When you burn a carbon-based fuel, what you’re actually doing is raising the temperature of the carbon until it oxidizes (reacts with the oxygen in the air) which it does explosively… i.e. with a flame. Each carbon atom then bonds with two oxygen atoms and it is these two extra atoms that provide the “extra” weight (i.e. it’s not really “extra” at all, it’s being drawn from the air you’re burning it in… hence why a fuel fire can be extinguished by depriving it of air / oxygen)

As for the CO2 and water bit, there’s actually two separate (though obviously related) chemical reactions at work. First you’ve got the oxidization of carbon. It’s a simple…

C + O2 -> CO2

But it’s when you burn hydrogen, that you get water. And of course carbon-based fuels tend to contain hydrogen – hence the “hydrocarbon” label. So the excess hydrogen in the fuel is what reacts with the oxygen in the air to produce water.

I hope that’s clear?

It’s good to see you back and ranting about peak oil again :)

Planes use huge amounts of fuel in take-off and landing, far more than when cruising along. Thus a 300 mile flight produces more CO2 per passenger mile than a 3000 mile flight.

Then there’s not only the seat occupancy mentioned, there’s the type of plane (eg the people running the new Cambridge-Oxford flights say a seat on their full plane is no worse than a driver-only car; they use a prop plane which is less polluting than a jet).

Also there’s where your seat is (cramming more people into Economy Class is more efficient than the vast spaces used for each First Class passenger).

By the same token, boats are not as sustainable as people imagine – the space and weight per passenger is very large indeed. There are those who’ve argued that a flight to New York emits less CO2 than the boat.

Still, we need some sort of ballparking to let us get an idea, and when the numbers come out so vastly different as the coach vs the plane to London, it’d take a very weird mind to say the plane was the better option.

Philippe’s right that some offset projects are not carbon sinks, and these can have genuine merit. For example, one of the World Cup’s offset schemes was to install simple methane-capture systems in India so people can cook off cow dung methane rather than burning kerosene.

The problem I have is that we’re only doing this stuff as a way to permit ourselves to live unsustainably, instead of doing it because it needs doing. It’s like being a child slave dealer but clearing your conscience by giving some of the money you make off it to nurseries and adoption services.

As Jim says, it’s profoundly undemocratic to put a cash value on environmental damage.

To say the rich can keep their high-pollution lifestyles by buying them says the changes have to come from elsewhere. Elsewhere than the rich? that’d be the poor, then.

Philippe wonders how else we can allocate resources other than placing a cash value on them.

One alternative would be carbon rations, a fixed amount the same for each person, and – most importantly – these would be non-tradable.

Most current proposals for this have a tradability factor, and these are held to be good because the less polluting people can make money out of selling their spare rations to the more polluting.

This, however, lets the richest carry on with frivolous consumption and gives the poor a strong incentive to sell what they would have used for more essential activities.

If they were non-tradable, it would be more democratic.

Additionally, if there were some kind of reward or incentive for those who consumed under their quota, it could encourage drastic reduction without permitting the frivolous and unsustainable activities – such as holiday aviation – that simply have to stop.

Climate change is here and it will get worse. The difference the people of the next 30-50 years can make is ‘how much worse’? Severe, or catastrophic? Literally hundreds of millions of lives hang in the balance on this. There is no more important issue.

I suspect that if we had lifespans of 400 years, if we had to live with the longer term consequences of this, we’d be taking a very different approach. If that’s so, we have no excuse for inflicting this on people yet to come who have no voice just because we won’t personally have to answer to them.

Conversely, if we were the people living with the effects of climate change, what would we be asking the people of today to do? Would we accept their desire for short-haul flights and year-round strawberries?

If we wouldn’t do it to ourselves, we shouldn’t do it to others.

A civil aviation experience

By Tyler Brûlé

Published: July 1 2006 03:00 | Last updated: July 1 2006 03:00

You don’t know this yet but your summer holiday plans are about to change. Instead of the week on Salina, the three weeks in Maine, the trip to inspect the cabin you’re building in Chile or the 10 days on Mykonos you’re now going to be boarding a flight to Tokyo Narita, jumping in a cab to Haneda and sampling domestic air travel as it should be. I know this sounds like an enormous sacrifice but if you care about the way you get from A to B, have some funds to invest or simply enjoy new experiences then do as I did earlier in the week and sample a new benchmark in civil aviation.

