Quick Note on Ecotourism and Climate
On Mastodon, I follow the EU Commission’s feed, which reliably outputs schlock that expresses enthusiasm about things that don’t excite anyone who doesn’t work for the EU. A few days ago, it posted something about green tourism that goes beyond the usual saying nothing, and instead actively promotes the wrong things.
The issue at hand is that the greenest way to do tourism is to avoid flying and driving. The origin of Greta Thunberg’s activism is that, in 2018, she was disturbed by the standard green message at school: recycle bottles, but fly to other continents for vacations and tell exciting stories. The concept of flight shame originates with her; she hasn’t flown at all since 2015 and famously traveled to New York by sailboat, but most of her followers are more pragmatic and shift to trains where possible (domestically) and not where it is too ridiculous (internationally, even within Europe).
So environmentally sustainable tourism means tourism that does not involve flying or driving. It means taking the train to Munich or Hamburg or Cologne – or Rome, for the dedicated environmental masochist – doing city center tourism, and at no point using a form of transportation that isn’t a train or maybe a bus.
But the European Commission isn’t recommending that. It’s telling people to choose ecotourism, with a top-down photo of a forest. From Europe, this invariably means flying long distances, and then getting around by taxi in a biome that Europe does not have, usually a tropical climate. The point of ecotourism is not to reduce emissions or any other environmental footprint; it’s to go see a place of natural beauty before it’s destroyed by climate change coming in part from the emissions generated by the trip to it.
This worse-than-nothing campaign comes at a time when there’s growth in demand for actually green tourism in sections of Europe. The more hardcore greens talk about night trains so that they can do those all-rail trips to more distant parts of Europe. People who believe that the Union might be able to do something instead hold out for high-speed trains.
Even with the Commission’s regular appetite for words over actions, there are things that can be done about greening tourism. For example, it could help advertise intra-European attractions that could be done by rail. Berlin is full of these “You are EU” posters that say nothing; they could be telling people how to get to Prague, to any Polish city within reasonable train range, to Jutland if there’s anything interesting there.
At longer range, it could be helping promote circuits of travel entirely by rail. There’s already an UNESCO initiative promoting circuits, designed entirely around ecotourism principles (i.e. drive to where you can see pretty landscapes). This could be adapted to rail circuits, perhaps with some promotional deals. People who go on vacation for 5 weeks at once could be induced to ride trains visiting a different city every few days, breaking what would be a flight or an unreasonably long rail trip into short segments; there are enough cycles in the European intercity rail network that people wouldn’t need to visit the same city twice. For example, one route could go Berlin-Prague-Vienna-Salzburg-Venice-Rome-Milan-Basel-Cologne-Berlin. This is a rather urban route; circuits that include non-urban rail destinations like Saxon Switzerland or the Black Forest are also viable, but the more destinations are added, the smaller the circuit can be.
Pedestrian Observations 
There are trains in Europe to empty (comparably) places of great beauty — watched many cab videos on YouTube of trains through Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland — so you can still eco-tourist to the deep green woods by passenger rail. And they do make electric motor vehicles, so if you have to take a battery shuttle bus or rental car a few kilometers to reach an attraction or hiking train not at the station, that seems like a pretty green eco-vacation. After all, before private cars and highways, railways did good business taking tourists to Fort William in Scotland or Glacier National Park and the Grand Canyon in the United States.
Those places exist, but they are not promoted as much as people who want to talk the green talk should. There are also a lot of similar places that can’t be reached by train but it would be a good idea for other reasons to add a train there. More importantly, there are a lot of vacations that have nothing to do with green that still could be done via train if only those who should make trains better fixed some issues. (cross border travel in the EU is not as easy as it should be)
If you want tourists to use rail you need to be flexible for their plans which often are not carefully timetabled. That means tickets that can get you on whatever train happens to be there when you finish whatever you are doing, and the train is frequent enough that you can count on it not being too long before the next train arrives. Not too long can still be every half an hour – tourists have more flexibility to check out nearby things if the train closes the doors just as they arrive on the platform (so long as there are things to do nearby). You don’t have to run 24 hour service so long as there are hotels nearby that always have a vacancy and are not too expensive (different people have different demands for how nice a hotel must be, so a single hotel won’t cut it!). You need to have 7 day a week service though, with no holidays off because holidays are when tourists will be on vacation in mass.
High speed night trains! Beiijing-Guangzhou, 2236kim in 10:43h. Copenhagen-Rome is 1900km by road.
Some cursory sleuthing suggests that the photo was taken in Europe, based on other photos that photographer has taken and their propensity to touch up images (they probably boosted the greenness of it).
The other three photos it was put alongside of are all of Europe. Seems to me that they were promoting intra-Europe travel.
That said, as a New Zealander I’d like to see an increase in long distance air travel, not a decline. This feels like the “food miles” bullshit thing all over again.
There are lots of things that should be done to bring down emissions (eliminating coal plants for one), but telling people not to go to places that can only be practically reached by aircraft is not going to work.
Flying is probably more than half my lifetime carbon emissions. Its a big deal.
That said I am less worried about long haul flights than short haul flights. Long haul you can just use artificial fossil fuels – they are currently around €6/litre – but for the upper middle classes that isn’t completely ridiculous.
Also geopolitical issues aside and assuming high speed rail where it makes sense I would assume you could get to New Zealand in a week by train and ferry – if you aren’t working that isn’t awful.
@Matthew Hutton:
No. I’ve discussed this previously because I tried to find a way to get to Asia by boat but there are only two realistic means. One is to pay a fortune on a cruise ship, and freighters are no longer like the old days in that they actually cost more than a big cruise ship which is already too expensive and slow. The other is by catching a private sailing yacht from Darwin (or anywhere I suppose) but while it is possible –yachts often pick up temporary crew in Darwin–it is very unpredictable and you might have to wait around for up to 6 months! No doubt Greta would get a ride quick smart but mere mortals … Oh, and these are still pirate waters, ie. for small vessels.
In Tony & Maureen Wheeler’s original overland trip UK to Australia (where they stayed, becoming Australians, smart) that formed the original Across Asia on the Cheap which evolved into Lonely Planet’s first big hit, South-East Asia on a Shoestring they did Singapore to Indonesia to Timor with ferries or fishing vessels. I think they may have got a freighter from there to Darwin but that was 50 years ago. It’s not the English Channel at about 800km from Dili to Darwin, and there is no scheduled shipping or passenger service between them.
In fact Seat61 says:
I doubt it is any greener than flying–about 8 to 9 hours to Singapore or Indonesia from the East Coast cities.
To be clear I am assuming a bunch of new construction 🙂. I agree that in the current world we live in that it’s ridiculous and undoable.
You’ve got to understand how few people live in the top half of Australia. Then, once you arrive in Darwin you still have at least 4,000km to traverse if you’re going to do it overland. The Ghan railway from Darwin to Adelaide is 3,000 km and is for tourists and is expensive. That leaves ≈1500km to get to an east-coast city.
A week?! Honestly, fuck you man. The one time I went to Europe it took me 25 hours just in wheels-up flight time, two days with a stop-over.
With current technology and in perfect conditions I’m very doubtful it is even possible make the trip in one week without any flying. Spend 10 trillion dollars building a maglev train from London to Jakarta and then it might just be possible…
Synthetic fuels will make all of these arguments irrelevant once they become cheaper than conventional fuels. Carbon negative jet fuel made by nuclear reactors from sea water. Be having synthetic gasoline and diesel selling for five cents a gallon one day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter
Yep. Thats the future. Probably would have gotten it by now had we not gotten all of the cringe from “greens”.
It costs money to make whatever the source for the synthetic fuel is and costs money to make the synthetic fuel. It costs money to distribute it, it’s never going to be that cheap.
Whaler in 1850, “Standard Oil cant possibly get the price of lamp oil down that much. We will always be competitive!
