Where's my error?

[fivemack]

I've often heard arguments like 'the cost of flying should reflect its externalities', where the clear implication was that this would make it so expensive that people would stop doing it, or so expensive that it would clearly be cheaper to take a train.

On the whole I'm strongly in favour of air travel - at least, I'm strongly in favour of at most one-level-vicarious personal experience of strange far-off places, and air travel is the only realistic way to get anyone there; going over land to Bangkok is significantly more expensive than Thai Air even if time and ludicrous inconvenience are not a constraint, the price of the return plane ticket won't get me a train beyond about Moscow.

Yes, it takes a lot of energy to remove one ton of CO2 from the air: http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/06/co2-removal-from-atmosphere.html says fifty kilojoules per mole which is 1.2 gigajoules per ton, http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/005592.html is optimistic and says a third of that.

A gigajoule is about 300 kilowatt-hours, so about thirty pounds worth of electricity at the price I pay for it as a domestic user on a not-terribly-good-value tariff. Say the cost-of-capital and depreciation for CO2-removal equipment is about the same as the electricity; so the total cost for taking CO2 out of the atmosphere would be sixty pounds a ton.

Even people strongly against CCS no-net-CO2 coal-fired electricity generation argue that the efficiency cost of doing the CCS would be about 30%, the currently-4GW facility at Drax would produce 2.5GW; say this doubles the price of the electricity and we're talking a hundred pounds a ton.

One of Easyjet's A319 planes burns 850 gallons of fuel an hour to transport say 120 people (capacity is around 150); jet fuel produces about a ton of CO2 per hundred gallons burned, so taking your 120 people two hours to Berlin has produced about twenty tons of CO2. Removing which would put £17 a head on the cost of the flight; Easyjet is nothing if not cheese-paring, so it probably wouldn't put £30 a head on the price of the ticket. +30%. The last time I compared the prices, Easyjet to Berlin was £100 return and rail was £400 one way.

A Eurostar train carries 750 people two hours from London to Paris and uses 12.5 megawatts of electricity to do so; 25 megawatt-hours at a kilo of CO2 per kilowatt-hour for UK electricity generation [yes, I know most of the French electricity is fission-produced] is 25 tons, so about the same amount of CO2 as the A319 to get six times as many people about half as far. I don't have the figures for slower trains.

A 747 with its 400 passengers burns about a gallon of fuel a second, say produces 36 tons of CO2 per hour, it's eleven hours to San Francisco so that's 400 tons, £24000 to remove. A hundred pounds per passenger per direction; say £250 on the price of the return ticket. +30% again, maybe a bit worse if you're flying at very off-peak times and can get a cheaper base ticket.

Flights aren't the overwhelming part of the cost of foreign holidays now; making them 30% more expensive doesn't seem likely to stop people travelling, and if doubled electricity bills and somewhat more expensive holidays are the price I have to pay to keep London (and incidentally Bangladesh, for there is only one sea level) above water, I'll pay gladly.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

No doubt different people have different points. For *me*, the point is that the ordinary market price should reflect these externalities, so that people don't have to research them and calculate them for themselves, and so that people who don't care about them will nonetheless take them into account. If I thought they would end air travel, I'd find that a strong disadvantage (but, if air travel were doing that much damage, possibly necessary; luckily, I don't think it is).

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

One of the advantages of that sort of carbon capture is that it can be done anywhere, so it can be done in Saudi Arabia using solar cells or even their cheap oil at a pinch, so the cost may be lower. I don't know whether the oil reservoirs there can be reverse pumped though.

Not sure how the costs differ extracting ambient CO2 or at higher concentrations from power station exhausts.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

It's suprisingly cheap, isn't it?

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

*applause*

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

I've often heard arguments like 'the cost of flying should reflect its externalities', where the clear implication was that this would make it so expensive that people would stop doing it, or so expensive that it would clearly be cheaper to take a train.

That was my implication; but I'd be equally happy with tax sufficient to scrub away the CO₂, even if there was no reduction in demand.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

I'm replying to Owen's comment because here seems most appropriate for a discussion on externalities.

Having been in a long-distance relationship, my view on matters such as these is rather skewed, and this is a rare topic on which my (otherwise well-contained) inner Clarkson sometimes threatens to appear.

Without prejudging the answers:

1) Tom, does your model accurately reflect all the externalities involved? For instance, is there a case to be made for including the cradle-to-grave costs of developing the aeroplane (or, conversely, the train)? Is there a case to be made for including the other costs of running the aviation system: air traffic control, airports and so on? (Fair treatment would demand counterpart calculations for trains.)

