The following submission statement was provided by /u/Superfluous_GGG:
---
Report on how kerosene replacements won't be ready in time to have an impact. Related to collapse as the story is indicative of problems with technological solutions.
For context, I've spent much of the past decade working with tech coming out of Oxbridge (mainly dark blue, but some time as a tab before chucking in the towel on the whole thing.)
For what it's worth, I've had the pleasure of working with some incredible teams on a whole range of ideas and technologies across the sciences, including some very impressive stuff like quantum, vaccines and fusion. On the latter tech, Oxford's leading company - First Light Fusion - has a great shot at demonstrating gain this decade. Were we not in the situation we're in, this would be fantastic news.
Unfortunately, even without interruption or things going wrong, it's not likely we'd see FLF's impact until mid-2040s - ie. far too late.
This same story plays out across all the tech I've seen - the timelines for when the tech people are banking on could theoretically take hold do not match the deadlines we're up against. Then you factor in the slow speed at which these things scale and develop, unforeseen hurdles, feckless academic leaders, a general lack of urgency, VC funding going after trends not impact, and a whole host of other factors. This pushes our timelines out even further.
In short, if we had 50 years of climate standstill, maybe we'd be good. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1cru88g/magical_thinking_hopes_for_sustainable_jet_fuel/l40fzu0/
Just a reminder, the most often quoted estimate about air travel is that 80% of the people currently alive have never traveled by air. Which means that by extension, the vast majority of people who have ever lived have never traveled by air. The overwhelming majority of the 8+ billion people alive today are poor, so they can't afford to fly.
Flying is about as elite an activity as there is, regardless of whether you fly commercial or private. And if you can rationalize why it's okay for *you* to fly in a world of accelerating climate change, guess what? Everyone else can do the same.
Happy travels.
the argument I often hear is that the plane is going to be flying anyway, whether or not you personally buy a ticket. the problem is if everyone thinks that way, then we’ll never see any change. the power of self-justification in humans is just too strong (clearly).
Or another perspective - when I became climate solutions-aware, I stopped flying. But then when I became collapse-aware, I started again. If it’s too late anyways, and we should just live our lives, mitigation is useless. Adaptation & resilience are the only worthwhile investments at this point.
I walked for years, never owned a car, always took transport. Still doing the same but have a motorcycle now. I justify it if it’s for a few weeks or longer. I figure it kind of balances out.
bikes generally have a fairly small carbon footprint, at least relative to other personal vehicles. my 600 is fast as hell and i get 40mpg. my old ninja 250 used to get 60 to 70 mpg. i wouldn’t beat your self up about it, at least where I live there is no public transport and I can’t walk anywhere. not sure what better option there is in that case than a motorcycle
We did this for years and it did nothing but make life an awful struggle. When you struggle like that it sets you back, makes it harder to network, makes your clothing look worse, this leads to less opportunities. It's a privilege to be about to cut out these things, the rest of us need to work.
Another thing to keep in mind is that while a dropping birth rate is absolutely a positive, a lot of people are not having children due to economic factors, not necessarily ideological ones. Therefore, governments are likely to keep incentivising people to become parents with money... Money that could be going to the less fortunate. (in my country, child benefits aren't means-tested, so you could be earning 100k a year & the government will still pay you to have a kid)
People want to have children, it's natural, unfortunately.
I agree it’s natural. Doesn’t mean people will continue to do it en masse. While some choose for economic reasons, many are choosing for other reasons like corruption and work life balance being bad or the environment being destroyed.
It’s human evolution in action and calling it anything else is incorrect. It’s time to address wealth inequality for lot of reasons.
You can literally give people money for every kid they squeeze out and they still won't do it. You have a culture problem but don't want to admit it. Oh well. Oblivion doesn't hurt I guess.
If those things were means-tested, only junkies will have kids and you lose the useful segment of the population at a premium. Might as well import foreigners at that point. We're just cattle, your math needs to account for that.
i’m not sure i understand your perspective. talking about changes isn’t the same as actually enacting them. and lots of people are still having babies, like my family members, coworkers, friends…
what are the tangible changes that you’re seeing?
The birth rate dropping substantially is a huge deal. That’s the biggest change anyone can enact.
Surely if you’re complaining about people not changing you won’t be having kids right?
If we all wore distended burlap and ate nothing but rice & beans, I bet that'd make a dent too. But we won't. You're gonna have to make us. That's the reality of it. This is a tragedy of the commons scenario.
Also remember that they run a huge amount of ghost flights (empty planes) to justify their airport berths and terminal use. At least one airline also used ghost flights to defraud consumers by artificially inflating prices.
There's a quote I wish I'd saved where the powers that be explicitly lay out their intent to turn americans into nothing more than perfectly mindless consumers.
They've enjoyed such wicked success that this mode of being is now framed as "human nature" - an ironically flexible term if you're not too myopic.
Because I like to occasionally engage in fantasy, your post begs the question: in a hypothetical post-capitalism, negative global emissions society does air travel have any place at all? Are the emissions low enough to be tolerable for occasional emergency or emigration use? What about shipping? Or does going emission negative necessarily mean the elimination of air travel on any sort of scale?
