# Every Time You Fly, You Trash The Planet - And There's No Easy Fix



## CHamilton (Jan 2, 2015)

> Planes don’t just release carbon dioxide, they also emit nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides and black carbon, as well as water vapor that can form heat-trapping clouds, said Rutherford, who serves as a technical observer to ICAO’s working groups on climate issues. These emissions take place in the upper troposphere, where their effects are magnified. When this so-called radiative forcing effect is taken into account, aviation emissions produce about 2.7 times the warming effects of CO2 alone, according to estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.


http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/every-time-you-fly-you-trash-the-planet-and-theres-no-easy-fix/


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## railiner (Jan 3, 2015)

So what's the point of this....make people give up flying?

I am sure there is some study that makes virtually every human activity detrimental to the planet....

We do what we can, and hopefully things will work themselves out.....


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## Blackwolf (Jan 3, 2015)

railiner said:


> So what's the point of this....make people give up flying?


If you believe the last paragraph of the article in full, that is exactly what one of the very real options are. And you can be promised that, if flying became substantially more expensive due to things like legislation and tariffs (think along the lines of the "gas guzzler tax" levied by the EPA for non-fuel efficient vehicles sold today, but on a global scale,) then you can bet people will stop flying in large percentages after a while.

Would you still hop on a flight to a distant city if prices were between 40% to 75% more, unless you _reeeeeeeally _needed to?

Overseas travel will be the hardest one to actually deal with, but in the context of this particular forum, in places where High Speed Rail corridors are viable and/or already in existence the alternative to flight is a no-brainer.


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## jis (Jan 3, 2015)

I thought the issues about EU CO2 tax on international flights covering the entire journey of the flight had more to do with EU trying to exercise extra-territorial tax collection authority. If they were serious about actually getting a system up and running they should simply have written the law to collect such only for the portion of the flight that was over EU airspace. But apparently they broader visions of grandeur and so the otherwise feasible idea crashed and burned. The way it is presented in the article is a bit misleading IMHO.

I also thought comparing to per capita CO2 emission in India was kind of interesting. Of course one way to solve the entire problem would be voluntarily reduce our per capita CO2 consumption to that of India too. 

That is not to say that things cannot be done in a stepwise fashion to start mitigating. I believe that is what ICAO is trying to do, but as usual the politics of it is difficult.

As for locally within the US, if we're really serious we would choose the top five short/medium distance air corridor and ban expansion of P2P air service in them and invest in setting up appropriate mix of ground transport along those with a proper mix of rail arterials, and possible road based transverses (see Singapore for a small scale model). But I am almost certain that nothing of the sort is going to happen. There isn't a sense of urgency enough at present.

It is human nature to first take a step into disaster before pulling back and starting to address the problem. Hopefully at that time there is a possibility to fix the problem before it consumes us. That is our nature, and I don't see us handling this any differently, unfortunately. We will most definitely try everything that does not work first.  Brings to mind a conversation in the movie _The Day the Earth Stood Still._ If you have seen it you will recall the old professor explaining this nature of the humans to the representative of the aliens who had come to rescue earth from the grips of humans by basically getting rid of the humans.


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## railiner (Jan 4, 2015)

Klaatu barada nikto!

Indeed....


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## Anderson (Jan 5, 2015)

Well, here's the funny thing: If domestic airline fares for long-haul flights (basically, transcontinental ones) on a per-mile basis were on par with those on similar trans-Atlantic flights, things would probably look far different. The air distance from New York to London is 3,503 miles while the air distance from New York to Los Angeles is 2,451 miles and New York to San Francisco is 2,594 miles. In theory, all else being equal the average fare NYC-LON should therefore be about 43% more than New York-Los Angeles and about 35% more than New York-San Francisco.

Of course, this isn't going to pan out perfectly (different flights are used on different routes, overseas flights tend to have larger seat pitch and more generous luggage allowances, and there are some wonky landing taxes in the EU), but it should at least be a ballpark to start with.

As of Q1 of 2014, the average round-trip fare New York-Los Angeles was $366.09 and New York-San Francisco was $360.50. This would put those trans-Atlantic flights in the range of $486.83 (off of San Francisco) to $523.22 (off of Los Angeles). Instead, the absolute cheapest flight I can find is $600 (Norwegian, on what seems to be a somewhat less-than-daily schedule), while a bunch of flights cluster in the range of $1150 or so.

Again, I'll grant that there's some fun tapdancing going on with "fuel surcharges" and various other taxes/fees, but if I had to guess, that average fare that "should" be about $500 is instead somewhere north of $1000*...which is more than should reasonably be accounted for in terms of a slightly larger seat and a baggage allowance. Then again, those routes have (if I'm not mistaken) long been seen as cash cows, and airlines have been willing to eat losses on feeder flights to route like these because of hefty margins. After all, you can't exactly take Amtrak to Europe, can you? (And no, interlining with United at Newark does not count...nice try, though!)

On the EU ETS front, there are some other things that could have been done. If the EU was desperate to force the issue on trans-Atlantic flights, they could have just required the EU-end airport to charge a fee to make up the difference for any non-complying flight (i.e. the airport would buy the emission offset and be required to charge the equivalent of one of those "bag fees" for it) and there's probably not much the US could have done short of soaking the EU-based airlines with a counter-fee at JFK, MCO, BOS, etc.

