Ride you bike to Mexico City!
There is starting to be a push to biofuel for aviation.
Aviation is about 2% of total emissions and while biofuel doesnt reduce the emissions it does at least source a percentage of it from a renewable (mostly plants).
Newer planes are improving efficiency (which does cut emissions) but that is driven mostly by cost.
At the moment only a few airports (including LAX and Brisbane) have biofuel. And we do need to be careful about just assuming this can ramp up - dont want to deforest large areas to grow fuel.
As for ships - one answer would be to allow large ships to go nuclear. Lots of big risks but it might help. Heck - maybe a new nuclear ship could even be made to tow another ship. Travel carbon free for most of the journey, then the other ship uses its own engines to navigate in/out of port. Tossing ideas out there!
Cruise ships - I dont know. Yes its a waste in that they basically go in a circle (not all - but the vast majority its an out and back cruise). But as long as its costed properly, people should be able to spend their carbon how they want. Again they could start using a biofuel to reduce the issue.
It is probably close.. the plane might have it
just found something claiming 22 gallons per 1000 passenger miles, which equals about 45mpg.
Although it didnt claim where that number came from, it would change greatly depending on plane capacity, percentage full and length of flight (longer = more efficient)
Hmm - another google search had driving between Boston and San Fran producing about 3/4 the CO2 than a flight, a win for the car.
Basically they are fairly close. Probably more variables on the plane (esp capacity and percentage of seats used)
But the car numbers are for 1 person. Put 2 or more and you are definitely better. Certainly a bus with 20 people onboard would smash it.
There's always a benefit to using mass transit, which is why local governments push for it, so it makes sense that a plane with 200 people in it would be more efficient than 200 cars. Just manufacturing cost alone (both in $$$ and in enviro impact) to build 200 cars vs. just one airplane would kill it.
Imagine if nobody drove coast-to-coast and all freight was shipped by rail. There would be one airport in the east and one in the west and we wouldn't need to build highways, and that environmental saving would be massive!
-inb4
It's a huge hypothetical of course, and it wouldn't realistically happen.
Here's one factor to consider (if we're talking about F1 racing): if it wasn't for technological development over the last 50 years in motorsport like F1 and endurance racing, then road cars would be spewing out heaps more emissions than they have been. It's definitely a net positive gain to have F1 each year, because the overall savings are way more than the amount of carbon pollution than one 747 flight across the Pacific Ocean.
And this is a tricky one. Some small island nations rely heavily on tourist dollars from wealthy weterners to survive. I say keep the cruise ships coming for now, but seriously push for electric cruise ships as soon as its possible.And ocean-going cruise ships should just disappear. From the Earth. Forever. They're filthy fucking cesspools and a complete waste of time.
Which is now.
Boeing 777 can be filled with 47890 gallons of fuel and will be able to go 8690 nmi or 10000 miles with 365 people.
Now, assume all those folks drive a 25mpg cars for a distance of 10000 miles...
10000/25=400 gallons of fuel/car
400*365=146000 gallons of fuel total if they each drive a car.
If each car carries 3 people, amount of fuel burnt would be about the same.
If each car carries 4 or more, then 25 mpg cars are greener than 777. But it’d take 5.5 days straight non stop at 75 mph to cover 10000 miles!