What about jet fuel?

Question

With all the focus on cars as contributing to green house gases and climate change, what about jet fuel?
How much more co2 emissions come from them flying all over the country and the world? Are they not higher up in the atmosphere? How many car dose it take to burn one tank of passenger jet fuel?

Answer 1

I would like Algore to be the first to try the electric plane.

It will fly if a consensus of engineers say it will.

Answer 2

Aviation is still a minor, but rapidly growing, contributor to CO2 emissions. On a passenger mile basis, airline travel is just as efficient as driving. The jet uses a lot of fuel, but it carries a lot of people a really long distance so that it really doesn't use more fuel that all those people would have used driving their cars that same distance. But the speed of air travel permits more people to travel farther and more often than they could otherwise.

Make no mistake, when people say global warming must be stopped by reducing these CO2 emissions, what that REALLY means is that people will be stuck in one place on Earth for their whole lives. Because we do not know (yet) how to travel long distances in a short time without emitting lots of CO2. If the liberals have their way, only "special" people will be permitted to use jets or even cars. We will be back in the middle ages, with the chosen elite (Al Gore for example) getting to ride cars and jets to all the places they need to go to give the orders to us serfs tilling the fields by hand.

Answer 3

Dr Jello, engineers don't have the luxury of being able to get things like that wrong and keep their jobs. Actually I know for a fact that some engineers get things wrong constantly, but they tend to gravitate away from design which really isn't a career impediment because there is more money in business development.

Anyway, passenger aircraft do use fuel which causes CO2 emissions. Problem is that there aren't electric planes, hybrid planes or 4 cylinder planes that we can use as an alternative. There are lots of high efficiency cars available which could reduce CO2 emissions if a person was inclinded to buy one.

Answer 4

It's a part of the problem. But, in total emissions, the thousands of jets are not nearly as important as the hundreds of millions of cars and trucks.