Discussion
Was having a discussion with some friends about how we need to shift air travel traffic to rail. One of them then shared this graph. Which entirely derailed the conversation by how utterly disingenuous it is. My first reaction was:
<Maths teacher>
Label your fucking axis!
</Maths teacher>
But putting aside basic graph formatting fuckups. This graph, upon any close inspection tells you absolutely fuck all, whilst trying to support a claim that aviation is the fastest growing emissions sector
1/n
This graph is trying to show us that aviation is growing faster than other sectors. A fair point. And it's not a fact I'm gonna dispute. The problem is, it's massively overlooking context, and scale.
Aviation is typically ~2% of global emissions. Surface transport is about 17%, and buildings (heat, cooling, lighting), is about 25%. I've tooted on numerous occasions that I think environmental campaigners focus on aviation is misguided, but that's a topic for another time.
2/n
@quixoticgeek Carbon per passenger kilometre of aviation is substantially higher than (any) surface transport, though, by at least one order of magnitude. So we should still be enormously concerned by any growth in aviation.
Indeed I am certain that unless we stop civil aviation entirely by 2050, there is no future.
#ThereIsNoEconomyOnADeadPlanet
#ThereIsNoPlanetB
https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/posts-output/2025-01-29-the-potato-famine-and-aviation-fuel/
https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/posts-output/2025-02-06-aviation-fuel-revisited/
https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/posts-output/2025-02-09-aviation-fuel-costs-revisited/
@simon_brooke I think that's entirely missing the scale and perspective. If we have no civil aviation, then that means we're all basically stuck on the continents we're on. That's not gonna fly as an idea. There is no alternative to flying from Amsterdam to New York. And remember. Aviation is 2% of global emissions. Steel is 6%. Cement is 8%. Surface transport 17%. Buildings are 25%. There's a lot more to be gained by reducing those.
@quixoticgeek Well, it's don't fly, or die. If we, as a global population, prefer to die, then by all means keep flying.
But when 10% of the population, by flying, dooms the whole population to dying, expect serious trouble.
@quixoticgeek And to your point: we're going to have to cut carbon on all those other things, too. Cities are probably going to become non-viable, because we won't have enough steel and aluminium to build the transport infrastructure, and the energy infrastructure, to move enough food into cities and enough waste out of them for people to survive.
We can't, as you point out, easily mine without diesel; and we can't use diesel. So the rate of mineral extraction must collapse.
@simon_brooke wow. I'm afraid to say you're wrong on a lot of these. The largest self propelled electric vehicles are mining dump trucks. That's all going electric. They were diesel electric anyway. Diesel is easy enough to do as a biofuel anyway, so not a major concern.
Steel production is moving to electric arc furnaces and electrolysis, which are low or zero emissions. Like wise aluminium smelting. Etc... also in buildings, gluelam is replacing steel in some places already.
@quixoticgeek we can't do any useful amount of biofuel, without diverting farmland from food production.
@simon_brooke no, but it's a solution for the final bits that become too difficult to electrify.
@quixoticgeek We're not going to be able to electrify much, in the next century. To electrify, we need generating plant. To make generating plant, we need structural materials, such as steel, aluminium, and concrete. Fortunately, a lot of aluminium smelting is already carbon neutral, but not much of our cement making and steel smelting capacity is. To build new steel smelting capacity we need, guess what, more steel and concrete; and the same for cement making capacity.
/Continued
@simon_brooke don't need any cement to put solar on the roof of a building we already got...
Wind turbines save more carbon than the embodied carbon they represent.
@quixoticgeek Yes, of course they do. But they still need steel for their masts, something for their blades -- and without petrochemicals, we're going to have to come up with a new solution there -- and concrete for their foundations. We're going to have shortages of all these things.
Our current industrial processes for making pure silicon crystals, for such things as solar panels, are enormously carbon intensive, We need new ones.
/Continued
We already have the tech to solve the need for hydrocarbons:
This was an EU-based project in 2018, that was working around the patents filed in the USA in 2016.
Manufacturable hydrocarbons are now cheaper than digging them out of the ground. 😁
It's the "FOSSIL" part of hydrocarbons that are obsolete. 😁
Use solar-generated electricity to create the hydrocarbons, and they are just another form of energy storage with a liquid form-factor, using a different set of atomic bonds. :D
The problem is without any axis labels, we can't be sure what this graph is actually trying to show. Is it percentages? If aviation emissions went up by 50%, that would be to about 3% (we'll overlook for now that all percentages have to add up to 100 here and it's not quite as simple as this). Where as ground transport emissions doing such a jump would equate to more than aviation and shipping combined... But the title shows MtCO2e. Which suggests this is about absolute numbers.
3/n
@quixoticgeek From what I understand:
- the y-axis is scaled so that “1” (or “100”, depending on whether you read the title or the axis) represents the value for the sector in 2005;
- the title mentions MtCO2 as the metric that is used to compute the evolution, not as the metric shown on the graph.
E.g. the graph shows that in 2023, emissions for public electricity were half of what they were, for that sector, in 2005.
I agree that the graph presentation is singularly unhelpful for analysis.
Absolute numbers is even more disingenuous. Because aviation is 8-9 times smaller than ground transport, adding 1MtCO2e to aviation represents a large proportion increase to aviation while it's lost in noise for surface transport.
We have a lot of problems with emissions reductions not happening. There's strong arguments that say every sector needs to find emissions reductions. But this graph. It's so badly designed it's essentially bollocks, if you'll excuse my technical terminology.
4/n
On a population level numerical and statistical literacy is poor. Depressingly so. But something we can all try to do to help is not make such steaming piles of crap as a way to try and support what ever arguments were trying to make. If you don't know how to make the graph properly, employ someone who does.
And of course. Label your fucking axis!!!
5/5
@quixoticgeek
Looks like all the numbers are indexed to MtCOe in 2005 (2005 = 100). In that case the y axis is labeled implicitly?
Of course if aviation starts very low in absolute numbers it's not much of a problem.
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