Air travel is profoundly bad for the environment but one of the hardest industries to decarbonize. Can green technologies make a difference before it’s too late?
https://www.noemamag.com/the-seductive-vision-of-green-aviation/
Picture yourself in an airship pushing into the northern latitudes. From the vantage of a barstool in the center of a luxurious lounge, you look through panoramic windows to see an Arctic vista scroll past. The ride is as smooth as a cruise liner cutting through a mirror sea. Above you is a white canopy, the base of the great bladder of gas keeping you airborne. Down below, a huge oval shadow glides across the pack ice.
I disembarked from this flight of fancy and came back to reality in an industrial estate on the outskirts of the town of Bedford, a couple hours north of London. For now, the airship of my imagination sat disassembled in front of me — an engine, the top section of a tail fin, a salubrious sample cabin.
Hybrid Air Vehicles calls it the Airlander: a colossal, state-of-the-art dirigible that was originally conceived as a military surveillance platform for the U.S. Air Force. That idea was scrapped as America de-escalated its operations in Afghanistan, but by then a new application for airships was emerging. Aviation is the most energy-intensive form of transport, and in recent years the industry has come under intense scrutiny for its environmental footprint. Unlike a passenger airplane, a passenger airship — buoyant and slow — doesn’t have to burn much fuel to stay in the air.
“We’ve completely normalized flying in an aluminum tube at 500 miles an hour, but I think we’ve got some big changes coming,” said Tom Grundy, an aerospace engineer and HAV’s CEO, who was showing me around the research facility.
Many of the scientific principles behind Grundy’s airship are a throwback to a bygone age, when Goodyears and Zeppelins carried affluent clientele around America and Europe and occasionally between the two. Other aspects are cutting-edge. The cambered twin hulls will be inflated with 1.2 million cubic feet of inert helium, not flammable hydrogen like most of the Airlander’s interwar forebears. The skin, a composite of tenacious, space-age materials, is barely a tenth of an inch thick but so strong that there is no need for any internal skeleton. Grundy handed me a handkerchief-sized off-cut. “You could probably hang an SUV off that,” he said. When it goes into production later this year, it will be the world’s largest commercial airliner: around 300 feet long, nearly the length of a soccer field.
But arguably its key selling point — the reason HAV resuscitated a mode of aerial transport once thought to have gone down in flames with the Hindenburg — is that it’s green. Even powered by today’s kerosene-based jet fuel, the total emissions per kilometer from its four vectored engines will be 75% less than a conventional narrow-bodied jet covering the same distance. The Airlander of course is much slower. A maximum velocity of under 100mph means that it’s never going to compete directly with jet airliners. “We tend to think of it as sitting between the air and ground markets — a railway carriage for the skies,” Grundy told me.
“When it enters service, perhaps as soon as 2026, the Airlander will offer premium, multi-day cruises to hard-to-reach places like the Arctic Circle.”
A 100-seat cabin designed for regional travel has already attracted orders from carriers in Spain and Scotland. The prototype we were sitting in, with a futuristic carbon-fiber profile and wine glasses dangling above a wraparound bar, is the central section of another configuration called the “expedition payload module.” When it enters service, perhaps as soon as 2026, it will offer premium, multi-day cruises to hard-to-reach places like the Arctic Circle. Behind the communal lounge, a central corridor will lead to eight double ensuite bedrooms. “You’ll even be able to open the windows,” Grundy said.
This website seems to suggest the breakeven point for when flying and driving emit the same carbon emissions, is if the size of your travel party is around 2 people. So if your alternative is to drive (as it is in much of the US) air travel is not markedly worse than driving.
29% of US greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation and 83% of that 29% come from cars and trucks.
I am all for doing your part to reduce carbon emission on the consumer level, because it's the right thing to do. The idea that consumers' choices are the largest contributor to carbon emissions and climate change is IMO a bold lie to distract from the industries who are much bigger contributors to destroying the planet.
To me, this is not a problem that is going to be solved on the demand side (i.e.: a consumer choosing between air travel or a train), because you cannot hand-waive away what is ultimately the demand for energy at a certain price. Rather, it will need to be fixed on the supply side, like cleaner electrical grids, oil refinement, agriculture, and energy efficient manufacturing.
