasty tipping points. He thought we’d fail and pointed out that security planners everywhere amongst the big powers were making plans against the notion that we would fail.
It’s more than probable that our defence White Paper is concerned not so much about the Chinese as such, but what happens if things really go pear-shaped with the climate.
Monbiot decided against nuclear, and Britain is not well-endowed with clean energy possibilities compared with Australia. So he came to the conclusion that air travel, whether for business, politics, love miles or frivolity (eg sporting teams flitting around the globe) would have to be severely constrained because it just doesn’t fit in the world’s carbon budget.
Offsets ostensibly are fine, unless you consider that offset capacity is going to be needed for arguably more necessary activities. Certainly, short of a technical fix we are going to have to do some hard thinking on this one.
Update: We discussed air travel last August where I quoted Monbiot’s relative calculations thus:
George Monbiot in his book Heat (2006) calculates that in order to achieve a 90% reduction in emissions the British will have to reduce the number of flights they make by 87%. That is after allowing for a 20% increase in fuel efficiency. He compares the carbon efficiency of various modes of transport from London to Manchester (298km):
Plane (70% full) 63.9kg CO2 per passenger
Car (1.56 passengers) 36.9kg
Train (70 % full) 5.2kg
Coach (40 passengers) 4.3kg
Monbiot believed the UK Government was not serious about limiting air travel. He quotes the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee as calculating that the extra capacity the government was proposing meant “the equivalent of another Heathrow every 5 years”
Not quite on topic, but the Prime Minister is about to announce that the introduction of the CPRS will be delayed for a year, with even more generous assistance to polluters.
Thanks, Sam. Perhaps we need a general climate change thread here.
*Headdesk*
Unfortunately I never have any more intelligent responses to Brian’s excellent threads than repeated headdesking.
Also unfortunately, I will be spending my Kevin stimulus on.. a plane ticket to New Zealand. Wouldn’t be my choice, but I feel I have to do it because it is my SO’s mum’s 80th birthday. On a personal level, with so many people moving around the planet, it is going to be very sad for a lot of mums and dads when (and I think it’s a when – not an if), air travel is severely constrained.
Helen, you gotta do what you gotta do.
On our family trip last year, some family members were keen to plan the next one. I think for me there won’t be. But I had to bight my lip not to become a real party pooper.
I’ve added an update to the post linking to our discussion last year, plus a quote from Monbiot’s relative carbon footprint of various modes of travel.
The GFC should be really helping then. There’s been a huge drop in business travel.
Helen @ 3 – if long distance travel becomes a lot more difficult or expensive I wonder if it will significantly impact on how far people are willing to move away from where they grew up for employment. I spent a few years overseas for work, but that was on the basis that I’d be able to come back to Australia at least once a year to catch up with family and friends.
Remember that offsets generally are a crock. Most rely on your paying someone else to emit less. That’s like me paying my mate to drink less then wondering why I’m still drunk. Especially daft if my mate was teetotal already.
The only thing that absorbs emissions which we can do is plant trees. But that’s a bit dodgy, too, in that it doesn’t work if we chop them down for wood chips ten years later, and it’s bloody hard to guarantee that whatever we plant will be around decades from now.
The proven method of sequestration is to leave it in the ground. It sat there for hundreds of millions of years without bothering anyone, and takes quite a lot of effort for us to dig it up.
That then leaves the other 43% or so of the problem, which is land use. Basically, eat less meat, and we need more small farms.
Air travel just doesn’t fit into it all. But I don’t see that as a problem. Plenty of food, electricity in homes, mass transit – these all demonstrably improve peoples lives a vast amount. Air travel, not so much. We have to think of carbon as like money – we can spend it well, or spend it badly.
$1,000 on home-cooked food improves my life a lot more than $1,000 on a night with some hookers and coke. A tonne of emissions from 14,300kWh of wind-sourced electricity improves my life a lot more than a tonne of emissions from flying across Australia.
When you’re short of cash you have to decide how best to spend it. You can’t have everything you want. Likewise, when we’re short of allowable emissions, we have to decide how best to spend them, and can’t have everything.
We should stop being pussies about it and make the decisions we need to. Honestly, nobody’s life is going to ruined because they couldn’t fly to Noosa.
The reason there is a lot more air travel than there used to be is because it has become so much cheaper. You can go SYD-LON-SYD for $1500 today. This is the same as thirty years ago, when incomes were 1/5 what they are today.
