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Where's my error?
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.
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.
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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.
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I think life experience and awareness of conditions that People Poorer Than Me live in may well be improved by twenty hours on a Ukranian train. Might actually *learn something* about other places, which you were suggesting as a Good Reason for taking foreign holidays at great cost to the environment...
Actual rationing would be hard and unpopular, yes. We could try the carbon credit thingy (where you can sell your allowance if you want to); that might work.
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(Anonymous) 2009-07-09 02:48 pm (UTC)(link)S.
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(Anonymous) 2009-07-09 02:55 pm (UTC)(link)(Cruises don't really appeal to me either).
S.