UKC

Should the plane icon be changed on the destinations forum?

No, I think we should stick with the plane and just remove the snow caps from the Alpine icon.

Perhaps just put a cross through the logo.

the beer glass and armchair have turned me into a fat bastard. they ought to be banned.

... and the Starting Out icon makes me want to go for a wee.

It could be changed to a hot-air balloon but the so could 'the pub' symbol.

And the rocktalk icon is a bit elitist; its overhanging, for Gods sake. 

🚆

And the "Walls and Training" icon is a bit Picasso

Someone should really oil the gate on the Gear krab.

Not sure how two pigeons are relevant to Hilltalk.

I can't 'unsee' that

Yep. I keep seeing an artist's palette.

Currently, on the Lausanne / Paris tgv after attending a climate change conference. The evidence for human made rapid global heating is overwhelming. The task in front of humanity is overwhelming. I am fully aware of the hypocrisy and paradoxes of all our actions. However, we have to start to change things. I am really trying to change my flying and eating habits. Not easy! 

I think it would be good if the climbing community started to focus on how people got to their climbing. For example, sailing, using public transport only. Maybe we need to start thinking about the quality of our journeys and climbing, not just the quantity of peaks climbed. 

I know I can be shot down with the usual arguments but we have got to start somewhere.

Yes, change the plane icon to a ...train? 

I bet you're on expenses though; and that the conference is part of your occupation and not squeezed into precious leave time off work as is the case for most climbing trips.  I am fascinated to read how electric planes are developing though apparently there is a size barrier.

To be fair, he/she did mention "really trying to change my flying and eating habits". You seem to imply that air travel is only being avoided on this one occasion, due to being on the job, on expenses, etc. I didn't see any basis for that in the post.

FWIW my partner and I are resolved not to take any more flights for climbing trips. It was a tough decision to come to, as we have been enjoying a climbing trip abroad at least once a year, and the convenience and time-saving of going by plane is undeniable; however, given the current situation it's a compromise we feel bound to make.

One effect I'm hoping for, apart from reducing my own impact on the environment, is to inspire others to consider similar lifestyle changes; what I'm hoping for as little as possible of is people trying to construe it as easier for me than for them, in a transparent attempt to justify making no changes at all. 

Ha! I hopefully will get some expenses. I am 'chaperoning' a group of Scottish kids on the Fridays for Future School Climate Strike European Conference. About 500 idealistic, passionate and well informed young people from as far afield as Russia, Lebanon and Portugal and all points in between. Greta was there! It is squeezed into my holiday but I did manage to climb Dents du Midi above Champery midweek...so some good climbing done.

I do hope they make electric planes although the train journey is quite pleasant, less stressful and more fun. 

I’m surprised we haven’t managed to organise taxiing such that most of that is done by electric means.

Perhaps I have a naughty imagination, but I actually see this:

https://bit.ly/2OKnhIL

At least the ice climbing icon little polar bear face is close on topic

Electric plane to be introduced in the orkneys between Papa-Westray and Westray in 2022.

I'm sure the VAG group would be happy for us to replace it with the winged arrow.

Excellent. I once flew around Antarctica with the pilot who had the world record for the shortest commercial flight from Westray to Papa Westray - about 90 seconds with a gale behind him 

The problem with electric planes (and cars for that matter) is how is the electricity generated? At the moment, most likely by burning fossil fuels. Are there any figures available to compare emissions from burning gas to create electricity for an electric vehicle, versus burning gas to directly fuel the vehicle? I guess it's not that simple as you also have to factor in production of the battery etc.

Fossil fuel burning engines used in vehicles such as cars and planes are constrained by the need to be lightweight and to operate very flexibly, that is to be started up and shutdown at short notice, and to work well under a variety of loads and speeds.  Efficiency is a secondary consideration.

Large fossil fuel burning electricity generating plants, on the other hand, are generally designed to be efficient.

Finding good comparative figures isn’t easy, but typically a petrol (car engine) is about 20% efficient.  A jet engine is about 30%.  A coal burning electricity generating unit is about 37% (but they are pretty much gone in the UK).  A combined cycle gas turbine generating unit is more like 50%

Hence, the power for electric vehicles is produced at a greater efficiency, so should be greener than burning fossil fuels within mobile engines.  I think it’s also worth pointing out that the proportion of our electricity that comes from solar and wind generation is now quite substantial and growing all the time, so the assertion that energy for electrical vehicles probably comes from burning fossil fuels is a bit shaky.

Thanks for that. Regarding your last bit - yes, solar and wind is increasing. But if we switch to electric cars and planes, the requirements for electricity will increase hugely. Can non-nuclear carbon-free source cope? Is there a risk of a shortage of the elements needed for batteries?

