crossposted at ecotrope.com
On Wednesday, a debate sponsored by IQ2US was held on the subject, "Global warming is not a crisis". One of the participants, NASA climatologist, Gavin Schmidt, has posted his thoughts on the debate at RealClimate. The transcript is now available for download and a podcast will be released next week. Personally, I am not so sure that the format of this debate was a good idea, given the equal weighting given to climate scientists and professional "skeptics". Nor do I think that this kind of forum is conducive to an accurate presentation of the science. One can talk in bombastic circles about a topic without ever fully getting to the bottom of it in a way that can be done with simple visual examination of the data. A perfect example of this is Michael Crichton's sarcastic proposal to ban private jets.
This is clearly an issue that Crichton has pondered at great length, since he mentions it no less than five times during the course of the debate.
p.16
I want to address the issue of crisis in a somewhat different way. Does it really matter if we have a crisis at all? I mean, haven‘t we actually raised temperatures so much that we, as stewards of the planet, have to act? These are the questions that friends of mine ask as they are getting on board their private jets to fly to their second and third homes.
p. 19
Well, if this is the situation, I suddenly think about my friends, you know, getting on their private jets. And I think, well, you know, maybe they have the right idea. Maybe all that we have to do is mouth a few platitudes, show a good, you know, expression of concern on our faces, buy a Prius, drive it around for a while and give it to the maid, attend a few fundraisers and you‘re done. Because, actually, all anybody really wants to do is talk about it.
p. 20
And the evidence for that is the number of major leaders in climate who clearly have no intention of changing their lifestyle, reducing their own consumption or getting off private jets themselves. If they‘re not willing to do it why should anybody else?
p. 77
that we can really address this by changing our light bulbs. Or that we can really make an impact by unplugging our appliances when we‘re not using them. It‘s very much out of whack. And so if...if it were only gonna do symbolic actions, I would like to suggest a few symbolic actions that right—might really mean something. One of them, which is very simple, 99% of the American population doesn‘t care, is ban private jets. Nobody needs to fly in them, ban them now.
p. 77
let‘s have the NRDC, the, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace make it a rule that all of their, all of their members, cannot fly on private jets, they must get their houses off the grid, they must live in the way that they‘re telling everyone else to live.
Now Crichton has an obvious point that private jets are the height of luxurious excess and certainly do contribute a great deal of CO2 to the atmosphere for an individual basis. However, this argument is completely divorced from finding any real solution to reducing total CO2 emissions.
I recently discovered a beautiful chart by the Climate, Energy and Pollution Program of the World Resources Institute.
I highly recommend clicking on the link and downloading the full size image (pdf). It presents U.S. emissions by sector, activity, and greenhouse gas. The first thing I noticed when looking at this chart is that road transportation, residential, and commercial buildings combine to form half of all greenhouse gas emissions. The remainder is made up by industry, agriculture, etc. But here is the big surprise, all of air travel constitutes a mere 3.3% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, considering that 1/30th of total GHG emissions are by airplanes, what percentage of those emissions are by private jets? I would suspect that the ratio would be very low, given the high volume of commercial flights (98 percent of US air travelers fly through 460 commercial airports) and relative engine sizes. I'd say that we're talking at least two orders of magnitude difference, around 1% of the total. So, Crichton proposes a solution that will only reduce 0.03% of US CO2 emissions, assuming unrealistically, that the passengers would alternatively not travel at all. A pittance.
Of course, Crichton recognizes the insignificance of his proposal by calling it a "symbolic action". That's true, no doubt. But to claim that it is somehow more meaningful than concrete measures to increase residential, commercial and automobile energy efficiency is simply wrong. Environmentalists focus on residential, commercial, and ground transportation emissions because they constitute half of the problem, not a mere 0.03%.
I agree that private jets are a profligate waste of resources and that we'd be better off without them. However, if members of the NRDC, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace chose to boycott, the private jet industry would still flourish. That's because the market for private jets is corporate executives, not environmentalists. Michael Crichton's friends, notwithstanding.