Do I understand the technology wrong, or synthetic fuel is made from fossil fuels (mostly coal)? You may reduce or eliminate the carbon emissions, but you’d still have the problem of limited reserves, eventually.
Whale oil was for rich people. Other people were burning other stuff. Including synthetic flammable gases. The people from production of the raw materials to processing your credit/debit card transaction for the fuel you just pumped are going to want to get paid.
It’s cheaper to use waste products of other petroleum products or coal to make synthetic whatever, than it is to do other ways. The industrial chemists have been tweaking the process for almost a century and you can put almost anything in one end and get almost anything out the other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel
If energy was cheap enough(thanks to nuclear power. Fusion and or Fisson) you could make it out from seawater. Use electrolysis to make hydrogen and then you get the CO2 from direct air capture or from sea water and then combine the two then vwala. You got hydrocarbons.
If the electricity was free it would still cost money to desalinate the water, cost money to make the hydrogen, cost money to combine it with something to make the synthetic fuel and cost money to deliver it. If the electricity is free it’s a lot cheaper to just use the electricity directly.
Long haul flights are actually the most energy efficient way of travelling long distances. Travelling Europe to Australia by boat is far worse for the environment than flying. Even within Europe flying eg. from Switzerland to Corsica is going to be better than taking a train to Genoa and a ferry from there.
Flying is also only responsible for around 3% of greenhouse gas emissions. I heat my home using a heat pump. I do not drive a car. I do take the occasional flight, and do not see the need to be ashamed of it.
When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions there is a lot of low hanging fruit still. Air travel isn’t one of them.
Being a foot passenger on a ferry is pretty carbon efficient – see the graph on https://flightfree.co.uk/why_flight_free/.
And certainly a longer trip with mostly high speed rail with a shorter distance covered by an ocean liner would be better for the environment than flying the whole way.
The way the emissions/energy use for foot passengers on ferries is calculated does underestimate it massively. I would have to check, but the figures that flight free posts seem way off.
You are anyway not going to tell my parents that they cannot go and see their grandchildren anymore…
Fully agree the non plane experience leaves a lot to be desired in many ways, that’s one reason I am so keen to improve it.
Don’t feel anyone should feel guilty for flying when there isn’t a plausible alternative – and in a lot of cases there isn’t.
The late David MacKay crunched the numbers here: http://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_133.shtml
Basically in a best case (no frills economy travel) an ocean liner still consumes twice the amount of energy per pkm a Jumbo does.
I believe we should concentrate on decarbonising ground transportation, electricit production, heating etc… If we do that we can slash our emissions, and still keep the comfort of flying to to see family in Australia…
Yeah, food miles is bullshit, because cargo ships and trains are fuel-efficient, and very little food gets shipped by air and then it’s usually so expensive (think high-end restaurants serving lobster) that the carbon content per dollar spent isn’t even that high.
But passenger air travel emissions are genuinely different.
Yes, air travel emissions are real, but it still “feels” bullshit. By that I mean it’s a solution that people simply will not tolerate. There could be a cyclone every day of summer and still it would be electoral suicide to try and seriously restrict air travel.
Something I’ve read once though, apparently night-time flights are about twice as heating than day flights. Something to do with infrared emissions from the ground bouncing off vapour trails I think.
Ascent humans the Earth is generally cooling – a little carbon is captured every year in long term stable forms (no animal eats charcoal for energy). We need to start with the large sources of carbon that are easy to solve first. In many places the grid is already switching to carbon free sources (wind, solar) – keep encouraging that. Getting better local and regional transport so people don’t feel like they need to drive would make a major difference – even the best transit cities could improve mode share a lot with better transit service. HSR between close urban areas would make a big difference too.
There are still some area that I don’t know how to solve. However we can work on the edges (construction may need to drive, but EVs make sense) for them. Eventually what is left is things like long distant travel that cannot reasonably be done via any alternative I can think of. However by the time we get there we have frozen global warming in place.
Note that the above is a world wide problem. So how do we bring HSR to places like Niger should be on everyone’s mind. (they just had a coup and so anything you imagined doing last year is thrown away – which is the type of problem we need to figure out even though I have no clue if it is solvable)
“Places like Niger”–by which I mean, the kinds of economically oppressed countries in the Global South that experience these levels of open instability–account for such a small fraction of global emissions that they are absolutely not something that needs to be front of mind for this, in anything other than a restorative-justice sense. Niger has 20% more people than, say, Romania, and emits 1/30th the CO2 per year.
The emissions impact of a minority-rule electoral coup in America next year would be far greater. (Though frankly we already have that sort of “anything you imagined doing last year is thrown away” instability thanks to the ongoing breakdown of our political system; but that aside it would take multiple divine interventions to get American per-capita carbon emissions down to a single-digit multiple of Nigeran ones within the next ten years anyway.)
A lot of that is because the alternative isn’t serious.
Istanbul is only 2000 miles from my house by road so theoretically you could do that journey at high speed rail speed in under 12 hours – whereas as per Seat61 the current journey takes 4 whole days.
Certainly even if the experience is worse than flying you should be able to go from the UK to Turkey or Greece quickly enough to have a weeks holiday there without spending a ridiculous portion of the trip travelling – whereas with the current status quo of travel by land you probably need to stay for ~4 weeks to justify the travel time.
In the last paragraph, it seems like you’re proposing the creation of the Interrail Pass, which has existed for some decades already?
But Mr Levy lives in another world where reality is not a concern…
…Mr?
I believe that’s “Mx Levy” to you (and everyone else).
Yeah, or just Alon, because queer culture is informal and very light on honorifics; there’s a reason why the culture converged on one gender-neutral pronoun in English five to 10 years ago (and earlier than that in Swedish) and on a gender- and legal status-neutral way to refer to someone you’re married to or dating, whereas honorifics remain idiolectical.
The issue isn’t the pass. It’s everything surrounding it; at scale (i.e. something the eurocrats are too scared to do), it requires new infrastructure.
I think using the existing infrastructure to full potential would be a good start 😜.
Theres enough Paris-Perpignan trains for example already that an hourly Paris-Barcelona service would be viable for sure.
You mean EU should be building or helping to build pieces of international rail network?
Subjective opinion: Some countries built their high speed networks with clear long-term nationalistic political goals (just see how centralized are the networks of Spain and France around Madrid and Paris). I don’t see that there’s an equivalent pseudo-nationalistic pan-european political agenda strong enough to invest in expensive infrastructure like HSR. And pure profit-based business cases for international rail will be hard to come as far as flying continues to be cheap.
Another subjective opinion:
I imagine it’s also a matter or operating trains, where the “let’s make free market mandatory and the trains will appear by themselves” seems too optimistic. Trips that are technically possible today, cannot be done without two or three changes of train between different non-coordinated companies.
And as michaelj points, another thing to do may be taxing the aviation fuel and using that money to run international trains. In work trips the time is important, but in tourism the price is probably a bigger factor in the choice. With a price difference (that right now doesn’t exist) slower travelling by train may become a more attractive option when you have to move a family of many members.
To be honest to a decent degree all that is needed is to run sensible trains on existing infrastructure.
Or perhaps upgrading some existing lines to 150-200km/h running.
And that isn’t super expensive.