There is only one way to curtail air travel, if that is what you want to do, and that is to make it much more expensive. Put economy class fares up to business class prices (the same price in real terms as a generation ago) and hardly anyone will fly. But this would be a courageous thing to do, politically. Australians quite like their Bali holidays; the English love to go to Florida; the Chinese are just starting to get used to overseas travel, and so on.
I do note that the Telegraph article gives best-case figures for cars and planes and “existing rolling stock” figures for trains. The day most of the cars I see on motorways are fully loaded late-model diesel small-medium cars I will probably die of shock. Double the consumption figures to get somewhere close to the average Australian car. Compare that to long-distance trains in Australia where they seem to have started trimming the train to match the load (rocket science!) which means better loading figures.
That said, I would love energy efficiency to be a criterion for trains too. The new Sydney commuter trains are a disaster in that respect – heavier, higher power use and much, much higher power use when starting from rest. So they had to beef up the lines and transformers as well. Why they can’t make a train that’s both lighter and higher capacity today than they could 50 years ago is interesting in that it seems to be as much about comfort as safety, and significantly about cost of manufacture. As a cyclist I’m also offended that the new trains are worse for cyclists/prams/wheelchairs (they can take them, but fewer of them). Not to mention the stupidity of less luggage capacity for the new airport line… WTF?
I fear that if we get fast trains here we will once again get something completely unique just so that Australian manufacturers can have a local monopoly. Much better to build dedicated lines that match the chosen supplier’s existing designs, use their rolling stock and build everything else to work with that. At least we’d get something that met the specification that way.
Go to Europe. That’s what you will see.
As BilB pointed out in the other thread, aviation emissions are still just a sideshow, the main game is doing something about coal. However, aviation will represent an increasingly significant percentage of global emissions, because it is growing rapidly everywhere, there is no alternative to jet fuel on the horizon, and there are no ‘low hanging fruit” efficiency gains to be made.
Thanks for that, Brian. You’ve cleared that one up for a while. Trains are looking pretty good CO2 wise. I particularly like the intercity fast train option over hub and spoke air travel. This is why the first part of my adaption plan involves a very special foldable push bike, for freedom and the last ten kilometres. Moz8 is on the money re bicycles and prams.
For the long commute http://www.aptera.com/ has to be amoungst the best answers to date by bringing that CO2 emission figure way down. And that is a good question…to what? I will send them an email for an estimate on the Monbiot Manchester journey (one of my customers does that commute regularly).
Carbonsink,
“there are no ‘low hanging fruit” efficiency gains to be made” is not a completely correct comment. The latest Boeing 777, dubbed the electric plane for its use of electric auxillary drives in place of the servo air, no longer uses engine compressor air bleed to power auxillary functions around the air craft. This was a signficant improvement in angine performance over 10% I recall. This is a very recent improvement which will not be included in most of the published aircraft operational information. The other significant improvement in testing is a reduction box from the compressor shaft to power the fan disc instead of 2 turbine sets and coaxial shafting. Another significant saving. I will dig around to see what else is underway. Still relatively marginal and totally swamped by increased demand.
And some good news
http://www.gizmag.com/all-electric-production-car/11594/
Like you said above, any efficiency gains are marginal and completely swamped by growth.
My point is, when (if?) we actually start doing something about carbon emissions, certain sectors will be able to slash emissions relatively quickly and easily (stationary electricity generation for one, think of all that brown coal being burnt in Victoria to employ a few hundred people at smelters). Aviation is not one of those sectors. There’s simply nothing on the horizon to replace kerosene-fueled jet engines.
The combination of exponential growth, no plausible means to significantly reduce emissions, and (hopefully) dramatic reductions in other sectors, means aviation could go from 2-3% of global emissions today, to 20% relatively quickly.
Then it becomes a big problem. If you have 20% of global emissions growing at 5% p.a. in say 2030, you have an out-of-control monster.
“think of all that brown coal being burnt in Victoria to employ a few hundred people at smelters).”
Well, I don’t believe the smelters are primarily an employment-generating scheme. I think they produce stuff that folk use.
Brown coal is dirty, but you’d want to investigate alternatives to the uses of power as much as the producers, innit? Anyone for cottage-smelted aluminium? Hang on, isn’t aluminium one of those lightish metals whose use lowers the mass of quite a few metal products??
