Rule number one: don’t t trust the SMH.
Should be about 7 tonnes for the round trip from London to Melbourne. I imagine this calculation is not just the fuel cost but the full emissions cost of the trip.
Which is about the same as Dane’s figures, and about 175% of the average human’s emissions.
I hope you’ve run that by the pedant for confirmation of accurate figures?
The efficiency of aircraft can vary wildly. It also depends on the assumed occupancy rates. I think this is why it was suggested that any environmental tax should be per flight rather than per passenger.
Back of a fag packet calculation. It’s just that it looked like they were an order of magnitude out.
But, but you know where I work, I must be wrong?
Believe it or not, regardless of my academic qualifications or where I work, I’m totally on board with doing all I can to contribute to helping the environment.
I’d not be surprised if my yearly carbon footprint is actually smaller than yours.
My ego certainly is
You’re almost certainly wrong… on both counts.
Then we’ll agree to disagree
Fucking love international breaks. Everyone is on edge without the football on.
There are some more accurate figures here:
It really does depend on the utilisation.
E.g the 747-400 is rated as 12.31kg/km fuel burn, and 3.16l/100km per seat.
A 787-8 with half the seating capacity is 5.38kg/km and 2.77l/km.
Per seat, there isn’t that much difference, but if the number of empty seats goes up, the older plane rapidly goes up per passenger.
The fundamental point is that air travel is bad for the environment and we should be doing as little of it as possible.
Agreed.
More so with domestic or short haul flights where alternatives methods of travel are feasible.
Problem there is, pricing of alternatives will stop people from using them.
Often the pricing of the alternatives is dictated by the government.
So the vicious circle continues
I’m thinking of the kind of things that are on platforms like Temu, some of which seem to have rather short fulfilment periods, but maybe I’m just mis-remembering.
Plastic junk like random toys, or clothing. The couple of days to deliver those seem to be too short for that to be surface freight.
Here, I think this works better…
I have wondered how much could you do as an individual before your carbon footprint is actually driven by things beyond your control.
For example, buying a cauliflower but it comes in a plastic bag. Other than growing your own, which is not possible for many, you cant avoid that bag unless you choose not to eat cauliflower. 
Temu and Shein have both been accused of clogging up air cargo routes. They also ship a large amount of fake and dangerous products.
I agree with you but the key thing is to keep drumming to individuals that we change what we can. If it’s just one plastic straw that you can consciously choose to do without, that’s a change. The issue can be we keep focusing on the 99% of things we have no control of and then use it as a reason not to do anything about the 1% we can.
All this arguing about personal responsibility versus corporate culpability is makes me keep thinking about this GIF.
This is what I meant before (perhaps on this thread, perhaps somewhere else), that as a society we really need to focus on this as an existential threat.
I guess it’s about how you feel about making huge personal sacrifices that might make your life far worse ( not talking about plastic straws here) if government, big business, billionaires and musicians are taking the piss and rubbing it in your face.
Moving away from plastic straws is low impact in both what it costs you in convenience and on the benefit to the environment from that change.
Excluding flights from your life may be high impact on your environmental footprint, but it might also be high impact on your life as well.
If we created a matrix of it with X and Y axis of personal impact and environmental impact, plastic straws would be as far to the bottom left as is possible. Flights might be far top right for many people.
We could all draw up these matrixes and the X axis probably would be vastly different. We all can and will choose what we can sacrifice.