As a “let’s play Ticket to Ride” concept, you made me think what would happen if the EU decided to run a grid network on HSR lines, since countries cannot agree themselves (with a few more intermediate stops and a bunch of bottlenecks right now):
Vertical axis:
* Sevilla – Madrid – Bilbao – Bordeaux – Tours – Paris
* Valencia – Barcelona – Montpellier – Lyon – Paris – Brussels – Amsterdam
* Genoa – Milan – Zurich – Frankfurt – Cologne – Hanover – Hamburg – Copenhagen – Gothenburg – Oslo
* Naples – Rome- Florence – Bologna – Bolzano – Munich – Prague – Berlin
* Zagreb – Budapest – Krakow – Warsaw – Riga – Tallinn
Horizontal axis:
* London – Brussels – Cologne – Hanover – Berlin – Warsaw
* Rennes – Paris – Frankfurt – Nuremberg – Prague – Krakow
* Lyon – Geneva – Bern – Zurich – Munich – Vienna – Bratislava – Budapest
* Lyon – Turin – Milan – Venice – Trieste – Zagreb
* Lisbon – Madrid – Barcelona – Montpellier – Marseille – Cannes – Genoa – Florence
I would just try running those as trains. You could use compartment trains that could switch into a sleeper for night time journeys and see what happens.
Worst case a relatively small amount of money would be wasted – but I would be surprised if the operating costs of the train themselves weren’t covered.
@Jordi
The EU has already basically established this with the High Speed and Conventional corridors of the Trans-European Rail Network as part of the TEN-T Trans European Transport Network. But there is no funding and things are left to individual countries.
That said
-No service London to south of France/Spain?
-No service from Naples/Rome to Frankfurt/Cologne/etc.?
-No service Berlin to Prague/Vienna/etc.?
-No service Paris to Cologne/Berlin?
-Frankfut to Munich is relatively flat and heavily trafficked. Zurich to Berlin is mountainous and Switzerland is small. I think your route to Budapest is wrong.
-Two corridors starting in Lyon, only one in Paris?
@Onux
I thought these corridors were about the infrastructure, rather than the service, and I agree with you on the EU leaving it to the individual countries, and I guess that’s Alon’s point indeed.
Matthew’s point (and mine) was that apart from building rails, you have to operate them, and there is potential for creating services from the EU, even with the current lines. So far the only project I know (maybe there are more) is this, in which the EU takes a passive approach, and asks for companies to come with proposals of point-to-point connections so they can give them support (economical? political?): https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/connecting-europe-train-10-eu-pilot-services-boost-cross-border-rail-2023-01-31_en
The “fun” of the grid is that it doesn’t require to try to connect all combinations between cities directly. In theory, using a transfer you can avoid overlapping routes and each line is useful for a lot of different trips, making it much more cost-effective. But implementing such a grid of complementary lines requires exactly the opposite policy that the EU has.
That said, your comments on my initial grid design are right. I basically took a map of each France, Italy and Germany (and Germany’s not very detailed), now I see the wikipedia map of the TEN-T, and I had connected things that are require a bad detour.
And as you comment on Paris or London, I guess it makes sense to bend a bit the grid (and accept a bit of overlap) to give more direct connection between the biggest population centers? Like making the Lisbon – Madrid – Paris line reach London. Or Paris – Lyon – Milan – …? Or Barcelona – Lyon – Geneva – Zurich…? And What’s the opinion of the professionals?
Or maybe it makes sense to “tilt” Europe 45º and you get a London – Paris – Rome line, and a Copenhagen – Berlin – Prague – Budapest. It’s a fun game, we could spam the forum trying to make an improved proposal for the EU to clean their (censored) with it.
@Jordi
Unfortunately any line crossing involving Paris becomes a lot less practical due to incredibly unfortunate lack of through station. I mean I guess a train coming from the south can stop at Gare de Lyon, reverse out, then use the LGV interconnection to continue north but it’d be a huge timesink.
@minhn1994
Yes, you’re right. Maybe with Gare du Nord the timesink would be smaller.
Some SNCF lines just stop at Charles de Gaulle TGV station without entering Paris. That would be a timesink for Paris users from one of the two directions, but saving for the rest. I don’t know how well suited it is to support different lines using it as a connection point.
There’s a few more bottlenecks though. The Perpignan – Montpellier stretch, connecting Munich or Berlin with anything outside of Germany, etc…
Through running is good for other reasons, but it really isn’t needed for the network. Anyone who arrives in Paris via HSR who doesn’t want to be in Paris should be assumed to want to transfer anyway. London, Madrid, Frankfurt are all places you might want to end up in (or start from) given todays infrastructure, not to mention any of the smaller cities in France. If your destination is a smaller city in Spain you should be going to Madrid and transferring
What we need are cross border trains Madrid – Paris should be a direct trip without any other transfers even at the border. This train should also stop and a couple cities on the way (though not all cities – so there probably should be another train on the same line that stops at more cities). I believe Paris/London and Paris/Frankfurt are already one train.
The other thing we need are good transfers between them. I don’t care where it happens, but there needs to be a central station in/near Paris that all long distance trains stop at. You can put it outside of Paris if you want with regular trains into Paris, but then you need to ensure no city is reachable via a Paris station that isn’t reachable directly from this station so it becomes the top station.
The above is specific to France where they mostly have a good enough internal network. They just need to work on international lines; and better transfers (right now they have some weird transfer situations with lower priced trains – Alon has written about this and I’m botching details already). Every country has a different situation – many of them need to build HSR across their country first so that it is reasonable to travel through without stopping – Warsaw to Paris should be a reasonable trip via HSR (it could take a few minutes more than 5 hours, so marginal but not unreasonable) – but today it takes 22 hours which is not reasonable (I just took the first result a search found, I don’t know if there are better times possible)
I notice that in Paris Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est are at walking distance of each other, so we may consider them a transferring central point, with trains not through-running.
I agree that you need to keep travel times reasonable. The ridership of Paris – Barcelona shows that there is demand for a train that loses the race to planes (and even in this case the train isn’t especially cheap). But let’s say the trip should be less than 10 hours.
“right now they have some weird transfer situations with lower priced trains” <- I get a sensation that rail companies play market segmentation, with point-to-point trains running like planes and matching the price of planes. Maybe more multi-purpose HSR lines would make the whole system more efficient, but those savings would show in the balance sheets of the legacy lines instead of the HSR ones and that's not convenient for company directors?
With that in mind, I think we can iterate a step 1 of the grid idea, with a clock-faced schedule for Central Europe, without Paris through-running, more useful than Germany or France only making their own timetables and specific trips separately:
Vertical:
– Amsterdam -2:00- Brussels -1:30- Paris (Thalys, already exists)
– Hamburg -1:30- Hannover -3:00- Frankfurt – 3:00- Strasbourg -1:00- Basel
– Hamburg -2:00- Berlin -3:00- Nuremberg -1:00- Munich -3:30- Zurich
Diagonal:
– London -2:30- Paris (Eurostar, already exists)
– Amsterdam -3:00- Cologne -1:30- Frankfurt -2:30- Nuremberg -1:00- Munich
Horizontal:
– London -2:00- Brussels -2:00- Cologne -2:30- Hannover -1:30- Berlin
– Paris -2:00- Strasbourg -3:30- Nuremberg
– Paris -3:00- Basel -1:00- Zurich -3:30- Munich (Lyria, exists between Paris and Zurich)
From a network point of view, France and Spain’s HSR networks are almost perfectly designed for international travel.
If you consider Brussels to be the “starting point” you only exit the high speed line either at Strasbourg (German border), Marseille (coast) or Montpellier. Once the Montpellier-Perpignan line opens (planned 2040), there are only four 230 km/h junctions (and the platforms at Barcelona) impeding a full 300 km/h run from Seville to Brussels. I don’t know if the line to Badajoz is being built to 300 km/h, but if it is then both France and Spain will be able to be crossed entirely border-to-border at 300 km/h only slowing down five times (at the junctions) and a single stop at Barcelona.
Sounds like a international network to me, at least one under construction.
That says it all, doesn’t it? France is perfectly capable of building high-speed lines in less than 27 years, it just doesn’t care enough about international connections.
If you could get SNCF to extend all the existing Paris-Perpignan trains to Barcelona it’d prove their was enough demand to justify building Montpellier-Perpignan much sooner.
