• rumschlumpel@feddit.org
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      1 month ago

      Seems to check out compared to the average bus ride, though. And long distance busses are popular in a lot of countries (including Britain), because they’re often much cheaper than long distance trains.

      • skisnow@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        That was my first reaction but then I thought about it a bit longer and realized that it’s not reasonable to compare a local bus ride that stops and starts every other junction, with a transatlantic flight.

        The long distance buses are listed there at 27g, which is a shade over 1/10th of a domestic flight.

        • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
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          1 month ago

          Huh, you’re right. I was looking at “Bus (average)”, thinking the regular local bus was represented by “Bus (local London)”.

    • Soggy@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10311

      https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability-indicators/carbon-footprint-factsheet

      I suspect “domestic flights” in the UK are pretty different than the US (a brief search indicates the average flight is around 4 times longer in the US, and planes are far more efficient during the middle of their flight compared to the ends, but average passengers per flight is a little harder to find for both countries to properly figure that out)

      • gewindestift@feddit.org
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        1 month ago

        Thank you for the reply. “Your” numbers are not in fuel/mile/person but in energy/mile/person. So an electric train is much better carbon emission wise than it suggests. I was aware that flights and ICE cars are equal-ish per distance, but the takeaway from this should be to not fly or ICE-drive long distances and not that flying is ok.

        Flying is really bad and billionaires as well as common people alike should not be allowed to do it. I do not understand why we still have to discuss this.

        • Soggy@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          The first one is measuring BTUs and converting but the UMich information is straight carbon emissions per passenger mile and planes are only ~30% worse than commuter rail in the US by that metric. It’s really not the apocalypse you’re making it out to be.

          • gewindestift@feddit.org
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            30 days ago

            Sorry i didn’t read carefully enough. Thanks for pointing that out. So there’s a huge difference between the UK “national rail” and the US “commuter rail” in carbon emission (35g vs 214g per km, which is not so great again*). I guess this is because the US rail is much less electrified and runs mostly on diesel. Also a national rail train will stop less (and have to accelerate again) than a commuter train.

            As i mentioned in another post in this thread a round trip transatlantic flight is almost a full year of what one person can emit (if we share it equally) to limit the warning to 1.5°C.

            What breaking this limit means is easy accessible information. (No its not the apocalypse but is is shit)

            *sorry couldn’t resist