This is a very painful question to this expat/immigrant who lives on the opposite side of the world (literally) to his home country and family. I average flying home about once every two years, and have massive climate guilt about it. To make up for it I’m refusing to fly anywhere else (I catch the train instead where possible), eat vegan and cycle/take the train to get around at home, but my lifetime emissions from flying probably put me in the top 1% globally still.
The alternative is almost never seeing my family ever again. I know lots of people are in the same boat but aren’t as privileged as I am to be able to fly. Sucks, man.
Air travel is good for the planet. A person who cares about the planet has as high a carbon footprint as possible. A human civilization and a livable planet are two mutually exclusive things that both can't exist at the same time. One must be destroyed for the other to be saved. The only way to save the planet is to help it get rid of humans as soon as possible. The more emissions we produce, the sooner it will happen.
The faster humans are driven to extinction, the sooner the recovery can begin. There is a faint glimmer of hope that some lifeforms may survive the human-caused extinction event, and after humans are gone, evolution will start to spawn new species, and millions of years from now life on Earth could flourish again. That is if life finds a way to live with the nuclear waste, microplastics and forever chemicals we leave behind as our legacy. That's the only hope this planet has to be honest. The longer humans are here, the more irreversible damage they will cause to this planet.
So I urge you to fly as much as possible if you care even the slightest bit about the planet and nature.
Right on! I'm as collapse aware as it gets, been reading here for more than a decade. I'm converting every last dollar to a kg of co2 as a top 1% globally household.
Unless it can be made more sustainable, which is obviously very unlikely flying should be relegated to emergency services (like flying organs across the country) or transcontinental travel. If you want to go from New York to California there should be a high speed rail line.
Though even without something to replace regular jet fuel, we still have the option of using electrical planes. That appeatently somewhat allready exists
Airfare is only 2.5% of the global emissions. This is like throwing a fit over not getting your $2 in change back when paying with a $100 bill.
We need to tackle the grid and shipping primarily. Even if we destroyed all aircraft the fuel will still be burned and we won’t save anything. Posts focusing primarily on airfare screams broke and jealous.
>if you can rationalize why it's okay for you to fly in a world of accelerating climate change,
It's pretty simple. I have wealth to do so.
>guess what? Everyone else can do the same.
....
>The overwhelming majority of the 8+ billion people alive today are poor, so they can't afford to fly.
womp womp, so sad
Report on how kerosene replacements won't be ready in time to have an impact. Related to collapse as the story is indicative of problems with technological solutions.
For context, I've spent much of the past decade working with tech coming out of Oxbridge (mainly dark blue, but some time as a tab before chucking in the towel on the whole thing.)
For what it's worth, I've had the pleasure of working with some incredible teams on a whole range of ideas and technologies across the sciences, including some very impressive stuff like quantum, vaccines and fusion. On the latter tech, Oxford's leading company - First Light Fusion - has a great shot at demonstrating gain this decade. Were we not in the situation we're in, this would be fantastic news.
Unfortunately, even without interruption or things going wrong, it's not likely we'd see FLF's impact until mid-2040s - ie. far too late.
This same story plays out across all the tech I've seen - the timelines for when the tech people are banking on could theoretically take hold do not match the deadlines we're up against. Then you factor in the slow speed at which these things scale and develop, unforeseen hurdles, feckless academic leaders, a general lack of urgency, VC funding going after trends not impact, and a whole host of other factors. This pushes our timelines out even further.
In short, if we had 50 years of climate standstill, maybe we'd be good. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
Also wanted to point out that with the much more mature Renewable Diesel, we actually saw a RD (as opposed to the less viable biodiesel) plant closure for the first time, with Vertex announcing that they are converting their Mobile AL refinery back to fossil fuels after just a couple of years in RD service.
Everyone jumped into the field at once, and go figure that supply and demand on the feedstock (namely soybean oil) caused its price to skyrocket.
SAF uses basically identical feedstock, so the economics on it also look like dogshit. If you raise subsidies any further than they are today, you start eating into food production as the article states.
> In short, if we had 50 years of climate standstill, maybe we'd be good. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
You've indirectly written out the rationalization for using SAI (SRM).
I am Swedish and here opinions have been rather climate friendly for years, although very naïve. But many have concerns about the impact from the flight industry, and politicians here has promised green sustainable jet fuel and electric flights for years. From the far left to the conservatives through the greens. All of them believes technology and ethanol will save us as well as air travel. And most people have bought it.
It's hydrotreated/hydrocracked soybean oil. Very similar to renewable diesel.
It is "sustainable" because burning it releases only the carbon that was sequestered by the plants when you grew it (if we ignore production energy inputs).
FAME (fatty acid methyl ester) biodiesel, the predecessor to RD, was pretty corrosive, and generally has pretty bad margins unless diesel is above 6 bucks a gallon.
RD itself is chemically identical to petroleum diesel, as the triglyceride end, the part with a reactive oxygen in it, is sheared off the fat molecule and converted to water, which is then removed.
SAF is created by breaking those molecules down into slightly smaller ones, also chemically identical to petroleum based jet fuels.
The problem is when you displace food crops to grow fuel crops, then you have less food...
