segunda-feira, 19 de novembro de 2018

Voos de ida e volta por 10 euros !? / Flying Is Bad for the Planet. You Can Help Make It Better. / To fly or not to fly? The environmental cost of air travel



Voos de ida e volta por 10 euros !?
Em função da pegada de caborno que cada voo implica e respectiva contribuição para as Alterações Climáticas e Aquecimento Global, cada voo devia estar a 1000 euros !
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Ryanair lança promoções para toda a Europa: há voos de ida e volta por 10€
19/11/2018
Ryanair lança promoções para toda a Europa: há voos de ida e volta por 10€

A Ryanair lançou hoje, 19 de novembro, uma semana de descontos e promoções, a «Cyber Week». Os voos têm partida de Lisboa, Porto, Faro e Ponta Delgada.
O primeiro dia desta promoção inicia com ligações de ida e volta, na Europa, e com descontos até 30 euros em reservas até à 23h59.

O diretor de comunicação da Ryanair, Robin Kiely, afirmou: «esta é a época mais deslumbrante do ano e para a celebrar, lançámos uma gigantesca semana de descontos, a «Cyber Week». «Reduzimos os preços em cerca de 30 euros nos voos de regresso dentro da Europa, entre abril e setembro de 2019. Também temos um desconto de 10 por cento em todos os check-ins de malas, realizados esta semana», concluiu Kiely.

De Lisboa, por exemplo, há voos de ida desde 4,89€ para Eindhoven (Holanda), Hamburgo (Alemanha), Marselha (França), Pisa, (Itália) ou Bruxelas (Bélgica), entre muitos outros destinos e tarifas.

Do Porto, por 4,89€, há voos para Barcelona e Madrid (Espanha), Bordéus (França), Colónia (Alemanha), Cagliari (Itália), Manchester (Reino Unido), Malta, entre outros destinos e tarifas.

De Faro há voo de ida para Berlin Tegel e Dusseldorf Int. por apenas 0,97€ e para Frankfurt-Hahn e Düsseldorf (Alemanha) por 3,90€, ou 4,60€ para o Porto, assim como Colónia (Alemanha), Bristol e Edimburgo (Reino Unido).



Flying Is Bad for the Planet. You Can Help Make It Better.
By Tatiana Schlossberg
July 27, 2017

Take one round-trip flight between New York and California, and you’ve generated about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases that your car emits over an entire year.

If you are like many people, flying may be a large portion of your carbon footprint. Over all, the aviation industry accounts for 11 percent of all transportation-related emissions in the United States.

According to some estimates, about 20,000 planes are in use around the world, serving three billion passengers annually. By 2040, more than 50,000 planes could be in service, and they are expected to fly more often.

If you’re flying, you’re adding a significant amount of planet-warming gases to the atmosphere — there’s no way around it. But there are some ways to make your airplane travel a little bit greener.

First, fly less.
The most effective way to reduce your carbon footprint is to fly less often. If everyone took fewer flights, airline companies wouldn’t burn as much jet fuel.

According to the World Bank, the average American generated about 16.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2013; according to some calculations, a round-trip flight from New York to San Francisco emits about 0.9 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person. For an American, that represents about one-eighteenth of your carbon emissions for the year.

Should you drive instead? The longer the distance, the more efficient flying becomes, because cruising requires less fuel than other stages of flight. So it’s certainly better to fly cross-country than to drive solo. If you’re taking a short trip, it may be better to drive.

Flying nonstop can help, too: The more times you take off, the more fuel you use. According to a 2010 report from NASA, about 25 percent of airplane emissions come from landing and taking off. That includes taxiing, which is the largest source of emissions in the landing-takeoff cycle.

Some research suggests that flying in warmer temperatures is less efficient, since hot air is thinner and makes it harder for planes to get enough lift to take off.

If you fly, offset it.
When you buy carbon offsets, you pay to take planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in exchange for the greenhouse gases you put in. For example, you can put money toward replanting trees, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

You can buy offsets through some airlines — Delta, United and JetBlue, among others. But they don’t necessarily make it easy during the booking process; some airlines offer offsets only on separate sustainability pages. You can also buy offsets through other organizations.

