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

[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.

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

Hypocrisy alert: I go to a lot of far-away places for work (which in theory is a Good Thing for the environment...). This rather diminishes the attraction of glamorous locations for me; 26 hours in Texas was quite enough thanks. I can see that plane trips have more attraction for people who aren't resentfully herded onto them to be a performing monkey in an identikit conference venue several times a month.

Even so, they aren't missing much.

[(Anonymous)]

What has Texas got to do with glamorous locations?

S.

[(Anonymous)]

I would love to have the time for a trip to be an adventure taking many months, but unfortunately I have to work for a living; do you not?

Perhaps when I am a rich dilletante I can spend months travelling.

S.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Yes, I work for a living. And as a result of this I take short holidays in places I can get to easily; largely that means cities in Western Europe, often it means places in the UK. Many very pleasant holidays can be had without more than a day's travel by road, rail and boat.

I have no *actual need* to see Beijing or San Francisco or anywhere else - I have no family or close friends in these places, I have no business to conduct in these places. Therefore I shall wait until I have the free time and available money to visit them.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, I also take short holidays in cool places I can get to easily, like New York.

S.

[(Anonymous)]

After all, as you say, I have no actual need to go on holiday anywhere. And what's more, I have very limited holiday time -- so of course I'm going to go to the most interesting places I can. Why on Earth would I use precious holiday time to go around the UK if I can get somewhere like Beijing?

[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.