But with that said...the answer probably lies in doing something about demand for flights that could be shifted to other modes. I will say that part of the problem is that, from what I can tell, those "other modes" are on the verge of crashing from demand loads in China and get plenty stressed in India and elsewhere, particularly at peak times (my understanding is that traveling at the Chinese New Year borders on a fool's errand there, and that even the new HSR systems can't hope to cope with the passenger loads needed at peak times). An effective ban on short-hop airline flights would probably go a long way here, but that isn't likely to be terribly popular.** In the meantime, unless someone can actually make the numbers work for high-speed ships (something that I HIGHLY doubt will ever work unless airline travel were to become truly prohibitive in cost), trans-oceanic travel is going to remain almost exclusively the remit of the airlines.

*For reference, the average yield per passenger-mile NYC-LA comes to 14.9 cents. The average yield per passenger mile NYC-SF comes to 13.9 cents. At an average of $1000, NYC-London comes to 28.5 cents/passenger mile and at $1150 it is 32.8 cents/passenger mile. Applying those rates to domestic travel gets you some fun numbers...the latter gets you $804.64 NYC-Los Angeles and $851.58 NYC-San Francisco.

**Though there are a few places where some major slashing would probably make the airline industry happy...LAX-LAS and LAX-SFO would probably not get too many tears shed for their passing, for example, given the sheer number of slots that get burned at LAX, McCarran, and SFO which airlines could put into other markets. Dallas-Houston is another example. To harken back to a line from a Delta executive I saw on here a few months ago, if you couldn't make money flying from Augusta to Atlanta (138 miles by air), then I'm inclined to call the profitability of routes such as Seattle-Portland dubious. Even if you only knocked out markets of less than 250 miles, that would get ride of New York-Washington, New York-Boston, the Texas Triangle, Miami-Orlando/Miami-Tampa, Los Angeles-Las Vegas, and Chicago-Detroit.


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## PRR 60 (Jan 7, 2015)

Anderson said:


> ...As of Q1 of 2014, the average round-trip fare New York-Los Angeles was $366.09 and New York-San Francisco was $360.50.


Those are average one way fares, not round trip.

Domestic Air Fare Report - 2014 Quarter 1 - Table 6


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## chakk (Jan 7, 2015)

When it comes to per capita CO2 emissions from India, and the level of personal way of living it suggests (unless all of the residents have lots of nuclear power that I don't know about), then I can tell you that not only do I not want to live like the Indians, I am quite certain that the Indians do not want to live like the Indians, either.

They do have the advantage that they are "leapfrogging" all of the technical development stages that Americans have transited over the past century -- going straight to cell phones in many cases, for example, rather than installing complete networks of energy inefficient landlines for all of their citizens. More power to them.


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## Anderson (Jan 8, 2015)

PRR 60 said:


> Anderson said:
> 
> 
> > ...As of Q1 of 2014, the average round-trip fare New York-Los Angeles was $366.09 and New York-San Francisco was $360.50.
> ...


Huh. I know the one-way/round-trip fares vary wildly (trivia point: Seems we can thank SP and Southern for this)...but I had figured that the numbers in those reports would, for all intents and purposes, be "Route revenue divided by one-way segments" for a given airline.

What does Table 6 do differently, anyway?


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## PRR 60 (Jan 8, 2015)

Anderson said:


> ...
> 
> What does Table 6 do differently, anyway?


Table 6 shows the data for all city pairs with at least 10 origin and destination (O&D) passengers per day. The passenger total is for both directions. The total fare paid by those passengers divided by the total passengers yields the average one way fare per passenger. If the average round trip fare to the west coast was only $360 (meaning some fares lower), my poor wife would never be home.

Note that Table 6 only shows O&D data for each city pair. For example, the data for 2014Q1 shows 86 passengers per day between Richmond (RIC) and Philadelphia. There are seven flights each way, 14 total. The data does not mean that each flight only carried six passengers. Passengers connecting through PHL to and from other destinations are shown for those specific city pairs, not RIC-PHL. With a very conservative assumption of load factor per flight, there are likely about 500 passengers a day traveling between PHL and RIC, of which all but 86 are simply passing through PHL to and from other destinations.


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## Anderson (Jan 8, 2015)

The load between New York and Florida never ceases to amaze me...I count something like 35,000 pax/day between New York and various Florida airports. Granted, a decent number of these are to Miami and likely connect onwards to international flights at one end or the other, but it's still a stunning load.


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## PRR 60 (Jan 8, 2015)

Anderson said:


> The load between New York and Florida never ceases to amaze me...I count something like 35,000 pax/day between New York and various Florida airports. Granted, a decent number of these are to Miami and likely connect onwards to international flights at one end or the other, but it's still a stunning load.


If they are connecting through to international flights on either end, they are not in the count. Only true O&D are counted for city pairs in the air fare report tables. Add in Boston and Philadelphia to Florida destinations, and the number gets even larger. It's a huge market.


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## jis (Jan 8, 2015)

That is the very reason that Amtrak has some of its most successful LD operations in that market too!


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