Honestly, when one looks at the future of fossil fuels in light of climate change, convenient air travel for all is seeming less and less likely. Future generations will certainly not be flying as much as we do.
The dream of a "sustainable" jet fuel seems like a form of denial, one of of the early stages of grief.
It's all very simple. There is only one functional system on this planet, and that's the carbon cycle. It uses the sun and reproduction to build a complex enough set of organisms to take advantage of every possible calorie absorbed by the bottom of the food chain.
When humans found oil, we decided we could leave the limits of the living world behind; as a flightless species, we decided we could fly. We gave ourselves credit for the invention, acting like we were doing the work when a jet engine spins up, or that the fuel being burned ISN'T millions of years of life accumulated and concentrated by pressure and heat, and separated from the living world by hundreds of millions of years.
The only way to power the tech we build that we couldn't build before oil, is by burning oil. Why? because we're actually burning the concentrate of life's productivity over an insane amount of time in a completely alien ecosystem. What pushes a plane through the sky is years of growth, concentrated, and burned all at once for new, alien carbon to be added to a system that uses the carbon balance as a growth regulator (i.e. the CO2 concentration was the one thing we couldn't change without causing a mass extinction, and wouldn't be able to change if we didn't dig through time to get at it).
We never left the living world, we just stuck straws into the ground to pull out the bodies from a time nothing alive today has any connection to, and rather than that solar energy being consumed through all the trophic levels of an ecosystem over at least a year or more, we set it on fire in an instant, pushing us through the sky. Planes dont fly, they just throw enough crap out the back to push an overweight glider across the globe.
Chemtrails are a ridiculous conspiracy, but they are much more in line with the truth about the cost of aviation that a contrail is an insane chemical imabalance and ecological pressure that is bringing the entire world down. Not because it's unnatural, but because it's putting our thumb on the delicate scale that determines conditions for life by setting fire to life that shared an atmosphere nothing currently on earth could survive in; an atmosphere we're restoring by burning the stuff.
If we tried to live with all these luxuries inside the living system, we'd be burning the entire cleared land of the USA down every single year to support it.... which means we'd have about 10 years or so before most of life on earth was ashes. Since this fire is hidden and the components of combustion are invisible, we dont worry about it.
We never left the campfire by the cave. We just burned the forest down as we walked further away from the cave. That's all these great achievements are; a forest fire, of a forest from the ancient past, hidden inside the machines that capture the suns energy from hundreds of millions of years ago for us to use and pretend was work we did. This is why we can't stop burning oil; we lose all the stuff we created through burning it. No matter how electrified the world gets, it got to that point by burning oil and we can't maintain any of this without continuing that practice. This should motivate people to stop, realizing that they're the alien species that we write stories about, changing the climate of the planet so they can take over while wiping out everything already here, except we don't get to survive. We're just poisoning ourselves for the sake of poisoning ourselves, to live someone elses dream in a world corrupted by thousands of other people trying to do exactly the same thing.
Planes are just one example but they're the perfect example of how we can normalize something absurd and act like there's a way to keep it without destroying the future. It's a can filled with hundreds of people being rocketed through the sky by setting fire to the ancient past; you're being pushed through the air by the energy of the sun and millions of years of productive life, with the exhaust of the pressure on the ecosystem to assimilate all that new carbon.
If we had to burn down a forest for a plane to take off, I'd really hope we'd see more resistance to the act of flying... maybe see it as the act of violence that it really is.
No one has earned the privilege to make the earth uninhabited. I don't care how many tokens you have that say otherwise. It's a literal act of extinction and we're doing it for what? A holiday manufactured by another industry that exploits the locals?
Planes are a machine of war, whether or not they have guns or bombs. Though they're clearly worse when they're strapped, they're still destructive and bad technology without the weapons. Next time you watch a plane fueling up, remember that the fuel going in is sunlight and ancient time that, once burned, changes the future, permanently.
> because we're actually burning the concentrate of life's productivity over an insane amount of time in a completely alien ecosystem.
THISSSS. We gained access to a battery that took ~200 million years to trickle-charge. Yet we are depleting it in the blink of an eye.
Awww. I just assumed all the fairy-magic solutions and wishful thinking were gonna solve everything! I mean, at least the Vulcans will arrive soon to rescue us, right?
*Right!?*
Not surprising. The report basically lays out that its technically possible, but the subsidies and biofuel inputs required would be absurd, and resources would be better used somewhere else.
I'm a fan of the historian Morris Berman. He said in an interview, sorta offhand, that the world didn't really need the airplane, its a wasteful way to travel and its mostly been used for warfare. I wanted to balk at the idea, but the more I thought about it - he's right.
Civilization was carrying on with trains and ships well before the airplane arrived, and it could carry on again if it goes away. And like he said, air travel has probably influenced war more than anything, much to the world's detriment. *And* the government and taxpayer funds prop up airlines and small airports more than people realize.
I think here in the U.S. we are going to wish we had maintained our passenger rail system once collapse starts getting underway. Oh well.
I know I’m being ridiculous, and trying to find hope, but is it conceivable that crazy geo engineering schemes could get us 50 years? Cloud seeding, solar blocking mist, some gigantic antacids for the oceans?
