Back to the roots, passenger ships, ferries, railways (fast overnight connections).
Ban short-distance flights.
Imagine Ryanair as a fast train operator.
When it’s done right, it’s amazing. The problem is that (here in the UK) it’s just terrible.
Example, going from London to Edinburgh
A flight takes 1h30m and costs £33 A train takes 4h26m and costs £178
Yes there are other monetary costs involved (driving to the airport, parking) and other time costs involved (you need to be at the airport 90 minutes early) but the headline price make a flight seem like much better value for time and money.
Trains are also often late or cancelled, this seems to happen much less with flights.
Until flights are taxed to hell people aren’t going change their habits.
The UK could meet its net-zero goals if it halved the number of private-jet flights.
Flying isn’t entirely horrible, but private jets are just about the worst thing you can do for the environment.
The first time I heard an aviation ceo spruiking this BS on NPR it was so clear that it was a complete lie. There was no serious attempt by a scientist to quantity emission reductions, just a lot of feel good marketing nonsense.
SAFs are just a cynical ploy by an industry that remains a climate disaster.
It is no sustainable product, anyway. We did the calculations some time ago, and the results were that in order to supply the airline fuel needed in this country, we would have to turn each and every piece or arable land into rapeseed plantations. Every field, meadow, winyard, whatever. Every year, without any rotation.
Air traffic is unsustainable in general, you can take four people, have them ride a Suburban with a big V8 and they’ll burn less fuel to travel the same distance compared to doing it by plane and that’s not even considering the anti pollution equipment found on road legal vehicles that is pretty much non existent for aircrafts.
Passenger airplanes burn about 4 to 5L/100km/passenger when they’re full, a Suburban burns about 13.5L/100km mixed driving, that’s about 3.4L/100km/passenger if there’s 4 passengers in it.
Because they’re can’t fly like Peter Pan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919
Currently in production and use by China Eastern Airlines, although the production run is very limited (13 built, 7 in active use). It’s high efficiency passenger plane with a range of 3500 miles, capable of holding 156-168 people based on seat configuration.
This vehicle threatens to compete with the Airbus 320 and Boeing 737 Max jets.
It should be noted that the engines for these planes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFM_International_LEAP) was originally developed as a joint project by the American engineering company GE and the French Safran Aircraft Engines. Chinese firms bought the design specs, insourced the production, and are now rolling them out for productive use while their French counterparts are still stuck on old designs and the Americans are just shoving their planes nose-first into the tarmac.