Ambigulous, yes aluminium is nice and light, but it’s still quite expensive to make and it doesn’t last as long. So there are situations where a heavier, less fuel efficient vehicle is actually cheaper over its life than the lightweight one. This is more of a problem than many people appreciate, but it’s quite apparent with bicycles where a steel frame from 50 years ago is likely to be usable or repairable, and aluminium frame from 10 years ago is probably marginal, and a carbon fibre frame from 2 years ago is toxic waste. Unless you know the usage history of a carbon or aluminium frame you need to xray it to find out why it’s been thrown out because defects are not visible to the eye.
So when it comes to a nice lightweight aluminium train chassis the question is how long it will last. The media loves to laugh at geriatric old rolling stock still being in use, but those things are made of steel that effectively lasts forever – you just have to replace the bits that have actually worn away, rather than the bits that might have internally failed and you can’t find out whether they actually have without xrays or other tricky tools.
A better solution for trains would be better control systems and improved regenerative braking, possibly with temporary energy storage systems. Those might not even have to be on the train – if you parked a couple of tonnes of supercapacitors next to the railway station the train could dump power back into the overhead system and pull it out again when it left the station.
But for cars and so on where the design life is less than ten years it doesn’t matter. What counts is how recyclable the car is, because lightweight materials will do for that sort of short-term use. Aluminium works pretty well there because it’s very recyclable, while most composites are not – they’re complex mixtures that can’t be separated. Engineering plastics are often recyclable, although many are only down-cyclable – you can reuse them, but not for the original application.
So? Produce it in Iceland where they have oodles of clean energy and could really do with some investment and job creation at the moment.
Why are we producing aluminium with the world’s dirtiest electricity, at prices heavily subsidised by government?
Moz15,
Regenerative breaking in trains is a problem. It cannot be used if there is not another train in the electricity sector to use the power generated, I am told by my State Rail friend. In a dense system such as the city circle it might work effectively. Temporary energy storage would be a must. Not sure about the weight. Super capacitors cannot come along soon enough.
BilB – couldn’t we just have a biggish removable cell on the train (not necessarily usable by the train), charge it via braking, then just use the power for something else?
FBD, a significant part of the problem is the huge power drain when the train starts up again. So local storage to supply that makes sense… and filling it when the train stops is the obvious way. The problems are technical, not commonsensical. I believe that once upon a time someone in England used a flywheel on a tram for this exact situation. No references, sorry.
I want to see the peer reviewed logitudinal double blind studies.
Moz and BilB,
Aluminium vs steel is a tradeoff between short-lifetime/easy recycle vs long-lifetime/difficult recycle. The recycling industry already has to use X-ray and ICP to determine what they’re recycling anyway – from what I’ve seen the composites industry may become very limited just due to the hazerdous nature of old/worn-out components.
I agree it is a bit silly to make Aluminium here but we have the Bauxite and you’d have to run the numbers to see if it would be better shipping it to Iceland (as opposed to China where more is going now).
Regenerative braking is currently (pun intended!) used on diesel-electric trains (they dump the energy into resistive loads). Feeding it back into the system can be done but usually requires a fair bit of load-matching hardware including transformers and other lovely examples of heavy-metal-nasty-for-the-environment things. Still probably worth it long-term.
Why we don’t use more rail freight is still a mystery to me but given the time-horizon for such heavy-rail projects seems to be 15-years (god-forbid the company that doesn’t fulfil BS tender requirements) I’m not holding my breath.
Back-to-the-topic (sorry); with a major cutback in air travel companies will need to hire local workforce for remote sites, and/or contract out to locals. Personally I’d quite like to ride to customer sites with my tools in the panniers (instead of flying all-over the country), however carrying the odd PCB could be uncomfortable.
Robert – any suggestions for how to carry multiple circuit boards on a bike rack?!
“I believe that once upon a time someone in England used a flywheel on a tram for this exact situation.”
Awesome idea. So what, the braking just gets the flywheel moving, it spins while you’re stationary, then you use it to take off, and gradually bring the overhead power back in?
Maybe some weight problems though?
FDB – personally I’d prefer to see hundreds of Muppets all madly pedalling on a giant wheel-thing.
Hang-on, hasn’t Henson et. al. already done that?
