How polluting is your flight? Bogus figures (update)
Did you know?
The carbon emitted per passenger [on a flight from London to Sydney] is equivalent to a mini driving around the world 640 times or the weight of four Indian elephants.
Or so says this interesting website that claims to show how much CO2 typical flights to various parts of the world pump into the air. The figures aren’t substantiated, and seem a little on the high side, so Carbon Planet’s CEO, Dr Ross Williams did the numbers.
So how much CO2 do you think a flight from London to Sydney costs? Over 11 tonnes per passenger according to this site. Ross’ instinct was to call ‘bogus’. See why.
Technorati Tags: airlines, aviation, carbon credits, CO2, debunking, emissions trading, hype, travel, UK
Here is Ross’s very rough reasoning.
This struck me as really sus. I had heard that an international flight was about two tonnes, and anyway, this figure struck me as nonsense from a common sense point of view because a 747 can only carry so much fuel, so I went off and calculated it myself on the back of an envelope as follows:
The fuel capacity of a 747 is 43,625 litres. (Ref: http://www.simviation.com/rinfo747.htm)
Seems the density of aviation fuel is about 1.2 kg/litre. (sorry lose the URL for that one).
Therefore we have 1.2 x 43,625 kg = 52,350kg = 52 tonnes.
Let’s assume it’s all Carbon. This means that it will turn into 3.66 (ratio of C to CO2) x 52 = 190 tonnes of CO2.
A 747 can carry about 416 passengers. So that’s about 190 tonnes / 416 which is 0.45 tonnes of CO2 per passenger for a full flight.
As it takes about two hops to get around the world, and as people usually take a return trip, a typical “long” flight emits about 2 tonnes.
Thanks Ross. There is a lot of rubbish being thrown around about climate change but the basic facts haven’t changed. We are heating our planet to death and carbon credits are one way to encourage use of newer, non-polluting technologies by dragging pollution into the overall economy. You can offset your flights, or your whole life by buying carbon credits. - DS