There are three SNCF Barcelona – Paris a day, their price is similar (maybe a bit cheaper) than a low cost airline, and they take almost 7h to complete around 1100km (approx 160 km/h).
Given that SNCF divorced RENFE from the trains they were running together, and that now RENFE is having to spend months and years to homologate in France the same trains they had been running when they were together, it looks like France is trying to put as much barriers to competence as possible.
And any trip from Spain to anything that is not Paris has to go through slow routes or have long detours. The physical network of both countries is very centered in connecting the country with the capital and nothing else.
Yes, I don’t know the difference today but 40 years ago Eurail (non-EU-residents only) was a much better bargain than Interrail (EU-residents only), which I thought was a bit odd. Eurail Youth pass was very good which I did a couple of times when I was a kid (under 26y) and not bad for over-26y (compulsory First Class which gets you meals on some trains). Of course Eurail never included the UK.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle is Brussels econocratic obsessions, ie. won’t allow subsidies. Even though aviation fuel is not taxed (=giant subsidy).
I’m currently riding trains and busses in Ukraine, where no fly zone eliminates regional flights EU folks are accustom to. Train from Kherson to Kyiv was diesel burner with spartan bunk bed sleeper coaches for 10 hr ride. In Kyiv, the Soviet era 3 line system is quite busy, well run, and cheap, but inadequate for city bigger than Paris. The city’s waterfront expressway and other multi-lane surface streets are car culture nightmare. From outer neighborhoods with broken pavement a large fleet of big public electric busses and private minivan jitneys fill in what metro train doesn’t cover.
promote circuits of travel
It’s meme. They even make movies about it. There are the alternate memes of Japanese or Chinese tour groups.
In Japan, there is heavy promotion of domestic tourism at JR stations. A lot of the “tradition” of regional specialties (meibutsu) is exaggerated for purposes of domestic consumption. You have to have some thing that is the thing that people come to see or buy whether it makes any sense or not.
Before 1971, North American railways had loose-leaf volumes known as the Optional Routing Guide. It was a treasure trove of ways to add a national park or a small city festival stopover at little or no extra cost. It encouraged circle trips, side trips, etc. Without computers, it depended on the knowledge of agents or a friend who had already made the trip. Amtrak took on a few of these, but when it modeled its reservation computer after the airlines it dropped that feature. Imagine my pleasure then in discovering that in 1970 or so, the Scandinavian railways published a booklet full of circle fares. Yes, Jutland and Odense and Aarhus were interesting!
This type of fare does not compete directly with passes or discounts. Passes tend to load up main lines. Optional routings have the effect, in the old North American private rail companies or in the publicly-owned Scandinavian example, of steering traffic onto secondary lines. With modern computing it should be possible to offer this on line.
[In 1967 I returned from St. Louis to Portland via Edmonton at no extra cost. My checked suitcase full of dirty laundry and exposed film followed me faithfully into Canada and then arrive sealed to await a U.S. Customs inspection in Portland Union Station.]
To be fair though very few of the mainlines are full. Plus even when they are full there’s a strong incentive to improve capacity further on them by improving signalling or 4 tracking 2 track sections etc.
“The concept of flight shame originates with her”
The concept originated with Swedish singer Staffan Lingberg and was first popularized by Swedish Olympian Bjorn Ferry, not Thunberg; she just got more press about it.
“famously traveled to New York by sailboat”
Several articles have shown how multiple crew members flew across the Atlantic to either crew the some of the boats she was on or replace her for the return journey, which means that her stunt probably led to more emissions than if had just flown herself.
Bring back Zeppelins, I say. They had a max speed of 135km/h so could cover London to NY in under two days, with a small fraction of the carbon emissions of aeroplanes, and with comfortable travelling rather than the sardine can conditions of contemporary air travel. Even express liners were able to do the journey in under four days.
Or you could get ambitious and run high-speed rail to Newfoundland and the west coast of Ireland, cutting the Atlantic crossing (by boat or air ship) to a little over 3000km. Although obviously this would only be possible in a world in which all air travel was prohibited.
Just wait for the next Silicon Valley startup ….
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2023-05-25/inside-sergey-brin-s-secret-250-million-airship
https://www.ft.com/content/ae625a25-d2ac-4bca-9508-a5f0d3c7dd09
If they are plausible replacements (which I don’t think they are), then why were they replaced so decisively by fixed-wing aviation at so early a stage of development? I mean, at a time when transatlantic airplane flights took refueling stops at Gander and Shannon (possibly even Reykjavik).
Never mind business passengers, even people traveling for leisure want to get to some destination on firm ground — there are a few exceptions from heritage railtours through circular flights to cross-jurisdiction gambling/alcohol-prohibition-avoiding “ferries” — but these are both a much smaller segment of demand, and not days long. Just on this point, people will discard this option as unviable and scream at their politicians until they re-legalize air travel. (If you do somehow pull this off, mode share will be the wrong question to ask next to the orders-of-magnitude collapse in global mobility. If the cake basically vanishes and only 1-10% of it remains, how those crumbs get distributed is beside the point.)
Second: most people travel by air in sardine can conditions — but business (and if we aren’t assuming one is fixed to an airline, first) class offerings exist and are used. Clearly, most people care about price enough for this to be the case, at least for the duration of a flight. But for multiple days of in-vehicle time, the very minimum is that each passenger will occupy rather more floorspace (i.e. cost) because they need a bed; secondly, although people do currently vote with their wallets for “sardine can” conditions, I don’t think quite so low a lack of amenities would be accepted anywhere this widely if people would spend days in the vehicle. I assume that is what you referred to as “comfortable travelling” with zeppelins. So let’s round up a little and assume that the lowest class offered will include spaces other than the bed. Congratulations, you just increased how much vehicle (and therefore cost) there is per passenger by, let’s say, double.
Third, because your vehicles make round-trips so much slower, each unit of passenger throughput capacity per connection needs a correspondingly larger number of vehicles and crews (actually more crews, since there have to be more crew per vehicle to work in shifts over days). Today, to move X passengers per day from e.g. JFK to LHR takes one plane (let’s roughly round to one round trip per 24 hours), with vehicles that take two day to make a crossing in one direction, X passengers per day would require four vehicles of equivalent seating capacity.
For the leisure travel market, the choice “an experience that people will complain about roughly as much as they do about economy seating, but for current first-class prices — or nothing” will see the large majority of travelers pick “nothing”.
For business travel, “well it takes multiple days to get there” is just obviously “no”.
As others have pointed out below, simply moving fixed-wing aircraft to carbon-neutral fuel (source)s is not just a simpler program, but is also significantly cheaper as well as more useful to passengers.
You can get a 5 day cruise from NY to England for $800/person (minimum 2 people per cabin), and this is a more or less regularly schedule trip that a decent number of people make. That is competitive with flying prices, and you get a lot more space. Often kids are free if they stay in your room. Prices do go up from there, you can easily pay 5 figures for a similar trip.
The question is can we make the 2 day zeppelin cruise for $200/person – at that price I can see price conscience families choosing it over flying – it takes a day longer but you get a luxury cruise and bed. One assumes there is on board entertainment, but the cruise industry proves that this can all be pulled off for a fairly low price so. I don’t know if you can apply the cruise model to a Zeppelin trip, but I can see people making a 6-9 day vacation of it, with 4 days in the air. Business will fly of course (if possible), but most people care about costs enough to agree. I don’t know enough about zeppelin economics to answer this question.
“The question is can we make the 2 day zeppelin cruise for $200/person”
You cannot. The Zeppelin is in the air for eight times as long as a plane, which means you need one eighth the pax/crew ratio for EQUAL staff costs. Since a 777 carries five times the pax (or more) with 15 pilots and attendants, that means your Zeppelin is carrying 1/3 of a person as crew. In addition to this impossibility, humans have to sleep, which means you have to carry multiple crew sets to rotate. If FAA regs for pilots apply you need three complete flight crews. Airships would be more expensive.