In Darling St Balmain, in Sydney’s tram era, there used to be an under-street system with an enormous concrete brick, a block and tackle and a counterweight. The tram would *push* the thing downhill to the bottom of the street, and then on the way back up. Regenerative, in an early twentieth-century way.
[A picture of the above.]
I love the idea of a flywheel on a tram. I also love the idea of the conductor winding up the revs on it at a stop, dropping the clutch, and wheelieing the car on the rails.
And because the spam filter is unable to cope with even two links, here’s me stinking up the thread with another image.
There will be no more talk about super capacitors OK? Energy storage in a capacitor is 1/2CV2. Power electronics for transport purposes can only tolerate small dc voltage variations. If the voltage is halved the losses are squared for a constant power output. Ordinary wound polypropylene will suffice, even electrolytics both of these capacitors are available in voltage ratings appropriate for power systems 500Vdc – to at least 3kVdc. Super caps are about 3.5 Volts each and require balancing resistors and all sorts of stuff to make them work. Academic wankers have been talking about these for years so far no applications in real power systems except for dinky little memory backups and a battery application that cannot use more than about 10% of the capacitor energy storage capability. Don’t even think about super-caps OK.
Sodium Sulphur is a mature energy storage technology; ideal for energy recovery, and grid balancing (ask the Japanese in Tokyo) also Sodium Nickel Chloride.
You want a really energy efficient train? Dig cycloidal tunnels into the ground, all you have to supply is the energy to overcome friction and windage, acceleration and deceleration come free.
Huggy.
steveh @ 23 – muppets? Why don’t we just get the passengers to pedal instead
I’m not going to argue with you, HB, I’m only reporting what I’ve heard recently.
C:\Documents and Settings\User\Desktop\aircraft shortcuts\batteries\New Nanoscale supercapacitor can store 100 times more energy.mht
but it is obvious that if such a device developed a fault there could be a lot of energy going a short distance in a very short peiod of time. Bang. Time will tell.
Bilb Here is the problem with capacitors (super or not) If you discharge a capacitor to 76% of its nominal voltage you only get 42% of the total energy stored in it. To get half the energy you need to discharge to 63% of the volts. No amount of technological advance will change this – it is a physical law. Now a dc bus drop to 76% of nominal is barely possible with many converters anything more is impossible. So all those big numbers for energy storage have to be seriously adjusted. Also if the super capacitor is ever deeply discharged it is impossible to recharge it again unless special measures are taken.
The only application I know of that makes any sense is the recent development by the CSIRO of capacitors across each individual cell of a lead acid battery, but as the voltage will only change by about 27% the energy recovery from the capacitor is limited, most of it must still come from the Pb couple.
Battery energy storage is an electrochemical reaction that can deliver most of its energy at a constant voltage. The sodium based couples have excellent characteristics, high specific energy densities, high surge current capabilities and excellent cycling capabilities.
You are right about the short circuit current from a super capacitor – that is really scary.
Huggy
moz: thanks, you made some good points.
Bring back sailing ships and dirigible ballons say I; if ‘slow food’ is good, why not ‘slow long distance travel’? Ships supported by the briney depths.
Meanwhile, over in the UK…
Leading businessmen launch protest against Heathrow’s third runway
Businessmen?! What planet are these crazy Poms on?
here is the link
http://www.gizmag.com/nanoscale-supercapacitor/11297/
The flaw in the conclusion of the argument in the article is that because an air trip London to New York is roughly equivalent to the annual usage of a car, then it is the London to New York travel that should be eliminated.
It might just as easily be argued that it is the use of the motor vehicle that should be eliminated.
Wait. In fact, if one eliminated the motor vehicle and substituted public transport, then one could still fly London to New York AND travel round locally.
I suggest that those who live in isolated enclaves that have no public transport be allowed to drive motor cars, and those who use public transport be allowed to go fly somewhere once a year.
As it is, I suspect the writer of the article is someone who had no interest in travelling overseas but has no interest in giving up their car. Self bleedingly servingly obviously.
It has the flavour of “I am not a climate denier because I drive my car to work every day, just look look over there at all those nasty aeroplane travellers!”
Of course this is why I have the greatest sympathy with any politician who wants to do something about conserving carbon.
There is always someone who will come up with a bright idea of how carbon can be conserved, only not by reducing their needs, but by reducing the carbon usage of somebody else.