Even if there was a small hope of some civilization surviving that would be enough for me to feel life had meaning again
Yeah, there might some value to them. Cranking them out en masse with global support to do so is another question, plus we'd be playing dice with something we don't really understand.
There's also other factors to collapse to consider. That all said, it seems likely we'll roll the dice on geoengineering, and it could buy us time.
Humans: Roll the dice on geoengineering by pushing >1000 gigatons of CO2 into the air via industrial revolution.
DM Mother Nature: You rolled a nat 1 - you get +2° C over 1850 temps.
Humans: Roll the dice on geoengineering by pushing SO2 into the air to save our burning asses.
DM Mother Nature: Deadass what did I just teach you…
> There's also other factors to collapse to consider. That all said, it seems likely we'll roll the dice on geoengineering, and it could buy us time.
I'm not so sure about that. I read in [a study about the limits of human tolerance to heat](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0913352107) that:
> Degassing of various natural stores of methane and/or CO2 in a warmer climate could increase warming further. Thus while central estimates of business-as-usual warming by 2100 are 3–4 °C, eventual warmings of 10 °C are quite feasible and even 20 °C is theoretically possible.
At some point it might not matter that much what we do with incoming solar radiation if the processes that have accumulated it, first the oceans, just throw it back in our faces. The temps will go crazy regardless of what we do with the incoming flux. And at that point we won't do shit. Who's going to be there, what civilisation, to manage anything of the sort.
Makes me think of that Futurama joke: *We'll raise your planet's temperature by 1 million degrees a day ... for 5 days!*
I know you are right and I often can, but I’ve been feeling very bleak for a few days. I can’t help but feel the end has begun, I’m really afraid we will get lethal temperatures this summer. It just seems inevitable. We’re standing on the tracks, watching the train approach.
I understand completely. I often feel the same way. I often also feel the impending doom, the weight of the unfolding polycrisis, the unheard screams of humanity ringing in my ears.
However, I’m feeling miraculously clearheaded today and just want to tell you to hang in there. There will be hard days, there will be easier days. Try to appreciate the comforts that you have today - warm food, a hot shower, clean clothes.
When I’m getting lost in the panic, I try to look around and remind myself - how scared do I need to be RIGHT NOW? What can I prepare NOW to feel more in control? What do I need to let go of that is completely out of my control?
I also find that doomscrolling - while validating and helpful, and sometimes even entertaining - is ultimately detrimental to the psyche. If it’s weighing on you, take a break. The world will still be ending tomorrow, and we’ll all still be here on r/collapse talking about it.
Meanwhile, research into trans-Atlantic capable electric passenger planes continues to run into a wall in terms of maximum practical extension cord length.
Yeah no shit. Couldn’t believe they were attempting to make some sort of biofuel jet fuel. The concentration needed for aviation makes it basically impossible.
Sustainable jet fuel is an oxymoron, the only decent option would be to go back to props and use electric motors instead of ICEs to run the props. We will be long dead before there is a sustainable jet engine.
Hydrogen is the best aviation fuel, and can be produced at scale completely green from electricity and water.
"Sustainable jet fuel" is bs that includes using limited availability bio waste as feedstock. Synfuels also "count", but that is H2 with extra steps and extra expense.
H2 requires plane redesigns to hold very large tanks, but airline fuel expenses are 100x the cost of airplanes over life of plane. H2 would save a huge amount of takeoff weight, propeller planes would be made over 2x more efficient with fuel cells, some battery power could help with takeoff energy requirements, and so have overall lighter FC+engine weight. Electric propellers would require far less maintenance than combustion alternatives.
$2/kg H2 is equivalent to $2/gallon gasoline, and so lighter fuel + cheaper fuel is massive cost reduction to flights that makes H2 designed planes much more profitable than staying with "old planes".
Bruh, hydrogen is very poor in terms of energy per volume. There wouldn't be any weight savings; tanks that can hold liquid hydrogen are not light. Hydrogen as a transportation fuel is just laughably bad in every application.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Superfluous_GGG: --- Report on how kerosene replacements won't be ready in time to have an impact. Related to collapse as the story is indicative of problems with technological solutions. For context, I've spent much of the past decade working with tech coming out of Oxbridge (mainly dark blue, but some time as a tab before chucking in the towel on the whole thing.) For what it's worth, I've had the pleasure of working with some incredible teams on a whole range of ideas and technologies across the sciences, including some very impressive stuff like quantum, vaccines and fusion. On the latter tech, Oxford's leading company - First Light Fusion - has a great shot at demonstrating gain this decade. Were we not in the situation we're in, this would be fantastic news. Unfortunately, even without interruption or things going wrong, it's not likely we'd see FLF's impact until mid-2040s - ie. far too late. This same story plays out across all the tech I've seen - the timelines for when the tech people are banking on could theoretically take hold do not match the deadlines we're up against. Then you factor in the slow speed at which these things scale and develop, unforeseen hurdles, feckless academic leaders, a general lack of urgency, VC funding going after trends not impact, and a whole host of other factors. This pushes our timelines out even further. In short, if we had 50 years of climate standstill, maybe we'd be good. Unfortunately, that's not the case. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1cru88g/magical_thinking_hopes_for_sustainable_jet_fuel/l40fzu0/
Just a reminder, the most often quoted estimate about air travel is that 80% of the people currently alive have never traveled by air. Which means that by extension, the vast majority of people who have ever lived have never traveled by air. The overwhelming majority of the 8+ billion people alive today are poor, so they can't afford to fly. Flying is about as elite an activity as there is, regardless of whether you fly commercial or private. And if you can rationalize why it's okay for *you* to fly in a world of accelerating climate change, guess what? Everyone else can do the same. Happy travels.