Can non-nuclear carbon-free source cope? - yes

Can future generation cope with the legacy of nuclear power - doubtful

Can the current generation cope with the nuclear levy? - doubtful

Which legacy of nuclear power? If you mean waste, then you ought to bring yourself up to date with the current generation of plants.

I do think that this would actually be a small good thing.

I haven't entirely given up flying and I won't give people a hard time if they've thought seriously about whether they can justify it for any given trip, but it'd be a positive step if we could start to get away from the current situation where a lot of people seem to see hopping on a cheap flight as a basic necessity or as a consequence-free thing that they do by default without even considering the alternatives.

Still seems a little demanding.  What about those of us who have never owned a car, cycle or use public transport exclusively, are largely vegetarian, with no kids and who subscribe to green energy suppliers....but won't think twice about a flight a few times a year?  

The focus on air travel seems a bit ott.  Its as if you can keep on with everyday wasteful practices, or work for companies with dubious ethics or environmental impact, and pretty much pass under the radar.  But choose to fly and its as if an environmental crime has taken place.   It does feel as if people are claiming a lot of virtue in forgoing things they have grown bored of anyway, whereas actual painful change is maybe less likely to be undertaken.

Yeh, right!

The problem with flying is that it's a lot of CO2 very quickly. A return from Leeds to Alicante is 0.7 tonnes CO2 according to the calculator I just used. A 2015 ford focus seems to put out ~110g/km CO2 on average. So that flight to Alicante is equivalent to 6,363 kilometres driving.

If I take my personal situation of getting my family of 4 to Bavaria to visit my wife's relations and get a bit of mountain time in:- return flight from Guernsey to MUC via LGW is 2.5 tonnes CO2. I drive a 1.3litre petrol minivan which also puts out 110grm CO2/km. So my family trip is equivalent to me doing 22thousand kilometres, or about 3-4 years' worth of driving.  Nipping to the Dolomites for a long weekend of VF instead of doing Snowdonia or the Peak as promogulated in Trail magazine has a massive CO2 cost.

Putting a 5.25Kw PV system on my roof would save 1.8tonnes CO2 per year and cost me thousands of pounds. It's cheaper not to fly so often to seriously reduce my carbon footprint.

The plane still went to Alicante......😀

They produce less waste per kWh? How? 

Not if enough flyers choose not to fly in it.

Simplistic, like comparing the fuel CO2 for a trip to Alicante and ignoring the CO2 cost of the motorway there.

It might be simplistic, but it's fundamentally the case that as a civilisation we need far fewer planes in the air if we don't want to watch the world literally burning in front of our eyes, and individuals choosing to fly less is one thing that might actually be a step towards to achieving that.

What if you just don't go to Alicante?

I've never flown to Alicante, I sailed there.

From Munich?

From wherever, to wherever, sailing, I'm guessing, isn't an option at current volumes of travel, let alone current lifestyles, and I speak as someone who flew to SE Asia earlier this year.

I just don't know what the embodied carbon is of a mile of motorway, or, when you include it over its lifetime, plus those of the cars and all the other paraphernalia of driving, what the carbon cost is per passenger mile of driving, and how that compares to the equivalent cost for flying, to a destination of your choice. How the total emissions due to each mode of transport is influenced by the building of the infrastructure in the first place I also don't know. Perhaps you do?

From Swanage

I doubt the promoters of changing the plane symbol have any idea either.

Maybe not, but at least the idea led to a constructive discussion. It's very difficult to know these sorts of things for certain; fortunately, where the balance of probability seems clear, we can still make resolutions and act on them. Of course, critical consideration of "truths" is a good thing, but perhaps we need to be careful not to slip into the "no-one really knows" line of thought too readily; there are just too many people out there who will jump at any excuse not to reconsider their lifestyles.

Alternatively one could spend ten minutes on the bog thinking then a bit of time with a search machine looking at the mass of data BEFORE coming out with trite bollocks which alienates any normal thinking person. To get a message over it should be credible.

... I thought we were discussing air travel. Established beyond all reasonable doubt as one of the worst things we can do. The message is well and truly across already ..... or should be. There's hardly any need to add some amateurish attempts to analyse a few bits of data for "a bit of time" before posting on a climbing forum, unless the actual object is to cloud the issue .... presumably by your "normal thinking person", sitting there demanding more and more proofs but never satisfied, yet all too eager to feel "alienated". It's very simple: we all need to travel by air as little as we can possibly manage; ideally not at all. 

Actually if you're talking about the very worst thing we can do to the planet right now then by some considerably huge margin then it's having kids.  I'm not saying you shouldn't by the way, just that if we really want to get a grip on climate change then globally it's the elephant in the room that very few dare to talk about.  Cutting out a flight or two might make you feel more virtuous but in reality it will make almost zero difference until we get a grip on this:

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Latest on CO2 for human transport:-  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49349566

I said one of the worst, not the worst. 