Why not to use public transport? Too far away (usually means more than five minutes’ walk – or I chose to live so far away from anything that I should also be able to choose to burn as much carbon as I like getting anywhere I like), too infrequent (means they might have to discipline themselves to watching the clock – gasp), takes too long (erm you want to save the planet or not?).
I am sure that we can all find things that others can conserve, but of course we are all conserving as much as we reasonably can and for us to conserve more would be unfairly targeting us.
We could individually perhaps put up with some more pain, but I am only one person so if I really conserve more, it won’t make any difference till others do too.
Of course we have heard the last one from politicians over why Australia should not go it alone either.
More denial.
If we eliminated all emissions from private motor vehicles and stationary electricity generation by 2050 we still wouldn’t have reached the 80% reductions required. If aviation continues grow at 5% p.a. for the next 40 years (and all other emissions are reduced to zero) it will represent close to 100% of our emissions and growing.
Marks, of course people will always favour other people taking the hit. The trick is to collect their work under the heading “things we can do” then do all of them
I know there are things I could do to reduce my carbon use (and water use) but I like to think I’ve already done the easy ones.
One thing that I’d read but never really hit home until I did it was how much some conservation measures work by making consumption visible. The easy example is showering while standing in a bucket – just us ing the bucket cut our water consumption dramatically. We got the bucket so we could recover grey water for the garden, but because people can see how much water they’ve used they use less. The shower timer is a joke by comparison. (the bucket, by the way, is a rectangular tub with non-stick between tub and bath as well as in the tub. It holds ~15 litres which is approximately a two minute shower)
I wonder how to make the air travel visible in the same way. I suspect this is where people start talking about a personal carbon allowance with a credit-card style swiping system when you shop. I can’t think of a better idea… it’s not as though you can put pedals into a plane and make the buggers help move it.
moz: “Marks, of course people will always favour other people taking the hit. The trick is to collect their work under the heading “things we can do” then do all of them
I know there are things I could do to reduce my carbon use (and water use) but I like to think I’ve already done the easy ones.”
Hear, hear! And that awareness and those actions are spreading in Australia but too slowly.
moz, we have a 15 litre round tub and two 9 litre buckets in the shower and use it to flush the toilet.
Marks @ 33, in Monbiot’s book to get his 90% cuts he says we have to re-engineer the whole public transport system and quotes a guy that has done some work on this. It means running buses in different patterns with different nodes and links and improving the experience of riding in a bus.
From memory, he says that when he goes down to Cambridge, or wherever, it takes him an hour by car. When he uses the bus it takes 3-4 hours and he arrives feeling homicidal. He talks about the potential of buses to effectively scoop up a line of 50 cars.
But 90% is a tough ask. He also talks of redesigning shopping, where the supermarkets are always too hot in winter in Britain, but have open cool displays of frozen food. And the car trip to get there.
So having redesigned food shopping into local foot trips plus online home delivery, he still can’t fit air travel as we know it into his allowable 10%.
His book is well-researched. There is nothing capricious or off the top of his head.
Er carbonsink, that is all right just as long as the Chinese and Indians don’t take it into their heads to drive more cars.
You can’t compare an existing usage (cars now) with a future growth (planes future) logically.
Perhaps some mutual denial then? But I like Moz’s idea below.
Moz:
“I wonder how to make the air travel visible in the same way. I suspect this is where people start talking about a personal carbon allowance with a credit-card style swiping system when you shop. I can’t think of a better idea”
Brilliant idea. This will make it sort itself out. Set a tough ‘no exceptions’ target for everybody. Those who feel they need to drive cars can do so till it runs out, and similarly those who want to ride planes can do so to the same limit. Those who want to have kids should not have any more credit for that (there are six billion of us – no further encouragement needed thank you). The upper limit will then determine who does what without somebody trying to say that my driving to work is better than your flying to London. Add to that a carbon ‘price’ to come off every purchase of everything, so that purchases of high energy cost items will also be limiting to one’s overall carbon expenditure. Then people will make the decisions themselves as to whether to drive to work, buy carbon heavy nicknacks, travel overseas, have kids – as long as they live within the reduced limits, then they will sort themselves out.
I wondered when my lectures on complex adaptive systems might come in handy.
)
Precisely. There are very few holes in Monbiot’s arguments.
