GRcade

OrangeRKN wrote:On a personal level, everyone should seriously consider how many flights they take for holidays, as along with diet it's the only other significant change an individual can make. That doesn't mean eliminating air travel altogether, but reducing it certainly.

All good points well made, thanks ORKN/Kezzer/BID0. Certainly provokes thought and discussion.

Last year my family didn't have a flying holiday (the hellscape of being trapped on a plane with 2 infants is indescribable ) but we did still have a holiday. We drove our car down to Folkstone, got Le Shuttle across to Calais and then drove about 3 hours into central France. And then did the reverse on the way home. I doubt there's a way to accurately compare, but I wonder just how big the carbon footprint of that driving holiday was compared to jumping on a plane to a European destination and back. A plane would have, say between 100-200 people onboard so the carbon footprint would be divided by each of them, whereas in my car there were only 4 us. Is that how it works? I have no idea how much energy the trains on the Channel Tunnel use but it can't be insignificant.

I must have taken about 4 flights in the past 8 years. We've booked one holiday a year in advance, to France, which to be fair isn't far away. But yes, I would advocate that. It's something that I worry about if I want to visit my newly born niece in Japan (and I do), as that is a much more substantial journey (I think when we looked it would be about 20 hours, last time it was 16 hours, and the on-screen map of the flight was quite literally half way across the world - but most ridiculously, the plane was only about 30% full on average).

That gives me an idea. What if there was a queing system? You don't fly until the plane has been filled up. If the plane doesn't fill, all flights are delayed. That way the CO2 burned in the flight at least does the maximum potential energy conversion for the use case. The EU managed to legislate automatic standby options on consumer electronic devices. Why can't planes "stand by"? If you want to be the consumer of that much pollution, you should be willing to minimise it. Mandated.

According to research from the European Environment Agency for an average sized car carrying 4 people the CO2 per passenger kilometer is about 55 grams. The equivalent for a plane carrying 88 passengers is 285 grams per passenger kilometer.

Driving was definitely a better option!

Not sure exactly where the eurostar falls but for a "standard train" carrying 156 passengers the CO2 is only 14 grams per passenger kilometer.

EDIT: Accroding to eurostar themselves it's 18 grams per passenger per km: https://help.eurostar.com/faq/uk-en/question/What-is-the-Co2-emission-factor-per-kilometer-when-using-Eurostar

I have been on a place twice. Once to Bulgaria and once back around 20 years ago.

That makes me feel a little better. I use trains for about 90% of travel.

Pedz wrote:I have been on a place twice. Once to Bulgaria and once back around 20 years ago.

Then you have probably used more CO2 streaming games then flying

Pedz 'aint gettin' on no plane fool!

Preezy wrote:I doubt there's a way to accurately compare, but I wonder just how big the carbon footprint of that driving holiday was compared to jumping on a plane to a European destination and back

You might try this: http://ecopassenger.hafas.de

My carbon footprint from flying is a strawberry floating disaster.

Pedz wrote:I have been on a place twice. Once to Bulgaria and once back around 20 years ago.

I haven't been on a flight in over 25 years.

Rocsteady wrote:My carbon footprint from flying is a strawberry floating disaster.

same

I've done over 20 flights in 6 months.

4 being transatlantic

sorry for killing the planet everyone.

There's no point blaming yourself about some of this if we live in a society where you can fly from Scotland to London at a fraction of the cost compared to taking an electric train. It's the governments issue to address, they are the ones to invest in infrastructure so we can all get to work and pay our TAX and VAT's.

There's a toll across the Thames river between Essex and Kent. It's been automated now so it isn't such a problem anymore, but 10 years ago I would be sitting in traffic sometimes for 2 hours to pay £1.50 to the government for using the bridge. It's total false economy when queuing in traffic would be costing people and business £10s or £100s of pounds in revenue that they could spend in the economy and the government could then take a % of that which would probably generate more than that £1.50 from a toll booth.

I know the London Underground gets a lot of stick, but imagine if that system was scaled out across the entire UK. You could go to your nearest town and know they'll be a colour coded train heading north or south or east or west in the next 1-5 minutes and if you happen to miss that one you'll only have to wait up to another 5 minutes for the next one. If you had a service like that running you probably would take 90% of the cars off the road and it's something the government could provide almost at cost so we could travel cheaper than using a plane to fly to the next city.

A 4 day working week would reduce commuting 20% in a week. And we would all have a better life for it.

Provide business with relief for employees working from home.

Like airlines, have it so train ticket pricing scaled so people could be incentivised to work their 4 days a week or travel on days when the train network was less busy than other days meaning less capacity required rather than have the capacity there for everyone traveling on the same day within the same 1-2 hour window.

We need to stop worrying about the short term figures/manipulating the data and start investing properly (don't forget a government can borrow money at the cheapest rate) so we can become more efficient overall in the future.

Some good ideas Bido. I've done shift work now for about 8 years and doing longer hours with lots of time off has so many benefits in that I can do things when everyone else is at work which sometimes works out cheaper but is almost always more convenient.

Surely there must be lists of jobs that just need to be done and it doesn't actually matter when? The typical 9-5 thing seems fairly arbitrary now. It would be a reasonable thing to incentive staggered start and finish times as a means of reducing traffic on the road and making public transport more feasible. Note of that would require much, if any infrastructure.

How about doing something with supermarkets to use the perfectly good food that is thrown away? Have meals prepared to reduce unnecessary wastage of products that have a significant carbon footprint. At least if not everyone wants to reduce their meat consumption they have the option to purchase meat that would have otherwise been skipped.

Rocsteady wrote:My carbon footprint from flying is a strawberry floating disaster.

I wonder if they've ever calculated how much CO2 is created by people having sex?
Maybe if we just banned sex everything will be ok?

You'd be surprised at some of the gooseberry fool the supermarkets play on the suppliers.
I used to work for a company who made ready meals for a supermarket and they had a disaster of a contract where the supermarket could cancel an order even after the food had been cooked and packed. They could have an order for 1,000 pots of lets say spag bol 500g and they'd get a call to cancel and they'd have to just try and sell it to the staff for 10p each (these were £5 each in the store) which obviously they couldn't manage so most of it just got dumped.

This was about 15 years ago but I imagine it's not that much different now.

Peter Crisp wrote:

Rocsteady wrote:My carbon footprint from flying is a strawberry floating disaster.

I wonder if they've ever calculated how much CO2 is created by people having sex?
Maybe if we just banned sex everything will be ok?

Having sex and producing a child has got to be the most costly thing you can do from a carbon footprint POV.

Lucien was right all along.

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:Lucien was right all along.

If that’s not a sign of the apocalypse I don’t know what is.

I love the climate, but XR are a strawberry floating joke

twitter.com/MediocreDave/status/1182404265811349518

"thank you, institutionally racist police force, keep doing what you're doing."

Knoyleo why do you hate the police so much?