“I can see people making a 6-9 day vacation of it, with 4 days in the air”
You see people taking a six day trip with only two days at their destination and the rest of the time crammed in an airship with less total space per person than a Hong Kong apartment and sleeping in bunk beds?!?! Dream on.
I doubt Zeppelins would ever be the economic option. The motivation for them would be the subject of Alon’s post: ecotourism. It would happen either if flygskam leads to consumers opting for more time-consuming but environmentally friendly forms of transport (trains over land, and ships/airships over water), or governments decide to drastically increase taxes on carbon-intensive modes of transport to reflect their true cost to the environment, or even ration them out (e.g. you get a certain number of plane kilometres per year and can’t exceed your allocation).
Labour costs are a killer as you point out. The Zeppelin had a staff ratio of about 1 worker for every 2 passengers. Sure you could probably reduce this but it would still be much higher than planes are now, and of course for a longer period of time.
But labour costs are not the major driver of opex for planes, jet fuel is. Presumably Zeppelins are a lot cheaper in this area (since you’re essentially powering a big balloon, not a heavy chunk of metal). Other things like maintenance and depreciation might also work out substantially cheaper if the product matures.
As for comfort, Zeppelin wins hands down. Extra space is much cheaper to provide than on planes (you just need more helium to offset the added weight of the air). If you could get London-NY down to 40 hours (avg. speed 140km/h), then you could have something like a 9pm departure and an 8am arrival two days later (London-NY would have to be something like 2pm-11am+2 due to the time difference). So you have dinner, sleep, spend a day reading, lounging around, playing Uno, etc., sleep again, then arrive at your destination after a refreshing night with a full day ahead of you. The slower speeds and ability to sleep properly en route mean jetlag could be managed more gradually so your actual holiday isn’t ruined by messed up sleeping patterns.
Going from NY-London on a plane, you either do it overnight and arrive in the morning feeling like a wreck, or you go by day but then arrive in the evening and have wasted the day trapped in a sardine can. London-NY is admittedly a bit more tolerable, since you only arrive three hours “later” than you departed.
“But labour costs are not the major driver of opex for planes, jet fuel is.”
Sources vary, but I’ve seen fuel as 18-25% of airline cost, while labor is 25-35%. There is uncertainty in what these mean (% total cost, % operating cost, % flight hour cost) but I noted how the Hindenburg used about half the fuel per pax-km as a modern jet. Even if labor and fuel are equal, cutting one in half while increasing the other by five to ten times is a losing proposition.
“Extra space is much cheaper to provide than on planes (you just need more helium to offset the added weight of the air).”
Extra space is cheap, just offset the air!? To have usable space to use means a floor, walls, lights, furniture, etc. all of which weigh much more than the air they surround which means it is expensive to lift it (adding more helium means making the airship bigger!). Airships are hugely space inefficient. The Hindenburg was 245m long and 42m wide/high with only 560m2 usable deck. By comparison a B777 has 300-340m2. Was the Hindenburg’s space used by fewer passengers? Yes, but airline passengers only fly for a few hours, not days on end. Zeppelin rooms were like railway sleepers with bunk beds, only smaller and most without windows. There was a single shower, described as having a water bottle dumped on you, and going two days unwashed isn’t exactly refreshing.
“your actual holiday isn’t ruined by messed up sleeping patterns.”
No your actual holiday is ruined by spending more than half of it on a cramped airship. Remember we have been looking at the intercontinental best case of Lon-NY, not trips like NY-Athens or Chicago-Rome, or California to anywhere. All would be three days or more each way.
“As for comfort, Zeppelin wins hands down. Extra space is much cheaper to provide than on planes (you just need more helium to offset the added weight of the air).”
I would like to recommend a different framing. Take in “unfurnished” condition a specific vehicle (A321 or LZ### or a railway coach for that matter) that is capable of carrying N tons of payload in K m² of floorspace. Then treat interior design as strictly downstream of this. Thus if you want to put a lounge somewhere, you can do that, but then you can’t put seats there. You can put in beds (business-/first-class seats?), but those take up the floorspace of multiple economy-size seats. (Crew quarters may or may not have to be listed here; widebodies can hide those into nooks and crannies, comparatively speaking.) This is why you end up having to split the bill between fewer passengers — this was my second point.
Of course, this can be iterated — go back, choose (or “design” (read: spec)) a different airframe and allocate its payload and floorspace — and here we can talk about how the various technologies scale. Given that airships are not currently used for much, this part about scaling would involve some wild guesses — e.g. on closer inspection, perhaps it might turn out that helium loss (seepage through the membrane) would be a major cost item for a large-scale zeppelin industry (or hangar costs, or…).
Airline labor costs: I’d guess pilots and flight attendants are substantially less than half, instead ground crews (anything from refueling through baggage and poop handling to food restocking) and the “lighter”, more frequent kinds of maintenance make up the majority. I understand that the larger airlines do a lot of these in-house, while smaller ones contract out more of them. (This would really mess up comparisons.)
In addition to Basil Marte’s great point that propeller planes were seen to be more advantageous than airships, let alone jets, airships are also do not have “a small fraction” of the carbon emissions of airplanes. The Hindenburg carried 50-70 passengers but would only have had 45-65 if using helium. At 122kph cruise speed London to NY would be 48 hours when factoring in climb, descent, etc. A 777 carries 368 passengers and makes the trip in 6 hours. Even accounting for the fact that jet engines burn fuel at a higher rate (~15k kg/hr instead of 130 kg/hr for the zeppelin) the airship is using 40-55% of the fuel the jet is. You can say that is less, but it is certainly not “a small fraction.”
Modern technology (more efficient engines, lighter materials for more passengers) can help the airship some, but it is not at all like riding an electric train.
But mostly what Basil Marte said. No one will spend 4 days of a week’s vacation just getting to and from the destination. Businesspeople won’t spend a full work week away from home to attend a one day meeting/conference. Plus with 45-65 zeppelins required to move people at the same rate as a widebody, you will either run out of crew or have much more expensive tickets and thus either not be able to move or not attract air travellers.
Well I hoped it was obvious that my comment was a little tongue in cheek. But playing devil’s advocate for a second:
– there have been claims that modern airships could reduce emissions by 90% for equivalent journeys, although this has not been practically established yet since it’s all just vapourware right now.
– why planes established themselves over airships after the Hindenburg explosion is an interesting question (particularly since plane travel was not especially safe either at the time), but it is not proof of one mode’s superiority. Otherwise none of us would be sitting around here thinking of how to improve rail in North America, we’d just assume car travel was innately better.
– as an Australian I actually have done air trips that ended up taking two days or more, either because I was travelling with a small child so broke up the flight with an overnight hotel stay, or because I had to do some circuitous route due to the vagaries of return tickets or the need to pick up luggage. So it’s not inconceivable. I even imagine some trans-Atlantic journeys would start getting pretty long if you are going from one place-that’s-not-an-airline-hub to another place-that’s-not-an-airline hub, and the connections aren’t great. At least with airships you would have a much higher level of comfort than the present experience offered in planes and departure lounges.
– and yeah, you obviously wouldn’t travel that long for a business meeting, but maybe people shouldn’t be flying halfway around the world and back again just for a meeting (which could easily be done via video-conference). Maybe there would be a salutary effect for travelling speeds to not exceed the limits of high-speed rail, and for the realities of geographical space to be taken into consideration when travelling more than they presently are for many people.
The 90% reduction is claimed for cargo in relation to helicopters (airships can hover to pick up cargo instead of needing a runway too). But helicopters are notorious fuel hogs, much worse than passenger jets.
“improve rail in North America, we’d just assume car travel was innately better.”