I’ve read various numbers on the contribution of aviation to climate change today, ranging from 2% to 9%. For example: David Suzuki says 4-9%
Most of the estimates for global growth in air travel are in the 5-6% range:
Growth scenarios for EU & UK aviation: contradictions with climate policy (PDF)
Global Aviation Markets — Analysis (PDF)
Now, if by some miracle, we get our act together and slash emissions in all other sectors of the economy by 80-90%, and if aviation keeps growing at 5% p.a. with no revolutionary technological breakthrough, aviation will rapidly become the largest source of carbon emissions.
There are three scenarios where aviation doesn’t become one of the largest sources of emissions:
1. We don’t do anything about emissions from other sectors (highly likely)
2. We stop flying (highly unlikely)
3. There is a major technological breakthrough that allows to fly at high speed with very little global warming impact (highly unlikely)
Marks:
“I suggest that those who live in isolated enclaves that have no public transport”
This is the hub for the future. The greek and Italian island style village are the model for future habitation, I believe. Closer communities with walking and cycling access will be a better use of resources as climate effects bite and resources become depleted or scarce. Door to door automotive transport will change. Intercommunity transport will in this model will be better and efficient. Cluster communities with common ground between makes so much more sense than what we do today. And from a surviveability point of view as we move towards 2 degC temp rise on the way to 4 this is the model to follow as people are forced to abandon progressively worthless assets in search of a new level of security. This may take 30 years before it becomes a pressing need, but that is gold from a developers point of view. Where, is the question.
Marks @ 38:
In which case we’re screwed anyway.
I am trying to make the point that even if we do something about all other sectors of the economy, aviation will still be an out-of-control monster.
It doesn’t matter if the Chinese and Indians are all toodling around in solar-powered electric cars circa 2050, if aviation continues to grow at 5% p.a.
carbonsink @ 39, freshly released from moderation. Three links does it every time!
Marks writes,
“There is always someone who will come up with a bright idea of how carbon can be conserved, only not by reducing their needs, but by reducing the carbon usage of somebody else.”
Speak for yourself, Carbon Boy! My household is on its way, having reduced impact from Western average to one-third this, or world average, and on our way down. Change begins at home – my home.
Going to follow, now that your excuse – “but you don’t do it!” – is gone? Oh hang on, reading on I see you have more excuses.
“I am only one person so if I really conserve more, it won’t make any difference till others do too.”
1. The right thing to do is the right thing to do, whatever others are doing. If I refrain from screwing around on my missus, stealing from employer and telling people the truth, it’s not because I expect it to make the whole world faithful, honest and truthful. It’s just the right thing to do.
2. Change always begins with just one person, or group of people. It may as well be me. If everyone waits for everyone else to take the first step, the world will stay still.
3. Much more than blog articles or books or Earth Hour, actions speak louder than words. The power of example is to make the radical seem ordinary. Lead the crowd, not by words like that fat hypocritical drongo Al Gore, but by example.
4. Stop making excuses for yourself, man up.
Following from carbonsink @ 39, if air travel is, or if it isn’t it certainly will be, 5-6% that translates to 50-60% in Monbiot’s scenario. Don’t forget that many now feel that we’ll have to go close to zero or even negative.
Without some amazing techno-fix it seems obvious that air travel has to shrink.
But its not shrinking, its not even looking like shrinking, its growing at 5%, and at 5% compound growth, emissions double every 14 years.
You do the math.
“Without some amazing techno-fix it seems obvious that air travel has to shrink.”
Have I missed something here? The air travel industry is in free fall because of the GFC and is showing no signs of improvement. It is more likely to go backwards in way larger numbers than 5-6% IMHO in the foreseeable future.
Interesting link, Kaishu. I do most of what you advise already. But, big confession – I fly – and a couple of times per year. Am I irreparably screwed?
um Kiashu,
I was actually trying to point out what the difficulties are – and to perhaps provide some insight into how they might be overcome.
In particular, I was questioning why apparently flying is bad in the mind of the article which is the subject of this thread, and why apparently the consumption of an almost equivalent amount of petrol/diesel is not bad. Flying fossil fuel consumption bad, driving fossil fuel consumption good, seems to be the message it conveys. Shades of ‘Animal Farm’….and the pigs are both flying and driving.
You have picked up on how ridiculous some of the arguments against conserving carbon are at least. Perhaps I should have done the tags?
