Feb 7 2009. Join the Group Read. Chapters 5 and 6. Flight and Solar Will solar energy technologies allow us to sustainably take those long-haul flights to get our winter dose of sunshine? On the way, we discover that flying intecontinentally once per year has an energy cost slightly bigger than leaving a 1 kW electric fire on, non-stop, 24 hours a day, all year, despite the fact that modern planes are twice as fuel-efficient as a single-occupancy car. It may be no surprise, therefore, that Airline businessman Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, has developed a Swiftian the solution to the problem: " The best thing we can do with environmentalists is shoot them."

Table 4.5. Facts worth remembering: population density.

It’s been estimated that making each unit of petrol requires an input of 1.4 units of oil and other primary fuels (Treloar et al., 2004).

The total amount of car travel in the UK is 686 billion passenger-km per year, which corresponds to an “average distance travelled by car per British person” of 30 km per day.

But electrical energy can also be converted to chemical energy. In an alternative world (perhaps not far-off) with relatively plentiful electricity and little oil, we might use electricity to make liquid fuels;

One kilowatt-hour per day is roughly the power you could get from one human servant. The number of kilowatt-hours per day you use is thus the effective number of servants you have working for you.

United Kingdom

focus too much on economic feasibility and they miss the big picture.

“Okay – it’s agreed; we announce – ‘to do nothing is not an option!’ then we wait and see how things pan out...”

but you should find it easy to redo the calculations for whatever country or region you are interested in.

using a world population of six billion

1 ton per year per

Yes, the area of China’s rectangle is about the same as the USA’s, but the fact is that their per-capita emissions are below the world average. India’s per-capita emissions are less than half the world average. Moreover, it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the industrial emissions of China and India are associated with the manufacture of stuff for rich countries.

With numbers in place, we will be better placed to answer questions such as these

This heated debate is fundamentally about numbers.

if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little.

BP’s website