On Tue, 22 May 2007 21:37:32 +0100, John Halliwell <[email hidden]> wrote:
Quoted message said:
Quoted message said:
Reducing air travel is not the way to go, more efficient aircraft & engines
Quoted message said:
How much gain there? About 10% efficiency improvement from the 787 and A350. Hardly earth-shattering, and the >10% increase in passenger movements will quickly swallow that up.
Not a lot - far better to get people to switch off lights, use energy efficient cars and appliances and insulate their homes. The effect of that would swamp the effect of banning the airline industry in the UK.
Then there is the old chestnut of food air-miles where the impact of the fuel to ship many foods from warm growing climates is small compared to that of heating greenhouses to grow them here - or we could return to a diet of turnips, potatoes and brassicas in winter
-- Tony
"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way." - Bertrand Russell
We don't need to grow the foreign foodstuffs here in the UK, we just need to eat seasonal food and not think we should be able to eat anything we want at any time we want. This may mean not being able to eat some things ever again. As for better aircraft and more fule efficient engines etc. it is the same argument. We should not be using them to pop over to New York, Madrid etc. for the weekend. Go local, or go by train or bus. Just because we can do something doesn't make it morally corect to do it.
We don't need to grow the foreign foodstuffs here in the UK, we just need to eat seasonal food and not think we should be able to eat anything we want at any time we want. This may mean not being able to eat some things ever again.
You stick to your ascetic lifestyle and I'll stick to mine. There are far easier ways of achieving what is said to be the necessary reductions without getting out the sack cloth and birch twigs.
Quoted message said:
As for better aircraft and more fule efficient engines etc. it is the same argument. We should not be using them to pop over to New York, Madrid etc. for the weekend. Go local, or go by train or bus. Just because we can do something doesn't make it morally corect to do it.
Just because it uses an aircraft it doesn't make it morally wrong either.
-- Tony
"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way." - Bertrand Russell
You stick to your ascetic lifestyle and I'll stick to mine. There are far easier ways of achieving what is said to be the necessary reductions without getting out the sack cloth and birch twigs.
Eating potatoes in winter and not going to New York for the weekend is hardly sackcloth and birching.
Sure, I'll miss the USA, but there's a lot of perfectly nice Continent out there I've never seen. -- David Damerell <[email hidden]> Distortion Field! Today is Potmos, June.
Sure, I'll miss the USA, but there's a lot of perfectly nice Continent out there I've never seen.
The only difference between flying and taking the train, bus or boat is one of scale. If you have a fundamental objection to flying you should have a fundamental objection to the others and not go to the Continent or other parts of the UK either. If you don't have a fundamental objection then you won't object to people making their own transport and destination choices within their own carbon footprint targets.
We then just need to lose 40 million people in the UK to get our population down to a level we can sustain with our own agriculture without transporting food in from other countries.
-- Tony
"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way." - Bertrand Russell
Sure, I'll miss the USA, but there's a lot of perfectly nice Continent out there I've never seen.
If you don't have a fundamental objection then you won't object to people making their own transport and destination choices within their own carbon footprint targets.
Bit of a dodge there. No sensible target includes transAtlantic flights. Inside the Continent - or the UK - there's always a more efficient way to do it than flying.
Quoted message said:
We then just need to lose 40 million people in the UK
I've done my bit by minimising the production of additional affluent Westerners. -- David Damerell <[email hidden]> Distortion Field! Today is Potmos, June.
The only difference between flying and taking the train, bus or boat is one of scale. If you have a fundamental objection to flying you should have a fundamental objection to the others and not go to the Continent or other parts of the UK either.
But as you well know, scale is everything.
If there was some magic way X of getting from A to B with 0.0001% CO2 emissions of transport type Y then X would clearly be better, and it's not valid to argue that being anti Y means one shouldn't travel.
non causa pro causa and all that.
Arthur
-- Arthur Clune PGP/GPG Key: http://www.clune.org/pubkey.txt The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting - Milan Kundera
Sure, I'll miss the USA, but there's a lot of perfectly nice Continent out there I've never seen.
The only difference between flying and taking the train, bus or boat is one of scale. If you have a fundamental objection to flying you should have a fundamental objection to the others and not go to the Continent or other parts of the UK either. If you don't have a fundamental objection then you won't object to people making their own transport and destination choices within their own carbon footprint targets.
We then just need to lose 40 million people in the UK to get our population down to a level we can sustain with our own agriculture without transporting food in from other countries.
-- Tony
"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way." - Bertrand Russell
All of these arguments about the effectiveness of methods of carbon offsetting or of doing different things like cycling or using low energy light bulbs are something of a red halibut. As I have previously said on a similar thread, all that is needed is a tax on each harmful emission and finite resource. Each tax will be set at such a level that the emissions will be reduced to an amount deemed acceptable in terms of global warming, smog or whatever, and the laws of supply and demand will do the rest.
There is then nothing more to debate other than the detail.
