idk why people are hating on this for being greenwashing. Jet engines can accept almost any fuel with no physical modifications, so literally any alternative is an improvement no matter how small it is. Even the most penny pinching filthy rich airlines will switch if it means cheaper or more availability having several fuels to run with.
This is on top of the fact that aircraft don’t even make up that much in terms of emissions compared to cars, trucks, and even heavy shipping. I think it was something like 8-15%.
Better having at least 0.1% use than no use at all.
so-called sustainable aviation fuel made up largely of tallow and other waste fats.
It’s only sustainable if society decides to keep a highly unethical, cruel industry going with the continued abuse and slaughter of sentient animals.
FIND A BETTER SOLUTION!
OK. Tell me how to get the energy density needed to drive an airliner. Solar ain’t gonna fly (heh) and batteries weigh too much.
FFS, the world ain’t going vegan tomorrow and this fat is mostly waste. Waste that, left to rot, will produce methane witch is FAR worse than CO2.
Lemmy: “Not good enough!”
Nuclear trans-oceanic jumboliners would be rad af.
How about accepting that passenger air travel is a luxury we simply can’t afford… (let the downvotes flood in)
Just to be clear, ethical considerations aside, relying on fat from animals requires an extremely environmentally damaging industry (I.e. Livestock industry) to either sustain the current numbers or increase output, just to keep airplane fuel going.
The immediate solution, at least for regional airtravel is electric planes. This is already doable, so more investments should be put into that.
We can then look at solutions for international and long haul flight, even if that includes hybrid planes or fully electric, or a totally different (sustainable) fuel source.
If you consider that whatever solutions we come up with need to work in the long-term, it makes sense to prioritize more realistic goals, rather than create an entirely different set of problems.
What about Trains? We don’t need short-range aircraft, we need high speed trains. Trans-oceanic flights can still use fuel, it’s fine.
Miniature nuclear reactors have the power density to run a nuclear-electric airplane. If we developed a thorium airplane reactor, we wouldn’t even have to worry about the terrorism implications.
In that case it would only take a couple of planes worth of stealing before you jad enough plutonium for at least a dirty bomb if not a nuclear weapon lol.
Like wut? Thorium still needs plutonium to work and plutonium can be used for both cases just as uranium afaik.
Absolutely true, but the consequences of a crash are too dire to ever let this be a thing.
Plus, the ROI on a nuclear plane would be a joke. How you gonna pay for it? Maybe break even after 500,000 flights? :)
And then there’s the maintenance and professionals and on and on.
Yes the ROI would be abysmal. It would have to be operated at a loss, like lots of public transportation is.
Hydrogen
Yeah, this is just some bullshit greenwashing.
You can pry my red meat out of my cold dead hands. I’ll give it up when you can produce it to near perfection in a lab. I sympathize with the cause of animal lovers, but also see that our brains like the taste of meat and our bodies gain strength from it, so eating meat is also a part of our very nature. As humans, we have the ability to place value on other life and make concessions that other animals can’t. Nonetheless, I think that it would be more reasonable to a wean off brain-attached meat as we advance our organ manufacturing capabilities.
