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

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.

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

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

You may well be right that rationing won't work during peacetime because it's politically unpopular. I would argue that we don't know that, because we haven't tried it. Rationing worked in the UK during the two world wars because people understood that it was necessary and felt as if they were part of the war effort. You had spivs and cheats, but overall the system worked.

There's a famous quote which I've been trying to find online about how the sight of a woman in a fur coat can do more to undermine the war effort than German firepower.

What we have at the moment is the majority of people in the metaphorical fur coat, enjoying cheap flights and a high-carbon lifestyle. That's demoralising to people who are trying to cut their own emissions. I believe that if rationing came from the Government, and if it was properly enforced, and if they embarked on a proper public information campaign to explain why it was necessary, and if other countries followed our lead, it wouldn't be anywhere near as politically unpopular as you think. Other public information campaigns, telling you to eat your five a day or whatever, haven't been laughed out of existence. They've been internalised, even if we don't always actually do what they say. Combine that with proper enforcement and it just might work.

As for technological change, I think it's vital for a low-carbon future. But serious technological change is just as dependent on political will and international cooperation as global rationing would be. You need investment, and you can't wait for the market to provide that investment.

Basically, whatever we do, we need world leaders to decide that the world is worth saving.

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

[(Anonymous)]

The five-a-day campaign has been tolerated because there's no compulsion there. That's what's impossible during peacetime, compulsion. You can tell people what you think they can do, but the moment you actually try to enforce it, unless they see a clear rationalising narrative (eg, back-seat seatbelts and the 'elephant' campaign) you'll have problems.

The workplace smoking ban is a closer analogy, and even that little amount of restriction caused bitter divisions; but actual rationing of flights would be a much much harder fight even than banning tobacco entirely.

S.

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

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this comment. You may well be right.

What do you suggest should be done to avert runaway climate change?

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

[(Anonymous)]

You can't stop climate change. The Earth's climate is not a static system; it's changed before and it'll change again. In history there's been both ice ages and times when the whole planet's been scorching hot, and if humanity's going to survive it needs to ride out the changes which are coming, sometime in the future, whether or not you leave your TV on standby.

We need to be researching ways to live in a hotter or colder world, not pretending we can hold an inherently unstable system in a delicate, comfortable balance forever by making sacrifices to the Green Gods as if the planet runs on some kind of climate karma where if we stop flying Gaia will notice and have mercy on us.

We can start by building a waterproof, air-conditioned, sci-fi dome over Cambridge.

S.

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

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

That's all I needed to know. Thanks.

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

[(Anonymous)]

Happy to help you see the truth.

S.

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

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I'm very sorry about this; I have disabled anonymous commenting.

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

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

Good idea. I suddenly remembered in the middle of the conversation that this "S" has trolled your LJ comments before. No need to be sorry; it's not your fault if idiots pop up every now and then.