Cutting out a flight or two might make you feel more virtuous but in reality it will make almost zero difference until we get a grip on this:

You're using exaggerated rhetoric to play down the environmental impact of air travel, which is decidedly unhelpful. By your argument, it's not worth considering any lifestyle adjustments whatever unless the population problem is completely solved first. Sounds to me like a massive, catch-all excuse to do nothing at all! By all means decide not to have children, but also don't fly: the two aren't mutually exclusive! You could go vegan, too (assuming you aren't already).

Well, at the weekend we ( family of 4) are heading to Slovenia via train, as trying to reduce our carbon footprint. It does mean less time at the end destination which is a but of a negative, but now the actual travelling is part of the holiday rather than a means to get to the holiday.

Not really, just saying that if the environment is our concern then why not put our energy into tackling the low hanging fruit first rather than wasting a disproportionate amount of time on the smaller issues - like debating a plane icon on an internet forum? 

Whilst we on here have the luxury to debate whether a plane icon is good or not, or whether to have the chicken or tofu burger for lunch, much of the developing world lacks access to even basic contraception.  Education in many places is so poor that family planning is not even a consideration.

The huge ongoing increase in world population means that whether or not we all become vegan, or whether on not those of us rich enough to fly take the train instead for our family holiday, the environment is still likely doomed in any case unless we do something drastic to address by far the biggest issue of all which is global population growth.

Quite so, bpm climbs original post was about as trite and pathetic as it gets, change the travel symbol on a middle-class British climbing website to save the planet. Then to question the thinking and logic (and knowledge) in subsequent posts leads to about the most wothless argument going.

"Every little bit helps" is just living in a dreamworld, I've changed my lightbulbs twice and f-all happened.

Climate change isn't going to be stopped even if people walk to Slovenia, more drastic and unpalatable measures are needed AND a certain mental adjustment for everyone, life will be shit, we are going back to the 18C OR we need a technological miracle.

I'm doing it because as a Catholic I was brought up with a healthy guilt complex so yes I think the world as we know it is fu*ked, and this is just a token gesture to ease my guilt and make it easier to face my children.

The original post was intended somewhat lightheartedly, believe it or not. It was only after certain posts, yours in particular, that the debate got rather more serious. 

 It was only after certain posts, yours in particular, that the debate got rather more serious. 

Am I the new Greta?

If you are still interested, these type of questions are often addressed by "Life cycle assessments" (LCA), and look at the whole of the process, from creation of product (and production processes etc) to grave. They are dependent on location too, eg in this example aus produces more electricity from coal, but France produces a lot from Nuclear.

They also look at more than just CO2 emissions, which, as a single indicator, is a pointless metric. 

Here is one from Belgium, though a little out of date https://www.mdpi.com/2032-6653/3/3/469

And a more recent one from Italy https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-015-0903-x

and Australia https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261917312539

The reality is that folk in the UK having fewer kids will make almost zero difference to world population growth. The best thing we could do would be to unleash the four horsemen on the world, but I doubt that would get through parliament at the moment... 

We travelled to Barcelona by train from Manchester last year, so much nicer than flying. We very much made the travelling part of the trip, overnighting in London and Paris along the way.

Actually, isn't it you who is indulging that luxury without actually doing anything - as far as we know from this thread, anyway? As I said, myself and my partner have resolved not to take any more flights for holidays, and are carrying out that plan. I must confess to being late to that particular party; however, I have been 100% dietary vegan for thirty years. I found back then, and still do, the cumulative force of all the arguments for it compelling; foremost among them being the land use conversion factor and its implications for energy use, deforestation, desertification, water shortages, famine, I could go on. Being a long-term and committed vegan is not nothing: of course, one person doing it has little overall effect, but then, one person choosing not to have children has very little overall effect either. But your hypothetical case of all of us becoming vegan ... the world would be changed dramatically, immeasurably. I have to say that I find your attitude to it, your glib dismissiveness, your use of tired old cliches about tofu burgers, careless and bigoted.

You dismiss everything that's not directly connected with tackling the specific problem of population as pointless. I'd like to know how many people think that's a logical, balanced, impartial assessment?

Out of interest, where would you stand on eating meat in limited quantities and sourced in a way that is about as close to a natural, hunter-gatherer, carnivorous diet as possible?  I'm of the view that done this way, the real issue reverts largely to the insane human population size (I find it bizarre that the world's population of chimps, orangs and gorillas - our nearest relatives - number just a few hundred thousand while we think it natural that we should soon number 8 billion.