On car and truck emissions, the best we can do is really encouraging cycling and mixed-use developments.
The closer someone is to a grocer and other necessities, the less that person will need to drive. Electric cars aren't as much of a fix as simply pivoting away from car-centric development patterns. American style suburbs are cancerous from a sustainability perspective.
Cycling and development aren’t really going to make a dent in air travel. We’d need intercity rail for that.
This is the point I was responding to. By encouraging cycling and better development patterns, we can reduce 83% of transportation emissions. I agree that we also need intercity rail to replace aeroplanes and trucking!
The 83% also includes commercial trucking, which is also not affected by switching to cycling. Also, many parts of the US are rural or semi-rural, so there's a decent percentage of the population that cannot feasibly switch to cycling. Electric vehicles backed by nuclear power are better answers to those problems.
Last mile deliveries can be converted to electric cargo bikes pretty easily, but I agree that a lot of commercial uses need more creative solutions.
Rural areas could definitely still benefit from more sustainable development patterns. If you look at an old farming village in Europe, they're significantly more space efficient, and they still require less driving than American suburbia!
This video does a really great job explaining why rural communities need "urbanism" even more than big cities!
https://youtu.be/0zUMQFJW3A4
Here's what's missing from this analysis: Semi-rural. I live on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, in a community where the minimum plot size is 2.5 acres, and large economic operations of any kind (such as Wal-Mart) are prohibited. This is an incorporated town that exists on the outskirts of a major city outside OKC proper. We are far from unique in our part of the country, and towns like ours are common across the central United States. "Urbanism" is not needed, nor wanted. We like being able to raise our own livestock and our own crops, but also need conveniences like Post Offices and grocery stores. We also like being less than 30 minutes from a major metropolitan center. Bicycles are neato for exercise, but useless for anything beyond visiting the neighbors.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html
The "rural" portions of the US comprise 20% of the population, and for those folks bicycles will never do. My nearest grocery store is only 3 miles away, but the nearest barber is over 15 miles away. A car or truck (probably both) is an absolute must. If electric cars were affordable enough they might be a viable choice, but without nuclear power instead of coal or gas it's nearly the same thing as driving a combustion vehicle.
If a vehicle, not including other costs of ownership, is needed in order to be a functioning member of society I'm not sure to what extent we can really say "urbanism is not needed." "Not wanted" I'll grant, but people want/don't want all sorts of mutually contradictory things.
It would be one thing if this development pattern was self-sustaining financially. I'm not even getting into energy efficiency or carbon impact here, but just the finances of maintaining the infrastructure that allows communities to be that spread out while still having reasonable (<30 min drive) access to amenities like post offices, medical care, and grocery stores are actually unsustainable. That lifestyle requires heavy subsidization by the parts of the country that are able to punch well above their weight in terms of generating taxable revenue per unit of land. And the insistence that there be ready access to the major metro means there has to be massive amounts of infrastructure spending as well as degradation in quality of life due to traffic and parking requirements in the city center as well.
It might be worth subsidizing that as a society if this provided some kind of positive externality in terms of spiritual or aesthetic or cultural benefit but even that argument is hard to make because the health and human development metrics for the rural and especially semi-rural United States are abominable. Deaths of despair are through the roof!
All of this is fixable. There are a variety of rural and semi-rural communities all over the world in a whole bunch of different configurations that do not require car ownership and a drivers' license in order to be a functioning member of society. What they mostly have in common is the availability of mass transit and concentrations of population in specific areas instead of discredited zoning requirements like minimum lot sizes and detached housing. If people want that, they can certainly build it. But when someone wishes to build, like, duplexes or townhouses near commercial streets it's hard to see the logic in banning it.
Rural no, but semi-rural can still be improved. Most trips are to stores and work, so if there is more medium-density development in small towns, the people living in then can still bike to get groceries or do their shopping
Big city thinking isn't really applicable in many small towns. Large-scale farming need people who are dedicated to farming as a lifestyle. Until farming itself is dramatically redesigned you're always going to need people who live that way. That means a community of people who keep their own horses, goats, chickens, etc., plus maybe a large garden or grazing field. Even if those folks don't work on a farm themselves, they are a part of the community that supports the farm, and their purchases of small-scale farming supplies support stores like Atwood's or Tractor Supply Co. so they can be profitable at lower prices in farming communities.