To offset the almost 0.9-metric-ton carbon footprint of a single passenger traveling on United from New York to San Francisco in July and back again, Sustainable Travel International, which runs United’s offset program, offers two choices: Donate $8.95 to a wind farm in Texas or donate $10.75 to a forest conservation program in Peru.

There’s some debate about the best way to offset — where and when tree-planting programs should occur for maximum effect, for example.

“Offsets can provide a useful way to help reduce your climate footprint,” said Peter Miller, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But it’s important to make sure that you’re getting credible and actual real emissions reductions.”

To make sure that an offset program really does what it says, it has to meet several criteria, including that it be verified by an independent third party. All of the programs used by the major airlines are verified by such groups to make sure they provide the carbon reduction effects that the companies claim.

Fly coach.
According to a study from the World Bank, the emissions associated with flying in business class are about three times as great as flying in coach.

In business class and first class, seats are bigger, so fewer people are being moved by the same amount of fuel. The study estimates that a first-class seat could have a carbon footprint as much as nine times as big as an economy one.

At last, coach passengers have something to be happy about: smaller carbon footprints.

Listen to the flight attendants.
Apparently, some of the rules about lowering and raising your window shades could help cut emissions.

When you land at a warm destination, flight attendants might ask you to shut your window shades, said Christine Boucher, a director of global environmental sustainability for Delta Air Lines.

The reason? It reduces the amount of fuel used to cool the aircraft when it’s sitting at the gate, she said.

This won’t do anything to counteract all the emissions the plane created while flying. But it’s an example of how far airlines will go to save fuel when they can. That helps their bottom lines, but also the environment.

Know your fuels.
Commercial airlines have been using biofuels in some passenger flights since 2011, mixed with conventional petroleum-based fuels in varying amounts. The biofuels, which can come from sources like natural oils, seaweed and agricultural waste, can help reduce planet-warming emissions from aviation.

Last year, United Airlines started using biofuels in all of its flights out of Los Angeles. The biofuel, made by a company called AltAir Fuels, is estimated to cut at least 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions compared to regular jet fuel, according to United. (It cuts the emissions used to make the fuel as well as the emissions from burning it.)

Other companies and the American government are working to develop alternative biofuels to use in the airline industry. So far, however, a viable commercial market has not been developed.

In October, more than 190 countries agreed to reduce the carbon footprint of air travel through a combination of offsets and improvements in efficiency.

You can check the fuel efficiency of the airlines you fly. According to a report from the International Council on Clean Transportation, Alaska Airlines and Spirit Airlines were the most efficient domestic carriers in 2010. American Airlines and Allegiant Air were at the bottom of the list of the 15 largest airlines.



To fly or not to fly? The environmental cost of air travel
There were 3.6 billion individual passenger flights in 2016 — the number is expected to double by 2035
Though air travel is more popular than ever, the vast majority of people in the world have never been on a plane. As that dynamic slowly changes, the environment stands to suffer. Is flying less the only solution?

When was the last time you traveled by plane? As little as three percent of the global population flew in 2017, and at most, only about 18 percent have ever done so. But things are changing.

According to International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) estimates, there were 3.7 billion global air passengers in 2016 — and every year since 2009 has been a new record-breaker.

By 2035, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) predicts a rise to 7.2 billion. Like the planes themselves, the numbers just keep going up. And given the damage flying does to the planet, that is food for thought.

Not just the CO2

Many estimates put aviation's share of global CO2 emissions at just above two percent. That's the figure the industry itself generally accepts.

But according to Stefan Gössling, a professor at Sweden's Lund and Linnaeus universities and co-editor of the book Climate Change and Aviation: Issues, Challenges and Solutions, "That's only half the truth."

Other aviation emissions such as nitrogen oxides (NOx), water vapor, particulates, contrails and cirrus changes have additional warming effects.

Beyond emissions made solely in flight, manufacturing effects within the aviation industry add considerably to its overall footprint

"The sector makes a contribution to global warming that is at least twice the effect of CO2 alone," Gössling told DW, settling on an overall contribution of five percent "at minimum."

