Just 1% of people are responsible for half of all toxic emissions from flying.
Airplanes have a consumption equivalent of 3.5L/100km/passenger. A car with two passengers is equal to that, more passengers and cars win. Take more than CO2 into consideration? Looks even worse for planes as they don’t have an equivalent to a catalytic converter. Is 8.5T kilometers enough data?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft
How about if we take contrails into consideration?
A 2011 study suggests that the net effect of these contrail clouds contributes more to atmospheric warming than all the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by planes since the dawn of aviation.
Man, that sure doesn’t look good for airplanes does it? Imagine if we started talking about leaded fuel still used for piston engines (but let’s not go there…)
The same amount of cargo can be transported much more efficiently by rail or by boat.
But hey, you’re just proving my original point right, “regular people” who travel by plane don’t want to be told that they too are part of the issue and that they should feel bad about their choice. Guess it’s too hard for you guys to imagine living like the majority of the world’s population that will never take a plane in their lifetime and that won’t be visiting anything past a few hundred kilometers away from where they live… Oh the agony! Right?
It’s funny cuz you don’t even realize that traveling by plane means you’re already part of an elite when looking at it on a global scale.
A car with two passengers is equal to that, more passengers and cars win.
Lies. Your own link shows that a plane’s consumption equivalent per passenger is 67mpg. Show me any car on the market, much less a majority of cars, that have a fuel efficiency of 67mpg. A hybrid Prius has a fuel efficiency of 52mpg. On top of that, the average drive in an automobile, light-duty truck, and semi-truck is 1.1 passengers with an average of 4 rides per day. There’s no way you can slice these numbers that shows that a car is more fuel efficient than a plane even with the most fuel-efficient vehicle much less the total number of cars out there that include much less fuel-efficient vehicles.
Man, that sure doesn’t look good for airplanes does it?
The 5% number already includes contrails in it. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation
The same amount of cargo can be transported much more efficiently by rail or by boat.
You can’t just drop a claim like that and a link to multiple datasets without identifying what the evidence is. It’s not my job to do your research for you just because you dump some unspecified data on me. Which data set shows what you’re saying?
But hey, you’re just proving… blah blah blah
I never said any of that and it’s not my responsibility to ignore seeing my family so that another person feels better about also not seeing their family. If anything, you’re just proving the need to further make these technologies better to lower those numbers. It still doesn’t change the fact that there are much larger impact items than airplanes and there are less intrusive ones too.
I’m not denying that I’ve had the privilege to travel by plane. That doesn’t mean that I do it often or that I can afford anything other than coach and it also doesn’t invalidate my point in any way. I’m only arguing about the initial claim that was made. Whether I’ve been on a plane is beside the point.
Since you don’t seem to understand how fuel economy works and you don’t seem to understand that I’m comparing travels for the same purpose I guess I’ll have to make it extremely simple for you.
The average number of passengers/vehicle during the average drive doesn’t matter since it counts people going to work out to get grocery and what we’re talking about right now is people going on vacation so they’re more likely to go as a group and ride sharing also is a thing. People don’t stop going on their average drive because they went on vacation to Japan the week before.
Airplanes have a fuel economy of 67mpg/passenger. The number for a Prius you gave me is 52mpg/vehicle. They’re not the same kind of data, the Prius’ number needs to be converted to /passenger.
One passenger? Same as your number since there’s one vehicle and one passenger. If there are two passengers in the Prius the fuel used is divided by each passenger, they each use half of that fuel, that’s 52mpg/0.5 = 104mpg/passenger because the car’s fuel economy doesn’t change with the extra passenger.
(And just for the lulz, a Boeing 777 gets 82mpg/passenger and has a capacity of 388 passengers, let’s say the plane only had one passenger, that’s 82 / 388 = 0.21 mpg!)
That’s why the Suburban example was used, it gets 17mpg mixed (I’m even helping you here instead of just using highway mpg), with four passengers that’s… oh my… 68mpg! It beats planes! Know what’s the passenger capacity of a Suburban is? Up to 8. Need me to do the math on that or I’ve proven my point? Heck, someone else already explained all of that to you so I don’t know why I need to repeat it.
Since I’m arguing against people going on vacations by plane so dang much it makes planes look even worse because people use them to travel thousands of miles instead of hundreds of miles if they were to go on vacation by car. 67mpg over 1000 miles = 14.9 gallons of fuel or the equivalent of traveling 250 miles per passenger in the Suburban or 770 miles per passenger in the Prius. How far do you go on vacation in a car? How far do you go on vacation in a plane?
Regional flights (i.e. in smaller less efficient planes) are 500 miles on average in the USA
https://www.statista.com/statistics/742763/regional-carriers-average-passenger-trip-length/
International (i.e. in bigger more efficient planes)… well it sure doesn’t look good!
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-international-aviation-km?tab=chart
In the USA it’s over 1000 miles (1980km), Europeans and Canadians are even worse… Do you really need me to prove that it’s more efficient for a French couple to drive from Paris to Rome (1400km) instead of going on the average French international flight (2700km) for their vacation? Our even more realistically, from Paris to Milan (850km) this way both travels take a day? I used the French example because their distance traveled is at the lower end of the West European average so I’m being nice here.
So, is my point clearer now?
It seems like you don’t understand how fuel economy works. Aviation is more fuel efficient no matter how you slice it and has been since the start of the millennium.
If your premise is that 52mpg/1 passenger = x mpg/3 passengers means that x is 104mpg/passenger then that means that 67mpg/1 passenger for a flight of 100 people is 6700mpg/passenger. You can’t divide for one and multiply for the other.
Also, planes get more fuel efficient the longer the trip because the majority of their fuel burn is on takeoff. Once they’re in the air, their fuel use is minimal and they lose the weight of the fuel as they continue which further makes it more efficient.
So no…your point is not clearer because air travel is more efficient than travel by auto in all cases except, again, the shortest distance travel where it’s not even practical to fly. You can try to limit your data to only trips with more than 3 people (the point where driving becomes more fuel efficient) and only for long distances but that means you’re only further scaling down the impact that making efficiencies has since that’s not really the most prevalent use for cars.
Also when we switch to e-fuel flying becomes far better ecologically than trains and as there are already flights happening using e fuel and facilities to make it at scale being built we’d be foolish not to consider that in our planning.