Keep urban development in urban places. I'll keep my truck and spacious yard.
I live in a farming community in the Netherlands. Granted, it is near a town, but it is not a black and white issue. Most everyone has a car, but people do use their bike to go visit friends or go get their bread or groceries. Urban development is not about city vs rural, it is about creating alternatives for people so that they have the freedom to choose to use the bike for short trips
Necessities within walkability/bikability is better than nothing, but this argument rarely accounts for the fact that many of these “necessities” are not interchangeable. A grocer, a barber, a dentist is not the same as another. Assuming if we somehow manage to equalize general quality (impossible), there’s still variation in stock levels and inventory selection, specialties, customer experience, and more between each one, even to a degree between different locations of the same chain. The result is that walking or biking for the basic staples might happen (or if income level leaves no room for choice), but people are still going to go farther to get what they actually want. And if they’re already driving out for X, they’ll drive somewhere else for Y instead of going home then walking to it.
Interesting opinion, but I disagree. Having lived in a very walkable city (helsinki), I’ve managed fine without a car for more than a decade. The few times I needed one I rented. But 95% of my shopping was done on foot.
I sort of agree. My primary point is reducing the number of car trips for the average person. If you live somewhere walkable, that quick milk run to get a missing ingredient might be a 10 minute walk instead of a 15 minute drive.
The upshot is: the more trips that can be done by walking or biking, the less crowded the roads are! The easiest way to solve traffic and make driving more pleasant is making driving optional for most trips. The point isn't to entirely replace driving; the point is to make life easier for the average person.
I'm lucky and live in a very walkable town. We have 3 different supermarkets, 2 international food shops (great for more specialist ingredients!), a number of independent/ small businesses, a doctor's, a dentist, 5+ different pubs and bars, at least 3 barbers/ hair salons, a pet shop, charity shops, a gym and leisure centre, etc. all within 10 - 15 minutes' walking distance. We have a car but we've almost never needed to use it to get what we need, with the exception of heading to the DIY/ hardware store (but part of that is also needing to haul around bulky/ heavy stuff).
I can't stress enough how great it is. It keeps us active and moving and of course lowers emissions. I've very rarely been frustrated at not being able to get what I need, and when I have it's over something that I couldn't have reasonably driven to get anyway.
When you walk you have more time to notice things; there's a bunch of local events I've attended because I've seen a poster somewhere on the street that I never would have spotted cruising past in a car. It makes me feel more connected to my community too. Creating a walkable/ bikable neighbourhood isn't a simple or easy solution but it is doable and it pays dividends.
Grocers have serious logistics and supply chain considerations that influence how many it's worthwhile to put in one space so that is an issue. But IMO a walkable community needs to have more than just 1 of everything.
So what you’re saying is that the world governments need to actually regulate companies to comply with better green standards. Since we can’t trust companies to change how they make money out of the goodness of their hearts.
It would be politically disastrous, but I feel like the easiest change is to ban the sale and import of high carbon meat.
As much as I'd love the nostalgia of floating around in blimps, I don't think this is going anywhere.
For one, passengers are used to rapid transit. If 100mph is the maximum speed, that means a best case scenario for New York to Chicago is 8 hours. A plane can do it in under 3. If this kind of travel allowed you to skip the airport those 8 hours would start to become worthwhile, but that regulatory tumor we call the TSA would never allow some new form of transit to exist outside their influence.
As a pleasure trip it could seem useful - like the article says, this is being designed for Arctic Circle cruises - but in that case it's not actually competing with airplanes,
Also, a practical question: what happens if the wind shifts? Surely something that big would get badly tossed around in the breeze.
More than that: If speed were not the goal, I'd be in a train or in a car.
Airplane travel is noise, cramped as hell, and incurs long utterly boring and bad-for-my-back waits at the airport.
Train travel is also long, but by comparison relaxed and I can readily sleep or work while travelling, or book an overnight train and just sleep, arrive well-rested in the morning ready for whatever I'm travelling there to.
