This article is a little misleading when it includes aviation industry bailouts as "fossil fuel commitments". Not only this is an indirect connection, but also there is no green air travel (for now). Regardless of your opinion on the necessity of the bailouts, the thought behind them was not to further tip the scales towards fossil fuel, but to help out the aviation industry in their country.
Wouldn't most of the fossil fuel commitments match this description, that the thought behind them isn't primarily to tip the scales. For example the car industry lifelines: the primary idea is presumably to save the jobs instead of supporting fossil fuels. I mean people and businesses mostly don't burn fossil fuels for the joy of it.
I did not include car industry lifelines in my comment because of this. You can help electric car manufactures more than fossil fuel ones and vice versa.
I'd rather call it blatantly opinionated... taking to its full conclusion the logic of considering commitments (i.e. money alloted) through the way energy is consumed instead of the way energy is produced (the fuel you put into the plane's reactors was not produced by the plane, was it?), you may as well say that any natalist policy is a commitment towards fossil fuels because humans in the end consume fossil fuels. Tautology at its best.
Humans don’t require fossil fuels to function, but planes do. When you give money to an airline so it can keep its planes flying, that directly translates into emissions.
However, those bailouts could have been tied to limiting short-distance flights. At least in Europe, trains are a good alternative for many short-distance flights.
Yes, this is correct. If you (somehow) tie the bailouts to limiting short-distance flights, than your bailouts are becoming more environmentally friendly.
But again, doing regular bailouts is not necessarily tipping the scales in the anti-environmentally friendly direction. They can be neutral. They are neutral if they did not change the behaviour in relative flight usage comparatively to before the pandemic.
Using this reasoning for example will make flight subsidies anti-environmentally friendly and not neutral (if you also do not subsidies other modes of transportation).
Obviously this is hard to judge, but the article (from what I can tell) does not study that, so I wrote "a little misleading".
> If you (somehow) tie the bailouts to limiting short-distance flights, (...)
I think that's what France did?
> Using this reasoning for example will make flight subsidies anti-environmentally friendly and not neutral
We have to reduce CO2 emissions by 7% a year (Germany, according to the IPCC). So besides laws and regulation, I'd argue that a crisis and the subsequently necessary bailouts are a good chance to force companies to do more. Before going bankrupt, they'd probably agree to the deal.
You are correct. But: 1. The article uses the term "fossil fuel commitments" and not "pollution" 2. Air industry bailouts are not necessarily increasing pollution compared to pre-pandemic levels.
The future is probably to only allow the middle-class and the well-off people to fly again, the tickets costing 5 or 10 pounds from London to the likes of Prague or Malaga that used to be so popular among the young and the low and low-middle-classes will probably be a thing of the past.
The same goes for personal cars, the governments are all too happy to give money directly to the high-middle-classes so that they could buy EVs costing north of 40,000 euros while imposing very high taxes (when not banning them altogether) for 10 to 15-year old SH cars favoured by the low and low-middle classes (because that's all that they can afford).
The Financial Times has had a really interesting article [1] on this a couple of days ago from the perspective of those high-middle class people, some of them are worried that the low and low-middle-class people will revolt once put in front of these new realities (like the Gilets Jaunes have done in France), but imo they will most probably do nothing of the sort.
I suspect that the only way for long-distance, heavy-lift aviation (and military aviation) to continue operating in a political/economic climate that demands CO2 reduction/elimination will be via biodiesel. Batteries ain't gonna do it. Zeppelins might be way forward for freight traffic where slow doesn't (often) matter as much, but for large scale passenger transport (again: assuming it's to survive) I don't see anything approaching the specific-energy embodied in diesel. Fischer-Tropsch (sp?) is well understood and can be made to work with pretty-much any feedstock.
I've been advocating Hydrogen for energy storage/transport for decades, but I don't think it works for planes. Specific energy (energy per kg) is against it, I'm afraid. It's not the H2 that weighs much, but it's such a sneaky/leaky gas that containment vessels end up weighing quite a lot. (Maybe there have been improvements in the past decade or so - it's been about that long since I looked.) Hydride storage can't deliver the H2 fast enough for aircraft (again, unless there've been some advances) and we'll not even speak of the flammability issue ;)
I think electric airplanes are still the more probable future. My understanding of the current problem is that the weight to energy ratio in electric batteries is still too high for useful flights. But this ratio is improving year by year, and very soon we will be near the number where electric aircrafts will be competitive with fossil fuel ones on some types of flights.
The energy density of kerosene absolutely destroys Amy battery tech we have and kerosene is used up, therefore making the aircraft lighter over time, further increasing range.
Mainstream commercial electric aviation is probably a half a century away (provided we don't actually discover something even better that supercedes it).
As far as I'm aware, there is no significant effort on battery-powered airliners in the industry. The only significant bets are on hydrogen and biofuels.
Since the Hindenburg disaster, hydrogen zeppelins have gone out of style. Probably rightly so. What non-flammable levitating gas we are left with is helium. Never mind that helium appears to be going up in price, it has twice the density of hydrogen and hence, is far less efficient. So i think zeppelins are basically dead, except for short, recreational flights.
I could see a use for hydrogen filled drone zeppelins carrying cargo. Cargo typically doesn't need to travel as quickly as people do and we can take risks with cargo that we wouldn't take with people.
Also, I have a feeling that hydrogen got a disproportionally bad reputation after Hindenburg. After all, people do travel in devices that are loaded with gasoline and jet fuel, so it's not like it isn't possible to safely handle flammable material.
I don't know about you but i just have a nightmarish vision in my head of thousands of self - propelled incendiary devices flying around and setting cities and countrysides ablaze. Shudder. No thanks.
And your comparison of zeppelins to cars and planes is flawed. The former consists chiefly of an extremely flammable gas. Protecting it is a thin layer of canvas (which can also burn). The latter contain a relatively small container of liquid which is protected by layers of solid metal and foam and all kinds of valves.
Are they competitive with cars/trains though. In the article linked by the sibling it says the Airlander can reach speeds of 50 knots. That is probably fine for a cruise-ship type experience, but for actually going anywhere a well designed train network seems like it would be much more effective?
Sure, I found this misleading because whether the entire industry is running on fossil fuels or on green electricity is orthogonal to the bailouts. The bailouts where concerned (at least according to the proponents) about job loss in the aviation industry. So these bailouts are neutral in terms of fossil fuels. They do not encourage or discourage the use of fossil fuels.
Getting into the article, I expected something more direct, like for example if they passed car gas subsidies.
Let me first check if I understand your argument correctly:
You are saying that my argument is wrong because subsidies to something like agriculture while also not directly encouraging fossil fuel usage, can potentially increase the CO2 output overall. Because subsidies are changing (lowering) prices, so they influence the behaviour of customers.
I partially agree. If your subsidies are helping parts of the agriculture that are more polluting than the industry average, then you are increasing the environmental pollution.
But this does not apply to my argument for 2 reasons:
1. I am talking about bailouts. They rather don't influence the long-term prices of flights. They are one time thing, intended to help some companies not die.
2. Even the agriculture subsidies you mention I would not call "fossil fuel commitments", which is misleading. Better name for them is something like "subsidies that encourage pollution" or "subsidies that encourage increase CO2 emissions".
First of all I appreciate the time you've taken to answer my question but I still have to disagree with you that bailing out the air transportation industry doesn't have long lasting effect on our Co to emissions and it is not compatible with a sustainable development. The bailouts are used in the same way as in the agricultural sector. They're used to protect domestic capabilities the environment be damned.