Good work by the way if you are actually beating the curve for fossil fuel consumption.
Monbiot is saying both are bad. I’m saying both are bad. Who is saying something else?
I have to go out for the day now. Seeya tonight.
joe2 @ 46:
Unless we see a 40 year depression, and I don’t think anyone wants that, aviation will resume previous growth trends in the next 12-24 months.
Marks @ 48:
Both are bad, but with driving fossil fuel consumption, there are “low hanging fruit” efficiency gains to be made (smaller cars, hybrids, diesels etc) and a clear long-term techno-fix (EVs powered by clean energy). There aren’t any easy efficiency gains to be made with aviation, and there is no long-term techno fix.
Kiashu, but what if I don’t want to triple my water consumption to get to the 100 litres/day target? {grin} A lot of the rest of the stuff at your link is what I’d call “easy”. My personal struggle is with energy-intensive gadgets. I find it easy to not buy new clothes, almost all my reading is electronic (except for the ATA’s Renew magazine, of all things), but there’s the new ebook reader, the new mp3 player… admittedly replacing old ones that have stopped working, but they’re still new. And I fear that another second hand laptop will be needed soon, my current one has taken to abruptly shutting itself off every now and then.
Actually, my big wish at the moment is a solar hot water system hooked up to our tanks so I can have long hot showers… pure luxury.
And Renew magazine… please, if you’re an ATA member, ask them if you can just read the PDF on the website instead of getting the paper posted to you. At the moment only three of us have done that and they need more encouragement.
I think that a few of the things out of this discussion for me is that as Moz said we need to put up a list of all things that need to be done with nothing left out, and also then have some sort of rationing system.
Thus if the rationing level is low enough people can use the list of things to do to make their own decisions as to how they get there. For me, I don’t care if people have kids and then go hard at savings elsewhere, or if they drive cars and save elsewhere or if they fly in planes and save elsewhere. That’s up to them.
What will make things fall over is if any significant group does not buy in because it sees things as unfair – which it will if major items are left out of the list. ie if the list forbids flying, but allows people no restrictions on motor vehicles or production of kids or vice versa. Leave something out, you don’t get buy in, and you get people willing and motivated to start up a black market, and others who think it all unfair and turn a blind eye to that black market.
Also, the broader the range of things needing an energy shave, the less there is on any one overall.
Marks, Monbiot’s idea was for everyone on the planet to be issued with their share of tradeable carbon credits. So some-one in Ethiopia could sell some of theirs to some-one in japan or wherever.
Great idea in principle, but probably just not feasible to implement.
Hi Brian,
During the second world war, petrol and a large swathe of foodstuffs were rationed with a paper based system within months of starting the process.
An electronic card based system ought to be able to do much better.
So there is not really a practical or technological bar to doing now something that was done seventy years ago.
However, the sticking point is this: when people really thought there was a crisis, AND the rationing system seemed fair, there was a good deal of compliance.
Without that general agreement of crisis, nor with agreement on what should be restricted – all the practicality in the world is doomed. (eg some people see air travel as the devil’s work incarnate, and others see having children and overpopulation similarly, but try to get those who travel, and those who have kids to come together on that one – and that’s only a couple of items).
However, IF, as Moz suggests, all items are on the table, and then people can pick and choose amongst whether they do this or don’t do that to come up with an overall fossil fuel usage per year, then there is some hope of implementation.
Also, the arguments about which and what should be done don’t need to go back and forth – people just choose what they want from a menu of options, and as long as they meet their targets.
Without all items being on the table however, you are just asking for a great degree of non-compliance, black marketeering and corruption.
You might note that the petrol rationing of WW2 actually boosted public transport patronage to the point where rider numbers have still not been exceeded in sixty five odd years – despite population increase. In the present situation, this could be phased in over five years say to allow construction of PT infrastructure, or citizens to move from where to whereever else, put in their solar hws, buy their bikes etc etc.
We don’t need an energy “shave” we need to slash emissions from most sectors to zero to achieve 80%+ cuts. If by some miracle we achieve that, it still leaves sectors like aviation where significant emissions reductions are extremely unlikely.
