[Tuxer]

Given the current emissions of air travel I find fairly repulsive to spend that much money designing a new airplane going completely in the wrong direction in terms of fuel efficiency. There is no way ( regardless of altitude, unless you’re going in LEO ) to avoid the huge drag losses of going supersonic, so most of that ticket price is going to go towards fuel.

If this ever flies and there is a kerosene carbon tax, that plane is dead.

[jws]

Recovering the externalities on jet fuel would only add about $0.19/gallon¹ with jet fuel going for >$4/gallon today, so say a 5% tax. I think they'd survive just fine. In fact, if I were them I'd voluntarily and ostentatiously pay that on every drop of fuel… supersonic and green.

Or without a carbon tax… 200 gallons of jet fuel makes 1 ton of CO2 and costs ~$800. Current state of the art in CO2 capture is $94/ton. For a self imposed 12% fuel surcharge they could be carbon neutral.

␄

¹ http://www.rff.org/blog/2017/calculating-various-fuel-prices...

[jonas21]

This doesn't change your argument too much, but FYI jet fuel is currently around $1.60/gal.

https://www.iata.org/publications/economics/fuel-monitor/Pag...

[jws]

I think we are looking at different ends of the market, I'm using a search of the retail price at airfields near me in the last 30 days. (My parameters don't get reflected in the URL, you will need to choose some to get results.)

I suspect at "airline" scale there is a large discount over the full service pump prices I'm seeing. This might change the percentages to 10% and 25%.

It's also possible I'm seeing the "putz price". That made up price that "no one really pays", unless you are that guy who doesn't know better and does.

https://www.airnav.com/fuel/local.html

[Tuxer]

Jet-A at airfields isn't a valid measure of how much airlines. I read that most airlines pay around 1.10$/gal for Jet-A.

[njarboe]

42 gallons in a barrel of oil. So the bottom price is going to be about (oil price)/42. Lots of complications in converting a random quality oil into jet fuel at an airport, but at scale you might add 10% to 20%. With current oil prices this does work out to around your $1.10/gal price.

[xfitm3]

A lot of major airlines engage in fuel hedging. who knows exactly how much they’re paying.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_hedging

[larkeith]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the concerns regarding supersonic flight the increased impact of higher-altitude emissions?

It probably wouldn't significantly alter the cost of carbon neutrality, but something to bear in mind.

[skyfaller]

It feels like you're missing the point, which is that our current level of air travel is unsustainable (just like the rest of our way of life in the USA). Any increase in fuel consumption is unforgivable, no matter how small.

Current carbon tax schemes are laughable and will not be sufficient to prevent disastrous climate change. The carbon tax calculator in the article you linked only goes up to $50/ton, while the IPCC report calls for carbon prices as high as $14,300/ton by 2050. Obviously prices that high would mean a de facto ban on carbon. And that's what we need to avert disaster.

[chris_va]

(I work in a climate R&D group)

Just wanted to weigh in here a bit...

You are correct that increased emissions are definitely bad, but you may have missed how a carbon tax scheme would work in practice.

From a climate perspective, there is not much difference between being zero carbon versus carbon neutral. In other words, adding 1kg of CO2 in one place, and removing it elsewhere is effectively the same as being zero carbon.

So, while a carbon tax does create an economic incentive to avoid emitting carbon, what it really creates is a market to offset carbon. No one would pay a $10,000/ton tax when they can pay someone else $100/ton to offset the same amount of carbon from the air. The smooth ramp-up of any carbon tax allows offset price discovery without significant disruption.

Anyway, net result of a carbon tax would make having a plane be effectively carbon free, and current air travel would thus not be unsustainable.

In the airplane case, what would likely happen is that biofuels, which are inherently carbon neutral, would come to dominate (easier to let plants capture carbon and then turn them into fuel than to sequester CO2 directly from the air). However, that is irrelevant from a consumer perspective, and we'll just see an x% increase in cost as the offset market price gets baked in.

[ethiclub]

Hi Chris,

Out of interest, may we ask - How do you reconcile your carbon emission research against other ecological considerations? Does your group use a preexisting model to map externalities / run simulations?

Many thanks (Apologies for taking the conversation out of scope slightly)

[Alex3917]

> No one would pay a $10,000/ton tax when they can pay someone else $100/ton to offset the same amount of carbon from the air.

That's cap-and-trade, not a carbon tax.

[Dylan16807]

Not really. There doesn't need to be a "cap". You can tax every single ton of net carbon.

Traditional cap-and-trade has a very valid criticism that it doesn't fix the problem, only limits it slightly and moves it around. If you add carbon-removers into the equation, and set things up to have 0 or even negative carbon per year, and then you actually do fix the problem.

[njarboe]

Any reason able carbon tax (not that politics are reasonable would pay (negative tax) people who remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and tax people the same rate when they emit it.

[ricardobeat]

It’s pointless to scream at this flying tree though. Methane and energy production emissions both completely overshadow emissions from aircraft, and have actionable, less painful paths for improvement.

[stcredzero]

Is that necessarily so? Esterised vegetable oils? It seems like a bit of an extreme knee-jerk to me. Basically, we're all supposed to be "disgusted" at any application of combustion? I think such issues need a bit more thought and nuance than that.

"Disgust first, ask questions later," is 180 degrees in the wrong direction for improving public discourse. I urge you to reconsider, then lead by example.

[Tuxer]

Well if you're investing a lot in newer plane tech, yeah I'd like them to think about the externalities of what they do and find alternative solutions. For example on high-flying airliners (I expect this plane to, like concorde, fly around FL550) you could potentially go with a hydrogen propulsion at least in cruise, since the outside air temperature wouldn't result in H2 boil.

[njarboe]

Once a new supersonic jet is built and flying then these changes can be done, by others if necessary. Don't you think building a supersonic jet is a hard enough problem already? We are still burning oil in 99% of cars and you are worried about burning oil in supersonic jets?

[notahacker]

In the scope of aerospace $100m is pocket money.

It's the lack of fuel efficiency which has killed off various other exploratory supersonic flight programmes from ever going anywhere. Ultimately to be successful they have to convince airlines the extra speed will convince passengers to pay for the extra fuel. I think that's unlikely in the near future, and Boom will have to raise a lot more to convince people otherwise.

[astrodust]

It's not pocket money, it's pocket lint.

[colechristensen]

It is on the order of the cost of a single aircraft.

Comparable would be Tesla raising $100,000

[FireBeyond]

Minus R&D, facilities build out.

And even then we're still talking a smaller body - 737, 757, not so much a 777/787.

[ryacko]

Single aircraft plus development costs.

[gingerbread-man]

It's worth noting that commercial airlines are exempted from paying any taxes on fuel worldwide by treaty. [1]

While this may eventually change, in the short term, airlines probably have less to fear about carbon taxes than any other industry.

[1] https://www.markey.senate.gov/GlobalWarming/files/LTTR/ACES/...

[wbl]

Biomass gasification plus GTL.

[yinyinwu]

The TL&DR I'm getting from the thread is that everyone should stop flying because it's so bad for the environment.