Given the fuel needed per passenger per mile, I don't think it 's reasonable to call supersonic planes sustainable, even if they use biofuels or synthetic fuels. As long as not all aviation fuel is net zero carbon emission, we shouldn't build/use planes that are unnecessarily inefficient. Also, biofuels and synthetic fuels have their own environmental impact (land use).
Supersonic planes are incredibly cool, but I can't help the feeling that it's an unnecessary and harmful luxury at this point. Although, that goes for a lot of other things used by the ultra-wealthy. Maybe ban yachts first?
Companies will build planes for whatever the market demands. We need regulatory agencies to impose carbon taxes on fuel usage so that inefficient planes are prices accordingly.
Aviation uses incredible amounts of fuel, and commercial planes are in the air more often than they are on the ground. My guess is that the embodied energy to operating energy ratio is lower for planes than for any other vehicle.
The beauty of a market-based solution is that you don't need to worry about details like that. If you price the externalities appropriately, the market will automatically optimize for the most cost-effective, environmentally friendly solution; grounding planes in situations where that makes sense and leaving them running where it doesn't.
And yes, a carbon tax would indeed result in "a greater cost of air travel". That's sort of the whole point.
Boom is designing the plane around e-fuels, essentially ethanol, which will be created from direct air capture of CO2, water, and renewable electricity, making the fuels carbon neutral. But you can't drop-in replace A-1 with ethanol, potentially the entire platform needs to change.
Depending on the type of renewable energy used in the production of the fuels, there might be some land use issues, but this is about as close as possible to the least impactful transportation option ever designed. Speed is always going to decrease fuel economy, but we're not going to tackle climate change by taking things away from people. Tech improvements like these are exactly what we need to move forward.
What are the expected numbers for the Boom plane? The Concorde was a little over 1/3 as efficient per passenger-mile compared to a contemporary 747. I seem to recall that the planned successor to the Concorde was considerably more fuel efficient.
I imagine it would still be more thirsty than a typical subsonic airliner, but I am curious to know how it actually pencils out.
So far we've made zero progress actually cutting emissions. So why not plan for a world where everyone just keeps emitting? That's what every other company and industry is doing...
Companies and industries won't have to pay to build a wall around Miami to protect it from water... or the repair to New York when everything gets flooded. That's why a government needs to step in, companies have no incentives to step in (why would they?).
Government, at least in democratic societies, follows from the will of the people. So it does matter what people believe. If nobody believes that carbon emissions are a problem or that we should actually do something about the problem, then it’s odd to expect that government would somehow step in and work against the believe of people.
The way the people in the thread react to the attempt to resurge a technology associated with huge emissions is worrying in this context. I guess a bit of handwaving around sustainability is enough to make people ignore the issue, while the aviation industry in real life has made close to zero progress in replacing fossil fuels.
United, as part of their announcement on Twitter, suggested that a weekend trip from sf to Tokyo would be possible with this. Even if the emissions per km weren’t higher (which is a stretch at best), it’s still trying to encourage people to burn through a huge chunk of their personal lifetime carbon budget in a single weekend for fun.
You're right. But what you're saying has been a fact for decades. And so far government hasn't stepped in. So do you want to live in a cave and hope the government finally steps in, or invest in a (carbon intensive) Miami wall project and make massive profit?
Net co2e globally. I believe it's flattened out since covid hit at least, the issue being we need it to fall massively and we can't rely on having a pandemic every year...
Did we have global climate change, ecosystems extinction and resource depletion 200 years ago?
Every single human on the planet consumes enormous amount of resources during their life time, there must be some reasonable limit on how many humans the planet can support without being turned into concrete jungle with deserts.
In fact, more humans now then ever and we have more resources then we ever had.
> Did we have global climate change, ecosystems extinction and resource depletion 200 years ago?
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Yes. In fact some of the smartest economists and intellectual at the time were panicking about things like 'peak-coal'. Sound familiar? Go actually read Jevons. Others were panicked about over-population, go read Malthus and the Population trap.
There was a massive popular movement in the US predicting imminent over-population and resource exhaustion in the 60s. Read things like The Population Bomb.
And it always end up with the same fallacy and terrible dangerous zero sum ideas. Jevons was so afraid of 'peak coal' he suggested the government should roll back technological progress so the coal would be available for longer.
Paul R. Ehrlich and his ilk suggested that the US should not lend of food aid to India and said it was preferable for them to starve now in small numbers rather then millions later.
Not to mention the horrible, discussing suggestion they had about other forcible population control measures and not just for India, but they also want such policies in the US (This is literal professor from Standford, suggesting forced sterilization as a solution).
Of course 'peak oil' that nobody cares about now, was a huge thing in the early 1990-2000s. In the 2010 people thought rare-earth were gone run out. And yet not a single non-renewable resource has actually ever seriously run out. Ironically renewable resources like whales are far easier to exhaust then non renewable resources.