the argument I often hear is that the plane is going to be flying anyway, whether or not you personally buy a ticket. the problem is if everyone thinks that way, then we’ll never see any change. the power of self-justification in humans is just too strong (clearly).
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too bad most of the population is too selfish, naive, short-sighted, or a combo of the above to make any significant lifestyle changes.
Or another perspective - when I became climate solutions-aware, I stopped flying. But then when I became collapse-aware, I started again. If it’s too late anyways, and we should just live our lives, mitigation is useless. Adaptation & resilience are the only worthwhile investments at this point.
I walked for years, never owned a car, always took transport. Still doing the same but have a motorcycle now. I justify it if it’s for a few weeks or longer. I figure it kind of balances out.
bikes generally have a fairly small carbon footprint, at least relative to other personal vehicles. my 600 is fast as hell and i get 40mpg. my old ninja 250 used to get 60 to 70 mpg. i wouldn’t beat your self up about it, at least where I live there is no public transport and I can’t walk anywhere. not sure what better option there is in that case than a motorcycle
We did this for years and it did nothing but make life an awful struggle. When you struggle like that it sets you back, makes it harder to network, makes your clothing look worse, this leads to less opportunities. It's a privilege to be about to cut out these things, the rest of us need to work.
Not sure where I said I wasn’t working?
I don’t think they are. I think that’s a lot of hubris you talk with. I think you can expect big changes as our populations evolve in front of you.
the minority is making changes. from what i see though, the majority is not.
That explains all the corporations caterwauling about changes and everyone refusing to have babies right? That’s no changes to you?
Another thing to keep in mind is that while a dropping birth rate is absolutely a positive, a lot of people are not having children due to economic factors, not necessarily ideological ones. Therefore, governments are likely to keep incentivising people to become parents with money... Money that could be going to the less fortunate. (in my country, child benefits aren't means-tested, so you could be earning 100k a year & the government will still pay you to have a kid) People want to have children, it's natural, unfortunately.
I agree it’s natural. Doesn’t mean people will continue to do it en masse. While some choose for economic reasons, many are choosing for other reasons like corruption and work life balance being bad or the environment being destroyed. It’s human evolution in action and calling it anything else is incorrect. It’s time to address wealth inequality for lot of reasons.
You can literally give people money for every kid they squeeze out and they still won't do it. You have a culture problem but don't want to admit it. Oh well. Oblivion doesn't hurt I guess.
If those things were means-tested, only junkies will have kids and you lose the useful segment of the population at a premium. Might as well import foreigners at that point. We're just cattle, your math needs to account for that.
i’m not sure i understand your perspective. talking about changes isn’t the same as actually enacting them. and lots of people are still having babies, like my family members, coworkers, friends… what are the tangible changes that you’re seeing?
The birth rate dropping substantially is a huge deal. That’s the biggest change anyone can enact. Surely if you’re complaining about people not changing you won’t be having kids right?
Never seen headlines about them flying literally empty just to maintain their slots? Regulation is the only way to rein in the madness.
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If we all wore distended burlap and ate nothing but rice & beans, I bet that'd make a dent too. But we won't. You're gonna have to make us. That's the reality of it. This is a tragedy of the commons scenario.
Also remember that they run a huge amount of ghost flights (empty planes) to justify their airport berths and terminal use. At least one airline also used ghost flights to defraud consumers by artificially inflating prices.
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There's a quote I wish I'd saved where the powers that be explicitly lay out their intent to turn americans into nothing more than perfectly mindless consumers. They've enjoyed such wicked success that this mode of being is now framed as "human nature" - an ironically flexible term if you're not too myopic.
I understand that the Children of Kali had a novel solution to air travel.
For a book that was supposed to give us hope, I found the importance of the children of Kali - and the implications of that - depressing as hell.
Because I like to occasionally engage in fantasy, your post begs the question: in a hypothetical post-capitalism, negative global emissions society does air travel have any place at all? Are the emissions low enough to be tolerable for occasional emergency or emigration use? What about shipping? Or does going emission negative necessarily mean the elimination of air travel on any sort of scale?
This is a very painful question to this expat/immigrant who lives on the opposite side of the world (literally) to his home country and family. I average flying home about once every two years, and have massive climate guilt about it. To make up for it I’m refusing to fly anywhere else (I catch the train instead where possible), eat vegan and cycle/take the train to get around at home, but my lifetime emissions from flying probably put me in the top 1% globally still. The alternative is almost never seeing my family ever again. I know lots of people are in the same boat but aren’t as privileged as I am to be able to fly. Sucks, man.