2) Is it truth or propaganda that aeroplanes' emissions are more harmful than those which appear in the model by virtue of including chemicals more harmful than "just" CO₂, and by their emission at levels of altitude <ETA:> non-trivially distributed </ETA:> between sea level and cruising altitude?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

"Did you count all the externalities" feels like the kind of question encouraged at debating societies, or indeed from inner Clarksons; it obliges your counterpart to do a great deal of work, at the end of which he either says a 'yes' which isn't terribly convincing, or has undermined his own point.

My argument is that somebody has paid for the energy used in producing anything, so if energy were twice as expensive then the things would cost at most twice as much, and less given that there's profit taken out all the way down. I don't want to fall into the opposite of the sunk-costs fallacy, but if nobody is suggesting throwing away the current world aircraft fleet and procuring another then the fixed costs, cash and CO2 alike, of the aircraft have already been spent and don't need to be accounted for.

I have no idea how much concrete there is in a railway station; apparently producing the 250kg of cement in a cubic metre of concrete requires 300 kilograms of CO2, so £30 to abate, which is about the cost of that much cement. Making construction twice as expensive will have all sort of knock-on effects.

(at one point I convinced myself that wind turbines used much more concrete per name-plate gigawatt than nuclear power stations, but now I can't find a good figure for the amount of concrete poured at Sizewell B; I've just rung the press office and they'll email me later ...)

[naath.livejournal.com]

Easyjet flights to Paris at less than the cost of the train make me very cross.

Obviously if I wanted to go to Bangkok the time and faff involved in dealing with the train would probably outweigh any price considerations when choosing the method of travel (but price considerations might stop me going - especially since I have exactly no good reasons to go to Bangkok).

But travelling to Paris or Berlin or basically anywhere in the EU the train is roughly equal amounts of faff, time and energy to flying once the "sitting around in airports" part is factored in; especially if (like me) you find planes cramped and uncomfortable. And yet the train is (as you point out) rather more costly (slightly less so if you factor in "getting to the airport" at both ends).

The CO2 cost of flights is not linear in distance-flown, the largest costs are take-off and landing; a back-of-the-envelope calculation that I can't recall exactly how to do (DOH! I SUCK) shows that a full 747 flying serious long haul - the example was London-Cape Town - is not really that much worse (CO2 wise, and not accounting for it being worse if emitted at altitude) than a similarly long train ride (although of course there is no train) or ship (obv. fossil fuel powered ship). However the CO2 cost of flying to Paris is VASTLY more than the cost of taking the train (or, for that matter, of driving in an average car).

Also, whilst I'm broadly in favour of people having experience of far off places; I'm not especially in favour of people flying to France many times a year. I think that rather than attempting to price people out of flying (which would of course disproportionally restrict the poor) that a system of rationing flights might be more sensible - each person would get, say, one (return!) flight per year to the destination of their choosing and you could apply for more if you had a good reason (such as visiting family, or travelling on business).

My uncle who moved to France when he retired was recently in a production of Oliver in Essex - he was commuting on a weekly basis from his home (in France) to Essex for some months. Via Sleazy Jet. This is behaviour which I think really really really needs discouraging.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I agree that it is silly to fly to Paris or to Brussels, though the cheaper train tickets sell out much quicker than the cheaper flights, so I have flown to Paris a couple of times when I'm told of a conference at three weeks' notice.

I have been by train to pretty much the four corners of the EU: Inverness, Cadiz, Sofia, Stockholm. The outbound journeys were fun (Stockholm probably the least fun, an awful lot of northern Europe looks more like Lincolnshire than you would want to spend twenty hours heading through looking out of the window); on the other hand, I was going there for fun and the journey was part of the destination, and I tended to fly back because turning six days of a two-week holiday into a succession of city breaks is quite fun, and doing the same with twelve days, in the same cities, less so.

The frontier of trainship is not all that far beyond Paris - I make it quicker to take the train to Gatwick and fly to Marseille than to use the fast line to London, Eurostar and the TGV Sud - and certainly not as far east as Berlin. I'd draw it through Amsterdam, Cologne, Nancy, Lyon and La Rochelle.

Count four hours from leaving your house to getting to the source airport, then anywhere in nearby-Europe in two hours and anywhere in the EU in three, then maybe an hour and a half from the destination runway to the destination city centre. Seven hours to Amsterdam is tedious; nine hours to Kiev is pretty much an order of magnitude faster than the train and I am fairly confident that nothing is improved by twenty hours on a Ukrainian train.