But airships didn’t go out service just in the US because of the Hindenburg, they were overtaken worldwide, which suggests they are inherently inferior. For that matter passenger airships we’re really only a German thing, they were never widespread to begin with.
You may have taken a two day trip from Australia, but have you ever needed one *within* Australia, even Brisbane to Perth? Yes you can take jet trips that last more than a day with layovers, like Europe to Aus, or India-S America. But those trips at airship speed would last a week non-stop. No one is taking a two day flight across the Atlantic when you can leave NY after breakfast and have dinner in London.
“why planes established themselves over airships after the Hindenburg explosion is an interesting question, but it is not proof of one mode’s superiority. Otherwise none of us would be sitting around here thinking of how to improve rail in North America, we’d just assume car travel was innately better.”
To put the matter in terms of superiority, we tend to discuss things — NEC, LIRR-NJT all-day through-running, etc. — where the car’s margin of superiority is already narrow or negative. There’s much less about how to put Podunk, or for that matter Atlanta, on rails, exactly because in that case, cars are indeed blatantly the superior solution. Likewise, on transcontinental distances, flying is superior. (At the shorter end of “transcontinental”, sleeper trains can compete with aviation.)
Onux:
Maybe, but she could only be responsible for what she did, not whatever others thought they had to do to make that plan work. I can’t see why other people would have been obliged to fly transAtlantic to achieve her journey, which is not to say there aren’t dozens of interested parties who might claim that.
And the publicity and awareness of the issue has probably saved a hundred or thousands or more times than whatever CO2^e it cost. Because of her ‘stunt’ many people became more aware of the contribution to climate change from their unnecessary flying. Probably gave a bit of a boost to those who search for alternatives to aviation fuel but that is a long road (biofuel is made today but it will be a few decades before it is economic).
I usually use this free online book as a reference to understand the technological limits related to energy:
https://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_42.shtml
Biofuel is basically an inefficient way to store solar energy. In the long term, planes may become a niche use for it, since they cannot be attached to the grid, but still it’s impossible that biofuel could support the amount of flying we do nowadays (plane and jet engine efficiency are already close to the theoretical limits).
Most probably, a future will arrive where flying will become a luxury again, with no technological revolution to save us from that.
Flying will just used carbon neutral synthesized fuels. It will be more expensive, but as GDP keeps rising it will still be affordable, maybe to slightly fewer people.
Plants aren’t very efficient at storing solar energy. They are cheap.
If you try to scale plants to generate energy at industrial scale, you need impossible amounts of space to grow them. And that’s a quite hard technological limit, I don’t foresee it being overcome in my lifetime.
Ten percent of the gasoline I buy is bio-ethanol mostly from corn/maize.
A pretty obvious idea (as in, it’s already in common use in other contexts — namely, electrical and ships’ power plants) to improve thermal efficiency is to make combined-cycle engines. After the core airflow exhausts from the turbines, it’s still pretty hot, and some of this energy (which is currently lost) can be recovered into a useful, shaft-turning form by running an ordinary heat engine between this and some colder place to reject heat, which in this case would logically be the bypass airstream. I believe the biggest problem is that the heat exchangers required are bulky and heavy.
Environmentally sustainable tourism would mean that most tourism in the US would be unviable, except trips to the Northeastern cities, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Why do you think it would become that limited?
Because the other parts of the US have no public transit
1) The advent of electric cars means you cannot say driving is not environmentally sustainable. An electric car pollutes no more or no less than an electric train (it all depends on emissions of the electricity source) and is a better option than a diesel train.
2) That said, flight shame is a loser idea. Air travel makes up 2-3% of global emissions, and there is no workable substitute for fossil fuels here. Electricity makes up 25% of emissions, and we have technology that can produce it pollution free, and have for decades (lots of technologies, actually, nuclear, hydro, solar, wind…). Other transportation is 11-12% of emissions, and for much of it we also have workable, cost competitive non-polluting options (electric trains and cars). Focus on the major sources with high benefit-cost ratio, not the margins. If you tell people they must never fly again they will look at the line of jets outside Davos (let alone IPCC meetings!) and say forget your climate nonsense. If you tell them they won’t have to pay high prices at the pump and there will be no smog in the skies you can also get buy in on other things.
Its the same thing with the push to ban gas stoves. The emissions from gas cooking is negligible, people will have their stoves on for fractions of an hour a day cooking food (even if baking for a few hours in a gas oven the oven is not running continuously, only turning on when the temp drops to bring it back up). Emissions from central heating and hot water are so much higher. Why would you open yourself up to the charge of literally taking civilization away from people (“you can’t cook with fire!”) for so little gain?
The industrial chemists figured out how to make synthetic fuel almost a century ago. It’s not done often because boiling petroleum is cheaper. Synthetic methane can be made too.
Re gas stoves, I think the issue is gas leaks more than CO2 production. Also the safety and installation cost issues of household gas are non-negligible. I think I agree with you the ban is too heavy-handed though.
My apartment in Tokyo, which is the cheapest apartment I have ever lived in, has a gas stove. Along with mini split heat pump HVAC and hot water.
I prefer restaurants to home cooking anyways, so I’d rather not deal with gas at all, but in the developed world, the costs and safety issues of household gas are negligible.
For that matter, the cost of modern (heat pump) air and water heating must be so absurdly cheap, that something must be wildly dysfunctional in Europe and North America for them to not be common already. Or people are complaining about the price of stuff that has rounding error levels of impact, vs the price of NIMBYism. I dated someone whose rent was under $150/month, cheap even for Tokyo, and they had heat pumps for air and water heating (and no stove at all).
Japan relatively small country with an ocean moderated climate. It doesn’t get that cold (unless you climb a mountain) and so heat pumps work well.
America is a large continent. In some places heat pumps are common, in other places it gets too cold in winter for them to work (though modern ones work better in the cold and so they are slowly penetrating farther).
A modern gas furnace will be at least 95% fuel efficient at heating your house. A gas power plant will be at best 60% efficient at heating your house (resistance heat). You need a good COP to make up for that initial loss.
It would be very difficult to find a heap pump with a COP less than 3. According to Wikipedia, impossible in the U.S. because the least efficient that can be sold is higher than that. People in the real world don’t care much about efficiency they care about how much it costs, to buy and to run. A lot depends on the cost of electricity or natural gas, locally.
The parts of California people live in also have an ocean moderated climate that is even milder than Tokyo’s. Anecdotally, tons of people complained that they didn’t have gas heating, i.e., they had resistive electric heating and preferred gas. Statistically heat pumps had less than 10% adoption as of 2020. Nationwide in Japan, 90% of households have heat pump HVAC, and considering that gas kerosene is still pretty popular up north and in the mountains, I wouldn’t be surprised if heat pumps had 99%+ adoption in warm Japan.
That said, looking at per state statistics, heat pumps do generally seem more common in warmer states, with California being the notable exception. Though even in states with “high” heat pump adoption, it’s still under 50%. I can believe some states are just so warm that that percentage is low because people don’t want heat at all, but absolutely no state gets over even 50% adoption.
@Sassy
Isn’t that simply air-con? All air-con use heat-pumps just like all refrigerators use heat pumps. What I don’t know is whether the more modern “reverse-cycle” air-con units use heat pumps for their heating function, or simply have resistive heating elements somewhere in the circuit?
Anyway those things aren’t providing hot water to the house. It is not clear to me how much heat pumps are used to provide all the heating and cooling in Japanese houses, ie. including water heating as well as space heating. To state that x% of houses have heat pumps is uninformative. For example in subtropical Australia probably 90% of houses have Air-Con (ie. heat pump) but almost none have it providing hot-water which remains electric or gas, occasionally roof-top solar (thermal) units.
The statistics from both Japan and the US are for heat pumps used for air heating and cooling.