My trips to Tokyo are normally crammed with mad taxi scrambles to track down obscure bars and cafés, the odd meeting, perhaps an interview and too-late nights belting out the clutch of songs I’ve mastered since I joined the karaoke circuit. In London, Zürich and New York I’m a creature of habit, but in Tokyo I’m generally up for anything. So when my colleague Noriko interrupted a shopping incursion at Tomorrowland in Shibuya and suggested I get myself into a taxi because we were flying down to southern Japan for the evening I made my way out of the store, on to Meiji-dori and bundled myself into the back of a Toyota Crown Super Deluxe cab. Having just stepped off the SAS flight from Copenhagen I wasn’t that keen on spending another 90 minutes in the air. But when Noriko explained that she’d got us some tickets on Starflyer, it was all change.

You might recall I mentioned Starflyer, Japan’s newest airline, some weeks back because of its super-chic, all-black livery and inspired branding concept. At the time I’d only had positive, first-hand reports from people who’d sampled it and I’d been desperate to try it myself since it launched in late March. Unfortunately my last few trips to Japan haven’t allowed for any side trips further than Meguro, so the surprise jaunt on a shiny new airline was better than anything Shinjuku could have offered on a Monday in June.

I asked the driver to speed to the airport but to allow for a small diversion via Akihabara to buy a camera. I’ve given up on digital cameras and had already found a second-hand camera shop dealing in exclusively film cameras. It took about five minutes to select a titanium Contax T3 in mint condition. At £300, it was also a bit of a steal.

Arriving at Haneda, I parked myself at the Curry House at Terminal One for a heaping plate of hamburger curry rice and waited for Noriko to arrive with our tickets. By this time I had already documented the all-black- and-white check-in area and asked for the staff to pose in their skinny black suits. Tickets in hand we breezed through security (a concept that Haneda has mastered and pretty much every other airport in the world should copy) and went straight to the aircraft for the 20.40 flight down to Kitakyushu. At the moment Starflyer only flies between its base in southern Japan and Tokyo’s domestic airport but has plans to launch services to Nagoya, Seoul and Shanghai in the next 36 months. Backed by a host of local investors, perhaps the most interesting name to have put in capital is sanitary-ware giant Toto of all-spraying, blowing and singing toilets fame.

On board, Starflyer’s management and branding consultant Tatsuya Matsui have done their best to challenge every convention that makes civil aviation such a soul- destroying experience. Where most carriers would never dream of using black in the cabin, Starflyer’s gone for all-black leather seats in its A320 with a generous seat pitch and have added touches that include adjustable foot massagers on the leg-rest, seat-back TVs as standard in its single-class configuration and a cocktail table you can fold down if the middle seat is empty. On the trolley there’s organic apple juice, beer, coffee from Tully’s, petit-fours from Carré de Chocolat and absolutely no meal service.

As for the pricing structure, Starflyer has positioned itself as a lower-cost carrier by doing away with galley space and wardrobes and staffing its aircraft with only three flight attendants. Given that food retailers in Japan’s airports offer up bento boxes stuffed with every delicacy imaginable, a meal service isn’t really necessary and the lack of food is more than compensated for by crew who keep pouring juice and pass out blankets and headphones as part of the pre-flight service.

I don’t rave about shorthaul airline service very often, but Starflyer has come up with a service concept and brand image that other airlines need to experience and build on. As for your summer holiday, give the airline a whirl to witness that there’s still hope for commercial air travel and do a ryokan tour of Kyushu rather than the 30 minutes I spent there before flying back up to Tokyo.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f609d8aa-081f-11db-b9b2-0000779e2340.html

First let me agree with Jim and Merrick that merely planting trees does not look like a convincing way to go. However, there are many other ways in which you can reduce carbon emissions elsewhere, by investing in alternative energy or energy saving efficiency.

One example (from carbonneutral.com again) is replacing Kerosene lamps in Sri Lanka with solar panels. Coming back to your Plane vs Coach question, let’s say you decide to dedicate just 2 of your 8 “extra” hours towards buying solar panels – let’s put that at 20 quid. It’s hard to figure out from the website exactly how much CO2 you can “buy”, but it’s in the tons.

The end result is that you will have spewed out a few hundred kilos of CO2 with your one trip but will have prevented a few tons from being emitted in the next year.

Now about the kicker: “placing a cash value on environmental damage. Quite aside from it being profoundly undemocratic, it’s just plain wrong.”

How else do you propose to make decisions on allocating resources? How do we decide as a society how much to allocate to reducing emissions vs health spending, education, scientific research, the arts etc..?