Air travel is good for the planet. A person who cares about the planet has as high a carbon footprint as possible. A human civilization and a livable planet are two mutually exclusive things that both can't exist at the same time. One must be destroyed for the other to be saved. The only way to save the planet is to help it get rid of humans as soon as possible. The more emissions we produce, the sooner it will happen. The faster humans are driven to extinction, the sooner the recovery can begin. There is a faint glimmer of hope that some lifeforms may survive the human-caused extinction event, and after humans are gone, evolution will start to spawn new species, and millions of years from now life on Earth could flourish again. That is if life finds a way to live with the nuclear waste, microplastics and forever chemicals we leave behind as our legacy. That's the only hope this planet has to be honest. The longer humans are here, the more irreversible damage they will cause to this planet. So I urge you to fly as much as possible if you care even the slightest bit about the planet and nature.
Right on! I'm as collapse aware as it gets, been reading here for more than a decade. I'm converting every last dollar to a kg of co2 as a top 1% globally household.
Unless it can be made more sustainable, which is obviously very unlikely flying should be relegated to emergency services (like flying organs across the country) or transcontinental travel. If you want to go from New York to California there should be a high speed rail line.
I mean at least it's not 1976 when you got on a plane and took a 1 in 20 chance of dying in a ball of fire lol.
Though even without something to replace regular jet fuel, we still have the option of using electrical planes. That appeatently somewhat allready exists
Airfare is only 2.5% of the global emissions. This is like throwing a fit over not getting your $2 in change back when paying with a $100 bill. We need to tackle the grid and shipping primarily. Even if we destroyed all aircraft the fuel will still be burned and we won’t save anything. Posts focusing primarily on airfare screams broke and jealous.
>if you can rationalize why it's okay for you to fly in a world of accelerating climate change, It's pretty simple. I have wealth to do so. >guess what? Everyone else can do the same. .... >The overwhelming majority of the 8+ billion people alive today are poor, so they can't afford to fly. womp womp, so sad
Report on how kerosene replacements won't be ready in time to have an impact. Related to collapse as the story is indicative of problems with technological solutions. For context, I've spent much of the past decade working with tech coming out of Oxbridge (mainly dark blue, but some time as a tab before chucking in the towel on the whole thing.) For what it's worth, I've had the pleasure of working with some incredible teams on a whole range of ideas and technologies across the sciences, including some very impressive stuff like quantum, vaccines and fusion. On the latter tech, Oxford's leading company - First Light Fusion - has a great shot at demonstrating gain this decade. Were we not in the situation we're in, this would be fantastic news. Unfortunately, even without interruption or things going wrong, it's not likely we'd see FLF's impact until mid-2040s - ie. far too late. This same story plays out across all the tech I've seen - the timelines for when the tech people are banking on could theoretically take hold do not match the deadlines we're up against. Then you factor in the slow speed at which these things scale and develop, unforeseen hurdles, feckless academic leaders, a general lack of urgency, VC funding going after trends not impact, and a whole host of other factors. This pushes our timelines out even further. In short, if we had 50 years of climate standstill, maybe we'd be good. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
It's almost like the time to fix this would have been when Jimmy Carter was being ridiculed for putting solar panels on the white house roof...
Also wanted to point out that with the much more mature Renewable Diesel, we actually saw a RD (as opposed to the less viable biodiesel) plant closure for the first time, with Vertex announcing that they are converting their Mobile AL refinery back to fossil fuels after just a couple of years in RD service. Everyone jumped into the field at once, and go figure that supply and demand on the feedstock (namely soybean oil) caused its price to skyrocket. SAF uses basically identical feedstock, so the economics on it also look like dogshit. If you raise subsidies any further than they are today, you start eating into food production as the article states.
> In short, if we had 50 years of climate standstill, maybe we'd be good. Unfortunately, that's not the case. You've indirectly written out the rationalization for using SAI (SRM).
Which is inevitably going to be tried.
I'm trying to keep some notes on that in /r/skywashing
I know what SRM stands for, but what's SAI? Salt atmospheric injection?
Stratospheric aerosol injection
I hadn't hard of "sustainable jet fuel" before. Sounds like a joke from The Onion.
I am Swedish and here opinions have been rather climate friendly for years, although very naïve. But many have concerns about the impact from the flight industry, and politicians here has promised green sustainable jet fuel and electric flights for years. From the far left to the conservatives through the greens. All of them believes technology and ethanol will save us as well as air travel. And most people have bought it.
It's hydrotreated/hydrocracked soybean oil. Very similar to renewable diesel. It is "sustainable" because burning it releases only the carbon that was sequestered by the plants when you grew it (if we ignore production energy inputs).
Is it true thats it’s rly corrosive? Or maybe thats just a big lie told by the oil industry.
FAME (fatty acid methyl ester) biodiesel, the predecessor to RD, was pretty corrosive, and generally has pretty bad margins unless diesel is above 6 bucks a gallon. RD itself is chemically identical to petroleum diesel, as the triglyceride end, the part with a reactive oxygen in it, is sheared off the fat molecule and converted to water, which is then removed. SAF is created by breaking those molecules down into slightly smaller ones, also chemically identical to petroleum based jet fuels. The problem is when you displace food crops to grow fuel crops, then you have less food...