For cooling only air cons, the US adoption rate was 88% nationwide as of 2020, which makes the lack of air cons capable of reverse cycle for heating in the US even more puzzling than their lack in Europe where even cooling only air cons are rare luxuries.
The extremely low install base of cooling only air cons in Europe is an opportunity though. Instead of going the US route and installing cooling only air cons even in climates where heating is necessary in winter, Europe should go the Japan route and install air cons capable of both heating and cooling.
Also, resistive heating in air cons is a fancy upscale feature, used as a fall back when the requested temperature differential is too large. Non-fancy air cons run the cooling cycle in reverse for heating.
@Sassy
So not for water heating. This is the same situation as Australia where most houses have rev-cycle air-con units but still use electric or gas water heating (at one point about 2 decades ago, roof-top solar hot water was mandated for new-build houses but the developer lobby, and maybe plumber’s lobby, got it removed!).
Here, there is a lot of talk about going over to heat-pumps for everything but not clear if there is a single unit that can do both air-con and water heating. The state of Victoria has just outlawed gas in new-build houses. A lot of talk about heat-pump systems for water heating being very expensive though it’s not clear why it should be any more than a small air-con unit; though electric or gas water heaters are quite cheap so the comparison is a tough sell (because most people will still grumble despite the quick payback of cost of heat-pump via no more gas bills which have shot thru the roof since Ukraine despite us being the #2 LNG exporter! Developers will fight it all the way because they never want to spend an extra dollar on building a house even if the buyer ends up spending a lot more in retrofitting.)
Are you really sure rev-air-con works properly in very cold climates for space heating? I would think it would be a tough job, plus it would probably take an age to warm a house up (especially the way Americans like it, often hotter than the temperature they’d use air-con to cool it down in summer!).
It’s reversible heat pumps because most people have air conditioning or one sort or another.
Click to access State%20Air%20Conditioning.pdf
Almost all of the central units have backup resistive heating. For when the complicated heat pump goes kerfleuy when it’s freezing outside. Or it’s below the design temperature outside and the resistive heat is more efficient.
@michaelj
So would you agree that it’s puzzling that air cons in the US rarely have the ability to reverse the cooling cycle for heat, even in warm cities like San Francisco or Los Angeles?
I don’t have data on water heaters. Anecdotally heat pump water heaters seem common in Japan, though not almost universal like heating and cooling capable air cons, and almost non-existent in the US and Germany (though my experience in Germany predates recent actions by Russia so that might have changed a lot).
As for cold climates, older heat pumps struggled, but it seems like newer heat pumps are fine even in quite cold climates. And even though more of the US and Europe get cold compared to Japan, tons of cities there don’t. Winters in Paris and London are a tad warmer than winters in Tokyo, and winters in Frankfurt and Berlin aren’t that much colder.
In a more sane world, almost all of the US should already have heat pump heating and cooling, like in Japan. And considering many parts of Europe have experienced dangerous heat waves in the past decade, most of Europe should have had heat pump heating and cooling installed as well.
@Sassy
Nothing, or everything, is puzzling about Americans’ relationship to energy and efficiency. They routinely overcool and overheat to the point of discomfort. SF and LA are the parts of the US most like Australia’s east coast, and they would hardly have the need for space heating for the same reason: no serious winter. Those places with serious winter need more than heat-pump power, as adirondacker reported: resistive heating.
And, despite their perceptions and the Hollywood myths, America and Americans are backward. Right up until the Millennium most apartments in most American cities it was like stepping back several decades, sometimes right back to the 50s, a veritable timewarp. Clunky, chunky kitchen appliances, telephones, even tvs, furniture. Cars. That’s why they advertise (or used to) “European” kitchens and European-style cars (which the Japanese & Koreans make, not Americans of course).
Some of these things are results of market forces, sometimes unintended. Here, at the turn of the millennium rev-cycle-air-con was more expensive than without it but today I am not sure you can buy anything else. Like in most of (northern) Europe, double or triple glazed windows became the norm and now if you try to buy single-glazing it will actually be more expensive (special order etc). Like most in Brisbane (subtropical, almost no winter) I have rev-cycle air-con but have never in 15 years used it. Not once.
Those heat waves in (northern) Europe are short-lived. When I lived in Paris, there were occasional hot & sticky nights but not sure it would have justified installing air-con. In Haussmannian blocks it is not so easy. You won’t find units hanging over the street (strictly outlawed and actually any ornamental overhang was outlawed in the 18th century due to things falling off and killing pedestrians). Even for those on the courtyard I suspect regulations make it difficult and perhaps with good reason; who wants that racket? Probably need to use courettes. No blade-runner scenarios for Paris!
Maybe cooling will be a service you buy from the city. An extended version of:
I’ve never seen single glazed windows in the US unless the house was built before 1970. My local home center has several aisles of windows and none are single glazed. Even in before then, storm windows which function closer to double glazed (not as good, but closer) were common for several decades.
Heat pumps never caught on because gas is cheap, heat pumps more expensive, and heat pumps can’t work on the coldest days so you have to have the gas backup anyway. Electric restive heating works, but you would pay off the difference between that and a gas furnace in 2 months of winter. Meanwhile it is several years of a heat pump before you save enough to make the additional costs worth it. All of the above factors have changed, but people are only starting to catch on, and it generally isn’t worth replacing a working system unless it is very old.
Having used both the “Clunky, chunky kitchen appliances” and the European ones, in many cases I’ll take the American ones. Sure they don’t look as nice, but in the 1950s things were built to be used not look nice. In most cases the difference is strictly cosmetic, and thus better is purely subjective. In others the difference is about how cooking in the US vs Europe differs, and so the difference is functional but you cannot say one is better without the wider context.
In most cases the difference is strictly cosmetic,
Physics is a cruel mistress and burning gas or running electricity through a resistance is going to work the same way – have the same efficiency – all over the world.
Natural gas is cheap in North America, using that instead of electricity is the cheaper option.
@michaelj It seems heat pumps can work from -10 to -30 C depending on the specific type installed:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/heat-pump-faq-1.6824634
It does note that a backup heat source is needed where temperatures go below -30 C but that basically means heat pumps are viable for the majority of the year for the majority of the Canadian population. If it mostly works for Canada then it should work for the warmer US climate.
@Sarapen If there is even one day – even once in 100 years – where heat pumps cannot heat your house, then heat pumps don’t work. You can’t even ride out one hour of too cold for heat pumps (as when it warms up enough for them to work they are so inefficient that they can’t catch back up even though they are putting out heat). This means heat pumps don’t work in most of Canada, and large parts of the US as well.
Now heat pumps still can make sense – most of the US and Canada has air conditioning as standard. A heat pump shouldn’t (but does!) cost more than a cooling only air conditioner. However you still need the other heat source for those really cold day. Once you accept that the most economical option is a heat pump that is sized for cooling the house and is unable to supply enough heat at around -10C, just use the backup for those cold days. It will work on the majority of days, but not every day.
They cost more than straight air conditioning because they are much more complicated. If it’s sized for the cooling load it’s too small for the heating load most of the time in most places. Making it work most of the time for heating gets very very complicated and expensive.
[quote]the cost of modern (heat pump) air and water heating must be so absurdly cheap, that something must be wildly dysfunctional in Europe and North America for them to not be common already.[/quote]
Honestly, at least in the US, it’s a combination of a huge amount of cultural inertia–often expressed as NIMBYish objection to the aesthetics of having the compressor units visible on the facades–plus that the Anglosphere just simply doesn’t build housing any more (Tokyo’s 2012 housing starts were like 4x New York’s, or nearly equal to all of England) so there’s far less opportunity for newer technologies to filter their way into common use.
There are definitely indoor air quality issues with gas stoves which is why I replaced mine.
That said the main issue with gas stoves is that at this point it doesn’t make sense to put on in new. Obviously once you replace your boiler with a heat pump which we will all do over the next 15-20 years then you may as well switch off your whole gas connection.