But IATA spokesperson Chris Goater told DW the science behind this so-called 'radiative forcing' is "unproven".

Even if we accept the two percent emissions figure as final, if only three percent of the world's population flew last year, that relatively small group still accounted for a disproportionate chunk of global emissions.

A few years ago, environmental group Germanwatch estimated that a single person taking one roundtrip flight from Germany to the Caribbean produces the same amount of damaging emissions as 80 average residents of Tanzania do in an entire year: around four metric tons of CO2.

"On an individual level, there is no other human activity that emits as much over such a short period of time as aviation, because it is so energy-intensive," Gössling explains.

The WWF carbon footprint calculator is instructive in this regard. Even a serious environmentalist who eats vegan, heats using solar power and rides a bike to work, but who still take the occassional flight, wouldn't look very green at all.

Just two hypothetical short-haul return flights and one long-haul round-trip in a given year would outweigh otherwise exemplary behavior.

New tech can't solve everything

As awareness of the need to reduce our individual and collective carbon footprints in order to prevent climate catastrophe grows, several industries have come under sustained pressure to find clean solutions.

The aviation sector made its own promises — in October 2016, 191 nations agreed a UN accord which aims to cut global aviation carbon emissions to 2020 levels by 2035. Another ambitious target of that agreement is for the aviation industry to achieve a 50 percent carbon emission reduction by 2050, compared to 2005 levels.

Goater says there are four ways in which the aviation industry intends to achieve these things: through carbon offsetting in the short-term, the continued development of more efficient planes, deeper investment in sustainable fuels — such as biofuels — and through better route efficiency.

"Basically air traffic control is very inefficient," he explains. "It creates unnecessary fuel burns and more efficient use would create a 10 percent reduction in emissions."

He also highlights the fact that a number - albeit very few - of commercial flights are now powered with sustainable fuels every day, despite the fact that the first such flight took off less than a decade ago.

"That was something that happened much faster than anyone was expecting," he says. The key now, in his view, is for the industry to prioritise investment in the area and for governments to commit in the same way they have to e-mobility in the automobile sector.

But Gössling and many of his peers remain unconvinced.

 There were 3.6 billion individual passenger flights in 2016 — the number is expected to double by 2035

"I think that essentially we need price hikes," he says. "We did interviews with industry leaders a few months ago and many of them agreed, secretly — they were anonymous interviews — that if we don't have a major price hike for fossil fuels, then there is no way alternative fuels could ever make it."

Daniel Mittler, political director of environmental NGO Greenpeace, agrees that fossil fuels need to be more expensive. "The first step is to end all fossil fuel subsidies, including those going to aviation and to properly tax the aviation industry," he told DW.

For Goater, that is not realistic. "Fuel is already a significant proportion of an airline's costs," he says. "Believe me, if we could fly without oil we would."

The hard truth?

So what's to be done? Gössling, who has devoted more than 20 years of research to the subject, sees only one solution.

"Do we really need to fly as much as we do, or is the amount we fly induced by the industry?" he asks. In addition to artificially low airplane ticket prices, the industry also promotes a lifestyle, he argues.

"Airline campaigns project an image where you can become part of a group of people who are young, urban frequent flyers, visiting another city every few weeks for very low costs," he says.

Yet for Goater, the idea of dictating who can fly and when is as unrealistic as it is outdated.

Can we look toward simpler methods of transport than jet-fueled airplanes?

"Reducing emissions needs to be balanced with allowing people the opportunity to fly — I believe that's a settled consensus amongst the mainstream for many years," he says. "It's not up to people in one part of the world to take it on themselves to deny people in other parts of the world those opportunities."

For Mittler, it comes down to individual choice as much as anything else and he believes that while efficiency gains are vital, the first step is to reduce the amount we fly.

"We need to move towards a more sharing and caring way of living on this planet," he says, adding that doing without the weekend shop in New York might be one of the least painful ways of contributing to that.

"We need a prosperity that is based on community and based on real wealth of collective vision, rather than one that is based on relentless consumption. Aviation is a symbol of the kind of consumption that we need to leave behind.

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