> Every single human on the planet consumes enormous amount of resources during their life time, there must be some reasonable limit on how many humans the planet can support without being turned into concrete jungle with deserts. People obsessed with this id
This is again wrong. This is the exact zero sum fallacy that has lead to all the fallicy explained above and actually even worse the the much, much worse outcome of WW1 and WW2. Read some of the text of some of the German High Command before WW1 and all the suggestion they made. Read Hitler nonsense about 'Lebensraum'. Its all the same idea.
The idea that because if the total resource base is fixed, if there are Slaves who are consuming them, it means less for the Germans. There is simple logical conclusions that can be drawn for that, and they did.
The opposite is actually true. More humans, consistently has lead to more resources being available. Not just in the absolute but also on a per-human bases. The total amount of farm land needed has actually decreased in the US. There are far more forests in Europe now then there were in 1200.
You can today get 1kg of almost any material cheaper then in 1900 and you can get it in higher quality and of course you can also get tons of materials that simply didn't exist in 1900. Aluminum started out worth more then gold and now is not much more expensive then dirt.
Our total energy reserves now are larger then they have ever been. The discovery of uranium/thorium alone provides 10000x more energy then all forest that existed the world in 1500. The discovery of photovoltaic alone means we can take gigantic amounts of energy from a huge fusion reactor in the sky.
More humans consistently has meant the exact opposite of what you are suggesting. Read 'The Ultimate Resource' by Simons that was a direct response to the 'Population Bomb' people.
The difference between a bunch of dirt, a bunch of stone or a bunch of dirty sand is technology. Technology, human knowledge and productivity, is what turns utterly worthless stuff into resources. The Nevada desert for example has been without resources, and now it might turn out that it is the single biggest lithium resource in the US. What is and is not a resource depends on human knowledge and technology.
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones. The bronze age didn't end because we ran out of bronze. The iron age didn't end because we ran out of iron. The oil age isn't ending because we are running out of oil.
Urbanization actually means we can have far, far more people using less space then ever before and people even do it voluntary. There are huge parts of the US that are basically uninhabited and actually are consistently less inhabited over time.
We are not even anywhere remotely close to potential maximum efficiency of farm land. Our methods have been improving year over year for 200+ years. And farming now still doesn't look that different compered to 200 years ago. We are not close to max productivity. In terms of productivity per labor hour farming has improved even more then when we simply looking at land productivity.
Using actual simple fact, a marginal increasing in human population has actually increase to resource availability/consumption by any one human.
Some of the smartest people and intellectuals in history who have not understood this effect and it has to be relearned and proven wrong over and over. Doesn't matter if its Malthus in 1700s or Elon Musk in 1990s. There are good and bad things that come out of this, some of these people look at this situation and simply do something about it themselves, Norman Borlaug or Musk. More often however it lead to people who wanted to limit population, take resources by force or prevent technological progress.
You make some interesting points, but I don't think you can get around the logic that more people on the planet has a significant contribution to global warming (with all other things kept constant).
If we if ignore population size/growth as a factor, we will ignore possible solutions related to that variable.
Reducing the world's population doesn't have to some dystopian horror show, with forced sterilization and mass cullings.
Perhaps the most cost efficient way to combat global warming is lifting the world's poorest out of poverty. It's been shown as populations become richer/educated their growth slows and shrink over time.
Yes the world would be free of climate change if there were again only 100 million people. However that isn't a solution I would advocate.
> Perhaps the most cost efficient way to combat global warming is lifting the world's poorest out of poverty. It's been shown as populations become richer/educated their growth slows and shrink over time.
Exactly. And we do that by more technology development into superior technologies that don't suffer the inefficiencies of carbon sources. And we will get there faster with more people, more people working on these issues.
Btw more population also usually results in more urbanization and more efficient energy use per person.
I also believe that the effects are not gone be as bad as some people predict, as was the case with most of the 'this is gone kill us all predictions'. Slow adjustment over decades is gone mitigate most of the issues.
> And we will get there faster with more people, more people working on these issues.
I thought you were arguing against forcibly shrinking the population (which I don't think anyone was advocating btw), but are you actually arguing to grow the population as a way to improve things environmentally?
Having more people in the world does not lead to "more people are working on these issues". Well, maybe it could, but it would be one of the least efficient (and most indirect) ways to make it happen.
> Btw more population also usually results in more urbanization and more efficient energy use per person.
Problem: We've got a problem with too many humans being ineffecient.
Answer: increase the population to get more ubanization, which brings some efficiencies.
I'll just ignore the decrease in quality of life for everyone, and just say that this doesn't seem like an elegant solution.
The number one contributor to increasing carbon emissions is population growth, but the same people who pretend to be outraged about carbon emissions are also the same people who were adamant that we needed a full lockdown for COVID so that not a single unnecessary person would die. You can't have it both ways. You can't say carbon emissions are destroying the earth and then do everything in your power to undermine earth's natural defenses against overpopulation.
Supersonic planes are incredibly cool, but I can't help the feeling that it's an unnecessary and harmful luxury at this point. Although, that goes for a lot of other things used by the ultra-wealthy. Maybe ban yachts first?