I am strongly unconvinced by rationing arguments, on the boringly pragmatic basis that there's pretty much nothing else that we ration in that way in the UK (health care is rationed but in an entirely different way), and that rationing even goods which were demonstrably in U-boot-assisted short supply bred spivs mightily. You may think your uncle is spending his time and money unwisely, but I don't think that sort of unwiseness is as damaging as any legal sanctions that would prevent it.

[(Anonymous)]

But travelling to Paris or Berlin or basically anywhere in the EU the train is roughly equal amounts of faff, time and energy to flying once the "sitting around in airports" part is factored in

This old saw has been trotted out time and time again, but it is simply no longer true in the era of online-check-in, turn-up-walk-through-security-get-on-'plane.

If I go to Glasgow, I fly, because I can leave work at one o'clock and step off the bus in Glasgow city centre before five. Try doing that on a train.

(And any time I have to cross a sea I'll use an aeroplane, except for the one special case of the English Channel, where the tunnel makes a viable alternative as long as you are not travelling on from Paris, in which case the TGV tickets for any reasonable times make the price uncompetitive).

S.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

To be fair, a *lot* of the EU is more faff by train. Obviously Paris, Holland and parts of Germany are easy enough and I really find it hard to imagine why anybody would fly from the southeast of the UK to those places.

But as soon as you want to go to Austria, Italy, Spain or (of particular interest to me as my sister lives there) Hungary, you are looking at a night train and the journey pretty much takes two days each way especially if you don't sleep very well on night trains and have to make up the sleep at your destination. International train stations can be more work to negotiate than international airports too.

There are very good reasons you might choose to go by train anyway (and one of the reasons that I feel qualified to discuss this is the amount of train as opposed to plane travel that I've done!), but unless you get very unlucky with delays at airports then I think it's difficult to argue that train is quicker or less faff.

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

The future's bright green.

I happen to agree entirely. Fundamentally, civilisation, from the plough onward, is about being able to deploy energy to good effect. We've learnt over the past 30 years or so that the means of producing energy that we've been using for the past 200 years is even less sustainable than previously thought (i.e. not just about the coal & oil running out). The long term answer is to fix the sustainability, not reduce the amount of energy used.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time, when I was an impoverished student and budget airlines were all but unheard of, I went by bus from Manchester to Warsaw. I cannot contemplate doing so ever again!

if doubled electricity bills and somewhat more expensive holidays are the price I have to pay to keep London (and incidentally Bangladesh, for there is only one sea level) above water, I'll pay gladly.

Yeah, but you can afford it though, can't you? Why don't you voluntarily pay the extra money to $climateChangingPlan ;-).

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I admit that, sitting at Victoria Station to get a bus back from London to Nottingham sometime during the more tedious part of my PhD, the prospect of instead catching the bus to Katowice appealed for a moment. But only a moment.

I can't find a decent climate changing plan to give the money to; my electricity bill would keep even quite a bibulous PhD student in beer for a year, I've just poked around the Oxford and Cambridge engineering department Web sites but I can't find the appropriate PhD student, though there is an advert for one.

(I also have what used to be a thousand pounds and is now 700 pounds in Drax shares, but that's more a matter of attempting to use the curse upon my investments as a help to humanity)

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

My family is indeed all going on a long weekend in Asturias in October, and having booked the flight I donated the price of the flight (by buying an appropriate number of tons of carbon offsetting) to www.puretrust.org.uk.

Of course, that's only equivalent to forgoing geek-pizza for three weeks running, the entire point of this debate being that it seems odd that getting myself to Spain and back should cost the same as an extravagant lunch at a good gastropub.

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

A professor with a new tech, low-cost claims and drooling blog coverage is your weak link. If what they're doing will work, it will be after 25 years of work and considerable investment - and chances are it just won't work. I am not aware of any company beyond the professor stage who is planning to take carbon from the air. Though of course it's technically possible to grow trees and bury them in a swamp, which has the same effect... I haven't seen a cost analysis of this however, although it does get around the problem of having canisters of liquid carbon dioxide lying around.

It's much more economically rational to think of it in terms of carbon trading. This technology would theoretically act as a cap on the carbon price. It would be batshit nuts to reduce ('abate') carbon emissions at £60/tonne while there are cheaper options. The oft-quoted McKinsey cost of carbon emission abatement curve, of which one version is Exhibit B here:
http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/ccsi/pdf/Greenhouse_Gas_Emissions_Executive_Summary.pdf , while probably wrong in the detail, is certainly right in that there are a lot of cheaper abatement options than the glamorous ones.

So this boils down to, is it OK to fly when you buy carbon credits? They would currently cost you a couple of pounds per flight, nothing like your £60 figure.