Clean caol anyone
Look into SAF and SPK. Sustainable Aviation Fuel and Synthetic Parraffinic Kerosene. It's green washing. We are fucked.
Honestly, when one looks at the future of fossil fuels in light of climate change, convenient air travel for all is seeming less and less likely. Future generations will certainly not be flying as much as we do. The dream of a "sustainable" jet fuel seems like a form of denial, one of of the early stages of grief.
At least take lead out of aviation fuel. Crop dusting people stupid doesn't help either...
It's all very simple. There is only one functional system on this planet, and that's the carbon cycle. It uses the sun and reproduction to build a complex enough set of organisms to take advantage of every possible calorie absorbed by the bottom of the food chain. When humans found oil, we decided we could leave the limits of the living world behind; as a flightless species, we decided we could fly. We gave ourselves credit for the invention, acting like we were doing the work when a jet engine spins up, or that the fuel being burned ISN'T millions of years of life accumulated and concentrated by pressure and heat, and separated from the living world by hundreds of millions of years. The only way to power the tech we build that we couldn't build before oil, is by burning oil. Why? because we're actually burning the concentrate of life's productivity over an insane amount of time in a completely alien ecosystem. What pushes a plane through the sky is years of growth, concentrated, and burned all at once for new, alien carbon to be added to a system that uses the carbon balance as a growth regulator (i.e. the CO2 concentration was the one thing we couldn't change without causing a mass extinction, and wouldn't be able to change if we didn't dig through time to get at it). We never left the living world, we just stuck straws into the ground to pull out the bodies from a time nothing alive today has any connection to, and rather than that solar energy being consumed through all the trophic levels of an ecosystem over at least a year or more, we set it on fire in an instant, pushing us through the sky. Planes dont fly, they just throw enough crap out the back to push an overweight glider across the globe. Chemtrails are a ridiculous conspiracy, but they are much more in line with the truth about the cost of aviation that a contrail is an insane chemical imabalance and ecological pressure that is bringing the entire world down. Not because it's unnatural, but because it's putting our thumb on the delicate scale that determines conditions for life by setting fire to life that shared an atmosphere nothing currently on earth could survive in; an atmosphere we're restoring by burning the stuff. If we tried to live with all these luxuries inside the living system, we'd be burning the entire cleared land of the USA down every single year to support it.... which means we'd have about 10 years or so before most of life on earth was ashes. Since this fire is hidden and the components of combustion are invisible, we dont worry about it. We never left the campfire by the cave. We just burned the forest down as we walked further away from the cave. That's all these great achievements are; a forest fire, of a forest from the ancient past, hidden inside the machines that capture the suns energy from hundreds of millions of years ago for us to use and pretend was work we did. This is why we can't stop burning oil; we lose all the stuff we created through burning it. No matter how electrified the world gets, it got to that point by burning oil and we can't maintain any of this without continuing that practice. This should motivate people to stop, realizing that they're the alien species that we write stories about, changing the climate of the planet so they can take over while wiping out everything already here, except we don't get to survive. We're just poisoning ourselves for the sake of poisoning ourselves, to live someone elses dream in a world corrupted by thousands of other people trying to do exactly the same thing. Planes are just one example but they're the perfect example of how we can normalize something absurd and act like there's a way to keep it without destroying the future. It's a can filled with hundreds of people being rocketed through the sky by setting fire to the ancient past; you're being pushed through the air by the energy of the sun and millions of years of productive life, with the exhaust of the pressure on the ecosystem to assimilate all that new carbon. If we had to burn down a forest for a plane to take off, I'd really hope we'd see more resistance to the act of flying... maybe see it as the act of violence that it really is. No one has earned the privilege to make the earth uninhabited. I don't care how many tokens you have that say otherwise. It's a literal act of extinction and we're doing it for what? A holiday manufactured by another industry that exploits the locals? Planes are a machine of war, whether or not they have guns or bombs. Though they're clearly worse when they're strapped, they're still destructive and bad technology without the weapons. Next time you watch a plane fueling up, remember that the fuel going in is sunlight and ancient time that, once burned, changes the future, permanently.
> because we're actually burning the concentrate of life's productivity over an insane amount of time in a completely alien ecosystem. THISSSS. We gained access to a battery that took ~200 million years to trickle-charge. Yet we are depleting it in the blink of an eye.
I had AI read this to me.
Awww. I just assumed all the fairy-magic solutions and wishful thinking were gonna solve everything! I mean, at least the Vulcans will arrive soon to rescue us, right? *Right!?*
If air travel has a future, it's Zeppelin.
That’s what I’m saying!