And car of course offers me flexibility: I am not bound to a single central hub destination from which I need to utilize another mode of transportation anyways, so for shorter routes travel by car might be more convenient anyways.
Plane travel exists to me only for two cases:
You ask a very good question, and I don't know the answer.
I'm not knowledgeable in air travel so I'm speaking from ignorance, but I imagine wind would be critical for these kinds of craft.
If you were traveling with the wind, that would increase your speed and efficiency - but since the wind frequently changes, this means you'd also see a lot more changes to flights based on weather.
This matters the least for pleasure cruises that don't have a particular time or agenda for when to be anywhere - but this only continues to cement the idea that floating craft exist in a totally different category as airplanes for customer demand.
I could see it working if there was a trade off between comfort and speed. If a trip took twice as long but you had like a little sleeper car, that would be pretty great.
I'd agree with you there. Airplane rides are stressful enough that they usually trash the entire day you spend traveling anyway.
Edit: if I had to choose between an airplane ride and a similar trip that took 2x the time but allowed me to avoid airsickness and get useful work done during my trip? Hell yes!
That said, this still only seems to be a "sweet spot" solution that won't cover all of travel. And they conspicuously didn't mention the size or capacity of these blimps. Can they move a 787 worth of passengers? Half that?
I want it to work, it sounds fun, but I can't see it happening except in very limited situations that would make it very hard to deploy in a widespread way.
I mean, that dirigible looks seriously cool, and don’t get me wrong, I would absolutely try flying in one if given the opportunity. But if we’re trying to answer the question in the title, a luxury sky yacht barely faster than a car isn’t the answer.
Guys, it’s trains. Trains are the answer. High speed electrified trains powered by renewable energy is the future of long distance transportation .
i love trains as much as the next guy but we have so many small minded, spoilt idiots in the UK. Just look at the HS2, they even managed to get the main Euston terminal to pause construction even though it will cost billions to restart. We will have a high speed line which terminates in Old Oak Common where nobody is, a short distance to Euston where everything is. And Eurostar is going to limit services. This country is a joke when it comes to serious projects.
We are trapped on an island with these morons
I’m not very familiar with the situation in the UK but I did use the Eurostar the one time I visited and it’s a shame they’re limiting service. In the states it feels like passenger train service has been deliberately neglected in favor of automobile infrastructure; trains go almost nowhere, very slowly, and the equipment is 30 years old at best… if you want company in the joke about serious projects look up the high speed rail project in California. (At least they’re trying.)
I live in Australia and we desperately need some high-speed rail, but there is one thing a train will never, ever do: get me to Europe.
Well that's what planes are for silly!
For real though, that's like the argument for passenger jets. But we should really be working towards a world where a journey of less than 1500 miles or so that doesn't cross an ocean should be served efficiently by rail.
Never say never. Transsiberia railway exists, maybe someday there will be Transaustralasia railway to Europe :)
The sheer cost of a train from Australia to Europe would cost literal trillions, if not quadrillions. There are too many underwater tunnels and underwater bridges required for it to happen.
The transsiberia railway wasn't actually that hard - it was largely built by unskilled labor, after all. It killed a whole lot of people during its construction, but that was mostly deliberate, and none of the laborers could really do much damage if they screwed up (or even deliberately sabotaged it).
I think that there are some means to do it. I've just found something called train ferry: https://vid.puffyan.us/search?q=train+ferry like this one in Messina: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=BA_2p5RUbe8
Or just a simple ferry and you transfer to train on the other side of water.
There are already some rails in countries between AU and EU, so I guess they can be used.
I don't say it is easy and cheap, but I think it's doable. Or we just accept pollution made by airplanes.
The biggest issue I see here is in integration - even EU doesn't have it's rail systems integrated, it's pretty difficult to travel by train here compared to plane. Every country has it's own companies, public and private and they do not cooperate. There is a need of some central system which will administer all of them, or something like that.
You're describing something completely different to a continuous railway. What you're describing is technically possible, just pointless - it would take days instead of hours, you'd require literally dozens of interchanges, even if the whole affair was well-coordinated it still wouldn't be as efficient as travelling via aircraft, or even a more direct cruise ship route.