Generally I like carbon trading as a mechanism, but I do not think current schemes have sufficient long-term clarity to guarantee that we'll sort the problem out by themselves. Long-term, it's likely we are going to have to consider those expensive carbon emissions abatement options (though not necessarily as high as the cost of stuffing the liquid CO2 underground and hoping it doesn't leak out). I don't see how, even with technology and intentions in place, the whole world is going to live the lifestyle we currently enjoy. So an acceptable future will require fundamental shifts in our expectations and infrastructure, and the sooner we start on that, the easier it will be.

That means we have to build railways, not airports. We can't build cities where they are only reachable by air or where they need perpetual aircon, and we have to start thinking of flying as a privilege, not a right. And that is why when I travel for pleasure I support trains not planes, even though for the additional cost I could buy ten times the carbon credits. (I bet I could do a lot better than £400 to Berlin though). It allows me to refute the argument, "well you can't travel to Europe without flying" as I do, several times a month.

Besides, what's the point of flying over a lot of interesting places to get to another interesting place? When you have seen everywhere interesting within 2 days' rail or sail from home, then decide you must see Bangkok.

[(Anonymous)]

Usually, the place you're going is a lot more interesting than the places you're flying over. I'm not putting off seeing New York because I've never been to Llandudno.

S.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I quite agree. And fortunately you have a great deal more FACTS to back the point up. Of course I would have FACTS if I had paid more attention to lectures...

Edit: I do wonder why people like to skip all the stuff in the middle too. I mean, stepping off the plane at Luxor was like walking into a wall of heat - I'm sure that if I'd taken a nice, sensible, ferry across the Mediterranean (which probably doesn't exist at the moment, stupid ferry people) then I could have become used to the climate gradually. Of course I'm the sort of person who fully expects a trip to Beijing to be an adventure taking multiple months, and not the sort of person who takes weekend breaks in Texas.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I suppose I'm thinking of this on a strict-liability basis; that a sustainable answer to problem X can't consist of a solution to a different problem Y and a claim that the two problems are in sufficiently similar fields.

In particular, the potential demand for aviation is absolutely enormous - I'm holding the universality argument upside-down, I'm saying that it is a requirement on fairness grounds that when the people who are currently subsistence farmers in Bihar become factory workers in Patna and have enough spare money to want to go on holiday to Goa, there is transport to take them there, and that by that time Goa should still be at the coast.

I know that there are lots of cheap, indeed some in-the-medium-run negative-cost, ways to reduce CO2 emissions from non-aviation sources. But nearly all of them are matters of tidying up things currently done incompetently; so there are strong upper limits on how much can be achieved, because once none of the aluminium plants in Siberia are routinely emitting carbon tetrafluoride (and once the people building new CF4-emitting plants and asking for automatically-delivered bribes to shut them down are set to breaking rocks in Magadan) that window closes. I don't know any of them that would scale to a world containing a hundred and fifty Easyjets running in perpetuity.

I don't think anyone knows a good way to run planes on fuels that don't emit CO2 - the Russian and American air forces both spent billions on developing hydrogen-fuelled planes in the Fifties to no avail, though I admit they mostly wanted them to fly at Mach 5 while carrying enough of the extremely heavy early hydrogen bombs to convert western Russia to a morgue, and taking tourists to Ibiza might be an easier problem - so planes will always emit CO2, and I think that forces you to have an effective air-capture system to run aviation without adding net CO2 to the atmosphere.

I agree that what the articles propose is not yet an effective air-capture system; I would say it's worth spending hundreds of millions to see if it's possible to have one, and dozens of billions to build one if it's possible.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Well, it depends on what interesting is.

In particular, often what I want is something vastly different from what I've seen before; and Bucharest is much, much more like Lisbon than either of them is like Delhi, or than Delhi is like Bangkok, or I suspect than either Delhi or Bangkok is like Beijing.

Alpen gleich Alpen, Strand gleich Strand; far-foreign mountains and far-foreign beaches don't particularly appeal - but I don't see the Danube delta as a substitute for Okavango, if only because of its almost total elephantlessness. I'm sufficiently into religious architecture that I don't think Canterbury, Isfahan and Borobudur are interchangable; I'm not really into castles enough that I'd want to see Crac des Chevaliers as something uniquely wonderful when I've seen Caernafon and Malbork, but I know people who are.

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this post and for raising this topic. As someone who often comes out with the "the cost of flying should reflect its externalities" argument, can I point out a couple of problematic assumptions in your post? Then I'll try to explain my own perspective.