Carbonsink, aviation emissions will drop abruptly when I can spend a chunk of my emissions on SAM rockets. Like they say, everything is on the table
I wasn’t actually thinking of a “pick from the list” style list, but that is a great idea. I was thinking more “combine all the reduction ideas and do all of them”, perhaps with a “weed out the dumb ideas” step. But if you let people choose you can leave the dumb ones in, and that’s a strength because it means no-one’s idea gets dropped to make them unhappy. The chances of anyone choosing “make yourself into biodiesel” is low, but by all means lets put it in the list.
I don’t think an 80% cut is too hard on a personal level, and if we do that then the supply chain will also drop to some extent. The problem is when we’re taxed on that personal allowance to pay for stuff we don’t want. Saying I have 1.2T is all very well, but when the government says “we are taking 30kg of that to expand the Pacific Highway” I’m going to get cranky. My expectation is that highways will be the least of it – the government will tax me so they can subsidise the coal and aluminium industries. My 1.2T will end up losing 200kg for Alcoa, 200kg for Rio Tinto and so on and I’ll get what’s left.
I favour this sort of top-down budgeting rather than the current reduction-based approach because I think it’s harder to fiddle. Right now every single emitter is saying that their emissions don’t really count, but if we said “your sale price has to include your real emissions” it would be much harder to ignore. And the sale price would change accordingly… who’s going to want to spend their 1.2T for the year on a round trip to London if buying more credits costs real money *and* that money goes to a poor person?
Of course, watch for people to get ripped off wholesale… do you really think Mugabe would let Zimbawaeans keep that valuable international currency?
Carbonsink, the higher the slash the more things have to go obviously – that goes without saying. If that is aviation, so be it. If that is maximum of enough fossil fuel for 20km/month for everybody so be it. If that is a maximum of one kid per couple per lifetime, so be it.
What will never ever work is someone saying: “I can have my kids/10000km per year car/trip to europe, etc etc from the list but you can’t have yours.” It won’t work unless everything is on the table. If it is not seen to be fair, then it won’t work any more than the present laws against marijuana work – too much civil disobedience which leads to black marketeering, corruption and as importantly, ineffectiveness of the program that the laws are supposed to enact. Putting up a list and including everything is the only way to achieve fairness that will get you the buy in needed. Anything less is a joke doomed from the start – a straw man worthy of the deniers. (Put up something unfair, and wait for years for the haggling to stop – wonderful delaying tactic).
Marks, its entirely possible that you can keep your 10,000km/year car (if its an electric car charged with zero-emissions electricity) and you could even have a 500sqm McMansion with an A/C in every room (as long as the electricity is zero emissions) but what you cannot have is an annual trip to Europe.
Oh, and I’m pretty sure you can keep your kids
Carbonsink, I guess that my message is that in order to have mass mobilisation through society, you have to get general ‘buy in’.
I have no problem in understanding your line of reasoning.
However, if I want mass mobilisation on this, and I hope you would agree that mass mobilisation is needed, then I can see plenty of people saying, “When everybody has their electric car, and the grid is all renewable, then come back and talk about my air trips.” or “Yup, I will reduce my air trips in proportion to the general population’s takeup of green energy and electric cars.” or “Yup, I will transfer my present fossil based travel to a future hydrogen blimp powered by solar panels as the gen pop takes up electric cars.” They will then say, no doubt that people driving fossil fuel vehicles NOW and feeling all green because sometime in the future they MIGHT drive something sustainable is denial. However, to follow the argument, if one can get such a person to agree that as sustainable vehicles become more available they will also reduce their use of fossil fuels in other ways – there is a way forward. En masse.
As for the kids. No, I admit I do not seriously believe that Australia will ever adopt a chinese style one child policy.
However, those who have chosen to have children have made a decision to produce further fossil energy consumers – until complete sustainablity is reached. So someone who has two kids and claims to have a one tonne carbon footprint – I multiply by three or four times in my head and then attach that degree of credibility to their green claims. (Probably still better than the average, so not a reason for a flogging).
The final point is to reiterate. Australia could reduce greenhouse emissions by way more than the most optimistic of targets within four or five years by simply rationing – and using existing paper and IT systems. No waiting round for 2020. Four.or.five.years.possible.
However, it ain’t gonna happen unless everything is on the table. Choose to go some other way, and I will bet you a carton of the beer of your choice that in four or five years we will still be haggling, and the emissions will be even higher. Make that ten cartons…and my original copy of ‘Our Friend the Enemy.’ (Which I don’t want to lose).