It's a worry. Soon there won't even be enough Iphones to go around. I give it another 2 years and we'll be digging up landfill sites looking for old Nokia 3310s.

OK Greta...after a conversation last night I've learnt that your transatlantic crossing was done on the old Gitana 16. Given there's lots of alloy/steel/wooden hulls which could have done the crossing, how come you chose a carbon fibre one. Energy intensive to manufacture and pretty much unrecyclable; unless you use more energy and chemicals.  And there's the diesel engine for manoeuvring in and out of berth and harbour.

That's not fair, I used a boat that was built for a completely worthless objective, is un- recycleable, a lifespan of maybe 10 years and has a manufacturing footprint of around 300 tons of CO2 to send a message to the world that by sailing we can save the planet. If I'd gone on one of those stinking vile container ships and only used 1.05kg CO2 to cross the Atlantic what message would it send to my acolytes? It doesn't even look heroic

Because it is totally pointless if the population increases at the rate it has been.

If your house was gradually being flooded by a leaking pipe in the bathroom would you waste time by running round your house trying to find buckets and small containers, towels etc to hold or mop up all the water coming out of the pipe?  Or would you go directly to the source of the problem and turn off the water at the mains?

Mmmmm....

Striking pose on stinking vile container ship.

Striking pose on multi million pound sleek carbon fibre single purpose toy.

Remind me which one is the photo opportunity.

How has the total GHG CO2e emission per capita changed over the last several decades?

As a global average per capita it has increased.  Obviously big differences between countries but as this is a global problem the global average CO2 emissions today per person are around 5 tonnes per capita.  In the UK we are now at around 6.5 tonnes per person so just above average.  Back in the 1970's with peak coal being burned for power then we were up at around 11.9 tonnes per person so we are currently doing reasonably well here in the UK to reduce our CO2 emissions.  That said there is more that can be done as you have stated (e.g. reducing flights and meat consumption etc).

So current annual emissions from the UK as a whole are around 435 million tonnes.  Even if we managed to halve this in the next 10 years (an ambitions target) to say around 217.5 million tonnes then world population growth during this same 10 year period (based on current rates) would mean an increase of 820 million people.  That's over 12 times the current UK population!  If we use the world average CO2 emissions for these new people then that's an extra 4,100 million tonnes of CO2 per year regardless of what we save here in the UK. 

In any case it's not just CO2 or greenhouse gasses that are big issues.  If there were just a couple of billion people on the planet then I dare say we could get away with emitting as much CO2 per capita as we liked without much consequence.  Population growth however is decimating our forests (for agriculture, timber and housing).  Population growth is encroaching on key habitats for wildlife.  Population growth is emptying our oceans at an alarming rate.  It is also quickly using up what natural resources we have left.

So reducing our own individual carbon footprint is of course by itself a good thing.  But if by doing this it makes us feel good/smug about ourselves that we have done our bit, that we don't need to do any more, that we are somehow better than the rest, then perhaps it's a dangerous distraction almost?  As you can see from the stats above, cutting our own CO2 is not really the priority if we want to save the planet - it will not solve the problem.  Saving the planet can only be achieved once we have got a solid grip of the world's population problem first and foremost.  Anything else right now is simply tinkering around the edges.

And I still completely disagree. How much the climate and ecosystems are impacted by humans is not just dependent on how many humans there are, but very much on how they live. I can't think of anything more obvious! You play down the effectiveness of certain lifestyle choices, in particular eating low on the food chain, to a ludicrous extent. Are you aware of how much more plant food than animal food, on average, can be produced from a given land area? The difference is huge.

By way of analogy, imagine a family living well beyond their means and running out of money. Is it a sensible, balanced strategy only to think about which family members to get rid of ... or simply give up and despair because you don't have an acceptable way to do that? Might one not also look at what the money is being spent on? It's not hard to imagine a large family spending less than a famiily of less that half the size by making suitable choices.

I support what you are doing 100% but in the face of a couple of extra billion people added to the world's population over the next 20 years or so I really fear it is like trying to bail out the Titanic with some teacups.  Not sure what the solution is but it needs to be big and it needs to be global.

It's simple, divide the acceptable amount of GHG by the global population and they can buy or sell or use as they wish. Supply and demand will set the price and the poor can fleece the jet setters.

Where I'd stand? Not sure I'd put it that way. Collectively, globally, we need as many people as possible eating as low on the food chain as possible, but what any one person considers possible for them will vary. For what it's worth, 100% vegan is what I went for a long time ago, and have long since found many ways to make it work for me. I like the simplicity of it: plants yes, animals no.

In general, the production of animal-based foods uses far more land area and resources than crops, and I don't think the sheer scale of that difference is as widely appreciated as it could be.