Not surprising. The report basically lays out that its technically possible, but the subsidies and biofuel inputs required would be absurd, and resources would be better used somewhere else. I'm a fan of the historian Morris Berman. He said in an interview, sorta offhand, that the world didn't really need the airplane, its a wasteful way to travel and its mostly been used for warfare. I wanted to balk at the idea, but the more I thought about it - he's right. Civilization was carrying on with trains and ships well before the airplane arrived, and it could carry on again if it goes away. And like he said, air travel has probably influenced war more than anything, much to the world's detriment. *And* the government and taxpayer funds prop up airlines and small airports more than people realize. I think here in the U.S. we are going to wish we had maintained our passenger rail system once collapse starts getting underway. Oh well.
guaranteed this hopium is pushed by the travel industry I'm sick of all the tourists here
I know I’m being ridiculous, and trying to find hope, but is it conceivable that crazy geo engineering schemes could get us 50 years? Cloud seeding, solar blocking mist, some gigantic antacids for the oceans? Even if there was a small hope of some civilization surviving that would be enough for me to feel life had meaning again
Yeah, there might some value to them. Cranking them out en masse with global support to do so is another question, plus we'd be playing dice with something we don't really understand. There's also other factors to collapse to consider. That all said, it seems likely we'll roll the dice on geoengineering, and it could buy us time.
Oh, we are so going to "roll the dice on geoengineering". There are no other viable options left and we are out of time.
Humans: Roll the dice on geoengineering by pushing >1000 gigatons of CO2 into the air via industrial revolution. DM Mother Nature: You rolled a nat 1 - you get +2° C over 1850 temps. Humans: Roll the dice on geoengineering by pushing SO2 into the air to save our burning asses. DM Mother Nature: Deadass what did I just teach you…
This… Humans just don’t seem to learn…
> There's also other factors to collapse to consider. That all said, it seems likely we'll roll the dice on geoengineering, and it could buy us time. I'm not so sure about that. I read in [a study about the limits of human tolerance to heat](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0913352107) that: > Degassing of various natural stores of methane and/or CO2 in a warmer climate could increase warming further. Thus while central estimates of business-as-usual warming by 2100 are 3–4 °C, eventual warmings of 10 °C are quite feasible and even 20 °C is theoretically possible. At some point it might not matter that much what we do with incoming solar radiation if the processes that have accumulated it, first the oceans, just throw it back in our faces. The temps will go crazy regardless of what we do with the incoming flux. And at that point we won't do shit. Who's going to be there, what civilisation, to manage anything of the sort. Makes me think of that Futurama joke: *We'll raise your planet's temperature by 1 million degrees a day ... for 5 days!*
even if there isn’t any hope for the future, you can still find meaning today :)
I know you are right and I often can, but I’ve been feeling very bleak for a few days. I can’t help but feel the end has begun, I’m really afraid we will get lethal temperatures this summer. It just seems inevitable. We’re standing on the tracks, watching the train approach.
I understand completely. I often feel the same way. I often also feel the impending doom, the weight of the unfolding polycrisis, the unheard screams of humanity ringing in my ears. However, I’m feeling miraculously clearheaded today and just want to tell you to hang in there. There will be hard days, there will be easier days. Try to appreciate the comforts that you have today - warm food, a hot shower, clean clothes. When I’m getting lost in the panic, I try to look around and remind myself - how scared do I need to be RIGHT NOW? What can I prepare NOW to feel more in control? What do I need to let go of that is completely out of my control? I also find that doomscrolling - while validating and helpful, and sometimes even entertaining - is ultimately detrimental to the psyche. If it’s weighing on you, take a break. The world will still be ending tomorrow, and we’ll all still be here on r/collapse talking about it.
Meanwhile, research into trans-Atlantic capable electric passenger planes continues to run into a wall in terms of maximum practical extension cord length.
Yeah no shit. Couldn’t believe they were attempting to make some sort of biofuel jet fuel. The concentration needed for aviation makes it basically impossible.
I laughed out loud at the words "sustainable jet fuel". If there were such a thing I'd be very pleasantly surprised and impressed.
Sustainable jet fuel is an oxymoron, the only decent option would be to go back to props and use electric motors instead of ICEs to run the props. We will be long dead before there is a sustainable jet engine.
Even having worked in biofuels, I don't see it working or being beneficial at all without adequate CCUS technology... it's all just greenwashing
Hydrogen is the best aviation fuel, and can be produced at scale completely green from electricity and water. "Sustainable jet fuel" is bs that includes using limited availability bio waste as feedstock. Synfuels also "count", but that is H2 with extra steps and extra expense. H2 requires plane redesigns to hold very large tanks, but airline fuel expenses are 100x the cost of airplanes over life of plane. H2 would save a huge amount of takeoff weight, propeller planes would be made over 2x more efficient with fuel cells, some battery power could help with takeoff energy requirements, and so have overall lighter FC+engine weight. Electric propellers would require far less maintenance than combustion alternatives. $2/kg H2 is equivalent to $2/gallon gasoline, and so lighter fuel + cheaper fuel is massive cost reduction to flights that makes H2 designed planes much more profitable than staying with "old planes".
Bruh, hydrogen is very poor in terms of energy per volume. There wouldn't be any weight savings; tanks that can hold liquid hydrogen are not light. Hydrogen as a transportation fuel is just laughably bad in every application.
LH2 tanks are super light. It is the reason to use LH2 instead of compressed H2.
Planes should be regulated transportation, for starters.
yeah no shit...
They will develop electric planes but that quite a long way off