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.

[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.

[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 ;-).

[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.

[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]

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.