Far better when remodelling to put in induction rather than gas. Perhaps for the poor you’d use ceramic or electric plates instead as you can use cheaper saucepans with them.
And yeah in the unlikely event your existing gas hob breaks you are in a bit of trouble, but either you see if an induction hob will fit in the space or you get a second hand gas hob replacement.
Having the gas connection at all costs like £100/year, and as people move away from gas that price will only go up. There’s no way people will have gas pumped to their homes en-mass just for a gas hob. It makes no financial sense.
You have gas at all because heat on the coldest days when heat pumps don’t work is so expensive. In the northern US you will pay for the entire cost of gas hookup and a gas furnace in just a couple months of winter. The cost for the hob and water heater to also be gas is minimal once you are already hooked up, many people with gas stoves and water heaters don’t use their minimum gas charge in summer (of course if heat pumps could replace the gas furnace completely it would be worth getting rid of gas, but that isn’t likely in the northern us). In fact I know a lot of people who have a gas furnace/water heater but an electric stove – cooks have long debated which is better. Gas water heaters are generally better because of recovery rate – a large family doing their morning routine with an electric water heater will run out of hot water (on demand electric water heaters exist and can keep up – but they use more power than many houses have total, the other option is buy a larger tank)
Of course if you live in California instead of the Northern US gas only makes sense because/if your electric is not reliable. (CA has been in the news for rolling blackouts). Otherwise you don’t need enough backup heat to make the gas hookup costs worth it.
The blower on the furnace doesn’t work without electricity. There are solutions for that but most people don’t use them.
You keep typing these words. Typing them doesn’t make them true. (But whatabout Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station? Whatabout!)
Just stop; you’re making yourself sound like a fossil fuel lobbyist, and nobody wants to be an unpaid socipath, right?
The way German conservatives have decided that heat pumps, a.k.a. air conditioning, are bad for living standards, is pretty insane. The way Germany of 2030 shapes to be, about the only people who have any air conditioning in the summer will be Green voters, and we’ll still have way lower carbon footprint than the sweating SUV drivers.
@Richard
I was under the impression that in the context of the internet, the term for “unpaid sociopath” is “troll” and that many do find it fun.
@Alon
linksrechtsWhere can I read more about this clusterf?@ Richard Mlynarik
People keep saying the heat pumps work in all temperatures, but the coldest I’ve seen on claim to work is -22F (-30C), and most give up much warmer than that. I’ve personally seen -25F (-32C) where I live. Even when they work that cold, efficient is about temperature differential and so they are not very efficient when it is that cold. This is a real problem and trying to say otherwise is not going to make heat pumps work better, instead it gives them a bad reputation among people who listen to the likes of you and have their pipes freeze. If you are honest about the limits though, there are many days that are not nearly that extrema where they are much cheaper and so worth installing along with a gas furnace that you only use a little bit.
Now maybe you live where it doesn’t get that cold and so you gave the right message for your climate. However where I live in North America the reality is heat pumps alone are not enough. There are several million more people who like me live in a part of North America where heat pumps alone are not enough.
To Richard’s point, it’s just about the temperature differential. If you live somewhere that temperatures are reasonably expected to drop to a low-efficiency range for an air-exchange heat pump, you install a ground-exchange one instead. It’s about twice as expensive, but getting rid of gas will still save over the long run, and comes with the added bonus of not having your house explode[1].
[1] (https://www.pennlive.com/news/2023/08/new-details-emerge-in-pa-house-explosion-investigation-dep.html)
Assuming your heating system will work with a heat pump. Many of they won’t because the design temperatures are radically different.
@Eric2
Buried in the fine print of all the articles about gas stoves and air quality is that properly ventilated stoves pose no risk. That is an argument for regulating ventilation when installed not banning installation.
@Sassy
The issue with heat pumps is that in colder winters (NE US and much of Europe) they are less efficient (not a lot of heat outside to pump in) and have a perceived comfort gap (the air doesn’t come out “hot” so while it keeps a reasonable temperature over time it doesn’t feel toasty and takes a while to warm a cold house).
Heat pumps and electric water heaters are not absurdly cheap, they tend to be in line with combustion equipment costs for installation but win out over time on fuel costs. They’re not common because they are newer and there is enormous legacy infrastructure in place.
We have all been running our boilers in “heat pump” mode all winter as it uses less gas to do so because of the war in Ukraine. I don’t believe it has caused widespread issues.
Not all the world is the same climate. What works for you may not work at all for someone else. There is no one size fits all. Some years ago I looked into a passive house that was in the headlines and realized the insulation of that passive house wouldn’t even meet the minimum insulation codes where I lived.
“An electric car pollutes no more or no less than an electric train”
Some time ago, fellow commenter Sassy posted on Reddit a fairly comprehensive analysis of energy consumption by transit mode:
– a Tesla Model 3 occupied by 1.5 people uses 0.37 MJ/passenger-km
– the real-world network average for Nederlandse Spoorwegen in 2019 was 0.24 MJ/passenger-km
– the real-world network average for JR East in FY2016 was 0.10 MJ/passenger-km
If pollution can be quantified as CO2 emissions per MJ, then an electric car under typical use conditions pollutes significantly more than electric trains running off the same grid.
I’m assuming that’s just from the inefficiency of a large low-occupancy vehicle lugging heavy batteries around vs. drawing from line power. Factor in the impact of battery production (mining rare-earths) and things are probably looking even worse for the Tesla…
Most of it would be aerodynamics and tires. Steel wheels are more efficient than rubber tires. Trains have terrible aerodynamics in general, but that loss is divided by all the people on board. Trains also get priority at signals and so they can have a good average trip time while keeping their actual speed down which helps reduce aerodynamic losses. A train with one person on board has terrible per passenger efficiency, but trains tend to run with a lot of people on board most of the time so they work out much better.
Batteries are heavy, but so are train cars.
@Henry Miller
It is not aerodynamics and tired because Japanese trains are subject to the same laws of physics as Dutch trains yet the difference between Japanese and Dutch MJ/pax-km is greater than from Dutch trains to the Tesla.
@JohnD
“If pollution can be quantified as CO2 emissions per MJ”
It cannot, because different sources of generation produce CO2 differently. A Tesla with one passenger in Norway produces less CO2 than the most crowded train in Germany because Norway’s power comes almost entirely from hydro while Germany has been closing nuclear and replacing it with coal. THAT conversation should be the environmental conversation, not shaming people not to fly.
Also, the original context was about tourism. The good Dutch and Japanese figures come from heavy use. Trains to the Black Forest for holiday won’t be as full as the Shinkansen. There comes a point where a very heavy but lightly loaded train car is less energy efficient than a car, even if they both get electricity from the same source.
Your point on different electricity sources is well taken, which is why I specified “running off the same grid”. A train in Japan pollutes less than an electric car in Japan.
The point on utilisation, not so much, because those are network-wide averages that include some decidedly underutilised lines.
A train running around the Black Forest for vacationers may underperform those same people driving, but after you add in the train that took them there, it might not.
I’m sure the lightly loaded bus that took me to some hiking trail in Yamanashi was underperforming an electric car, and probably barely break even vs an internal combustion car. However, I’m also sure the entire trip from Tokyo, which included a very well utilized train, was better by transit than by car.
1. Car rentals at train stations in rural destinations are probably more eco-friendly than people give them credit for. As you noted, public transit for every segment of the trip probably isn’t the best in terms of emissions.
2. Maybe the real eco-tourism is fully touristifying a mountain and making sure 99% of people go there instead of the other mountains. The train to Takao-san is very well utilized, and after hiking to the top of Takao-san, you can sip on a beer while appreciating the unblemished natural beauty of all the mountains in the distance that aren’t selling beer, noodles, and ice cream at the summit.