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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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Commercial airliners are only about half as efficient as other kinds of mass transit (busses, trains) in terms of fuel/mile/person, this isn't the gotcha you think it is.
where did you get those numbers? i call bullshit
https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint:
Seems to check out compared to the average bus ride, though. And long distance busses are popular in a lot of countries (including Britain), because they're often much cheaper than long distance trains.
That was my first reaction but then I thought about it a bit longer and realized that it's not reasonable to compare a local bus ride that stops and starts every other junction, with a transatlantic flight.
The long distance buses are listed there at 27g, which is a shade over 1/10th of a domestic flight.
Huh, you're right. I was looking at "Bus (average)", thinking the regular local bus was represented by "Bus (local London)".
https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10311
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability-indicators/carbon-footprint-factsheet
I suspect "domestic flights" in the UK are pretty different than the US (a brief search indicates the average flight is around 4 times longer in the US, and planes are far more efficient during the middle of their flight compared to the ends, but average passengers per flight is a little harder to find for both countries to properly figure that out)
Thank you for the reply. "Your" numbers are not in fuel/mile/person but in energy/mile/person. So an electric train is much better carbon emission wise than it suggests. I was aware that flights and ICE cars are equal-ish per distance, but the takeaway from this should be to not fly or ICE-drive long distances and not that flying is ok.
Flying is really bad and billionaires as well as common people alike should not be allowed to do it. I do not understand why we still have to discuss this.
The first one is measuring BTUs and converting but the UMich information is straight carbon emissions per passenger mile and planes are only ~30% worse than commuter rail in the US by that metric. It's really not the apocalypse you're making it out to be.