Trains are a great option because they're trivially electrified, have low operational costs once built, and are your choice of very speedy or very energy-efficient. In contrast, ferries are a hole in the water that you fill with money.
...also, if we're blind enough to finances that we're willing to entertain the ferry-chain idea, then zeppelins are a viable option! The great thing about airships is that they have a huge surface area, and thus could be outfitted with enough solar panels to be feasibly self-propelling! And they're capable of truly point-to-point journeys, to boot; no need to go around all that land when you can just go over it!
Until we don't decide to go fully nuclear and add renewables to this, if we want to give our planet better treatment we have to be ready for lowering our comfort, especially regarding to travel. It will be longer, it will involve more interchanges, yes. If our goal is better environment, than we have to sacrifice something. If our goal is travel efficiency, we don't have to and we will use planes till the end.
Well I could paraphrase it and say that we are blind enough to finances and if we want to finance global climate changes, we should stick to using planes.
About zeppelins I have no idea, so no comment from me.
Ignoring business travel, military etc which are their own kettles of fish, there's a fundamental problem with making all green alternatives to travel viable that requires political will to solve: vacation days.
Without increasing the amount of time off people have to travel, nobody in their right mind is going to waste multiple days of their holiday getting to their destination. This goes equally for trains, airships, whatever. So far the only arguments I've heard boil down to "just go somewhere closer" or "suck it up buttercup" which isn't gonna cut it. A lot of leisure travel consists of families saving up all year to take one holiday. I find telling people to just vacation closer to home to be quite classist - as you are essentially saying "well, you can only see the rest of the world if you can afford to take enough time off to go there."
With regard to the "suck it up" train of thought, if you tell them "oh sorry guys, we banned planes, you gotta take a several days to a week each way to get there and use all of your holiday allowance" it won't fly (pun unintended) and people will just vote for someone who isn't gonna ruin the one reprieve they get a year.
There has to be a concerted effort to make it easier to take more time off work to be able to fill the gap that planes currently have a stranglehold on.
Remote work would help with this too I think. I could imagine a future where you spend a workday on the train working in the remote work car, and then when you're ready to call it for the day you're at your destination. Obviously it won't solve everything but it would help, and is a much easier sell to the bean counters.
Perhaps I should only speak for myself but I don’t feel like a lot of people subscribe to this train (heh) of thought. I think most rail advocates feel like high speed rail travel is already a viable alternative to air travel for the places you can reach using it; if more corridors were accessible by high speed rail, air travel wouldn’t be as competitive and would be used by fewer people (thereby lessening the environmental effect, to get back to the original point of the thread).
I really would love there to be more high-speed rail, desperately so. I am unfortunate enough to live in a joke country (UK) that has no concept of spending on infrastructure or making public transit affordable to access so to some extent it feels like a bit of a pipe dream to me. :(
I mean, I live in the USA, so I really do know how it feels...
I've heard that automation in every segment is growing these days. And, logically, due to the growrth of automation, labor law can be changed to give us more vacation time, right? /s and not /s
i think a company got a very big contract to have these exact airships constructed in Yorkshire. Doncaster i recall was on the news item, with the aim of flying them out of the recently closed Robin Hood Doncaster Airport. They want to keep it open as it has a huge runway and useful for so many types of aircraft
The impact of air travel on climate change is highly underestimated.
Our politicians, and the carbon producing industries would like you to think that you, Joe Average daily car driver, are the primary problem with your CO emitting Toyota Camry and a great change will happen if you'd only turn in your trusty Camry for a new $60,000 EV.
But just take a live look at the daily flights (https://flightaware.com/live/) that are travelling above our world 24/7 turning millions of gallons of jet fuel (very similar to diesel/kerosene) into gasses AT 30,000 FEET. If you had to devise a plan to envelop and encircle the globe in heat trapping gasses you couldnt come up with a better plan to spew those gasses continuously.
But air travel is for the mid and upper crust of society and most definitely for the uber wealthy. They're not going to be pushing for restrictions on air flight nor will it be taxed out of existence. It feeds business, it feeds tourism, it feeds globalization. Its not going away anytime soon. But hey, its your Camry thats killing the planet, right?