1. You're assuming that "the extra CO2 cost of air travel" = "how much it would cost for the electricity used in removing the extra CO2 from the air". The CO2 removal technology has only just been invented. It's not in widespread use and we have no idea if/when it will become more widely used. We can also assume that the creators of this technology will want to make a profit on their invention. That means that the likes of Easyjet can't at the moment make their emissions go away just by paying the electricity bill for the CO2 removal.

2. You're not taking radiative forcing into account. Radiative means that the climate-changing effects of aviation are about 2.8 times greater for exactly the same emissions. So if a flight and a train journey have identical emissions per passenger mile, the flight will be 2.8 times more damaging to the climate.

3. You're also forgetting about the Chicago Convention, which exempts air fuel from tax. This gives air travel a big, unearned advantage over train travel. I believe that unpaid tax is an externality too, even if it doesn't directly relate to climate change. The rise in Air Passenger Duty a couple of years ago was an attempt to make air travel pay for the environmental damage it causes through tax, but it's a tax on carriage, not fuel, and it still doesn't compare to the taxes that a train operator would pay on their fuel.

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

4. Even if you could hoover a given flight's total emissions out of the air and passengers paid for that hoovering through the ticket price, that still wouldn't cover all the externalities of aviation. Why?

Firstly, because your calculations assume that passengers will be paying only for the cost of cleaning up the flight they've just been on. But the problem with aviation is that you get "ghost flights", where airlines run completely empty flights in order to retain their landing slots. It's insane from a green point of view, but economically rational because landing slots are so coveted.

Secondly, because your calculations don't take into account the other externalities of aviation, such as noise pollution or people being forced to leave their homes so that someone can build a runway.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Without prejudicing the outcome of this question (and you may note that I asked a similar question a while back (http://fivemack.livejournal.com/190735.html?thread=861967#t861967)) is the radiative forcing concept generally accepted by the scientific community at large? Is it criticised and found to stand up to criticism?

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

Now I think I should explain my own position, which isn't so much "the cost of flying should reflect its externalities" but more "the cost of flying should reflect the true cost".

The quantity of greenhouse gases that can be emitted before we get into runaway climate change is limited. We all know that. So humans need to cut back drastically on the emissions we create as a species.

I think the fairest way of doing that would be carbon rationing, where every single human on the planet gets an equal share of emissions to spend. Richer humans can buy emissions from poorer humans, but the net result is that total human emissions stay the same whatever trading goes on.

At the moment, the economically rational choice is quite often the higher-emission option, so people carry on making higher-emission choices such as the decision to fly short distances rather than take the train. But if you had a limited number of carbon tokens issued to you by the Government, flights suddenly wouldn't be so affordable any more. That's what I mean when I talk about real costs. I'm not thinking in terms of paying for the damage you cause. I'm thinking in terms of dividing up a pie so that the resources for causing that damage are no longer available to the consumer in theoretically unlimited form.

I don't see this working in a world containing armies

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I don't think rationing is an option available to democratic governments in peacetime. It is certainly arguable - ask Hu Jintao - that keeping the planet capable of producing enough food to feed seven billion humans is more important than democracy. It is certainly arguable that we've let the problem go for long enough that the answer to it will involve mobilisation, disregard of what is economical in comparison to what is necessary, and the other appliances of war; but wartime rationing is only acceptable because wars end, and I don't see that carbon rationing doesn't have to be continued into perpetuity.

I'm not convinced that punitive levels of carbon taxation are available to democratic governments either - at very best you end up with the cigarette and alcohol situation, where if everyone in England became a devout Mormon overnight the hole in the public finances would eat the NHS; more likely the government that introduces the punitive tax loses power for a generation and its successor repeals the tax. Having it imposed by the EU might be enough for the UK; but to force China or Russia or the USA to adopt unpopular policies which can easily be spun as intended to make their inhabitants poorer would only be possible as an article of the inequitable treaty of surrender at the end of a successful war, and they'd have blown up the world first.

Absent technological change. It's conceivable, at a level of infrastructure development looking like Silicon Valley crossed with Stakhanov - the Sahara and the Saudi Empty Quarter paved with solar cells, a wind-farm on every elevation from South Carolina to San Francisco and from Dalian to Urumqi, every river in Siberia and in northern Canada dammed and pouring through turbines, a fast-breeder fission reactor every twenty miles along the world's shorelines, and much of the terawatts of power from these large and zero-emission facilities going to as-yet-undeveloped air-cleaning facilities - that the total net planetary emission CO2 goes negative for fifty years and then can be kept at zero, and if people want to fly more then Easyjet Niger has only to arrange for the building of another nuclear reactor to power another square mile of air-cleaning facilities.