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Carbon Footprint of attending the Model S Factory tour

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Anyone see the Carbon Footprint Elephant-in-the-Room? All this flying to ride in an electric car? Hate to be a party pooper, and I really want to go, but if I do it could only be because I had to be in the close area anyway for some other essential reason.

The European alternative is to see it in March at Geneva, with either electric trains or our own electric rides to take us there.
 
Some of us use electricity from the oldest coal power plant in the US to charge our electric vehicles. Not helping CO2, but we still love our EVs, which do still help in other ways.

Every day we have to decide how we will spend our electric miles (a limited asset for non-Tesla EVs). The best CO2 answer is to just stay home, but life must go on, so decide what trips are important, or add value to our lives, and go.

Likewise, everyone has a limited time to live. We all have to decide how to spend this limited time. If an activity is important or enriches your life, do it.

Likewise, we all have a travel budget. We only have so much vacation time, or just time period. We also have a monetary budget, and must decide what is most important to us, then use our money, and our time, for that. Some are also consicous of our CO2 budget. It is not zero. We have to decide what is important in life and spent our CO2 on that.

If anyone thinks that flying to beautiful SanFrancisco, meeting fellow Tesla enthusiasts and employees, and riding in a the new BETA Model S is worth spending their time and money to greatly enrich their life, it is also worth spending their CO2 budget as well. The time, money, and CO2 would most likely be spent on a different leisure trip somewhere else if they did not come to to celebrate Tesla's new EV.

GSP
 
Likewise, we all have a travel budget. We only have so much vacation time, or just time period. We also have a monetary budget, and must decide what is most important to us, then use our money, and our time, for that. Some are also consicous of our CO2 budget. It is not zero. We have to decide what is important in life and spent our CO2 on that.

For the CO2 part, find a nearly-full flight and use it to go to California for the tour. The planes are going to fly whether or not a Beta "Test Ride" attendee is on board. :tongue:

I hope Tesla does a similar event for BlueStar and beyond when they are first introduced.
 
Anyone see the Carbon Footprint Elephant-in-the-Room? All this flying to ride in an electric car? Hate to be a party pooper, and I really want to go, but if I do it could only be because I had to be in the close area anyway for some other essential reason.

The European alternative is to see it in March at Geneva, with either electric trains or our own electric rides to take us there.

Absolutely

Some are also consicous of our CO2 budget. It is not zero. We have to decide what is important in life and spent our CO2 on that.

What actually is the level this budget should be set at?

For the CO2 part, find a nearly-full flight and use it to go to California for the tour. The planes are going to fly whether or not a Beta "Test Ride" attendee is on board. :tongue:

The planes are flying there anyway argument is the one that keeps them flying. So your personal emissions for the flight must be 0 then...


To give an idea of what this involves, if one took a flight from London to SFO just to see the car, you would have to drive more than 33000 km in the Model S just to offset the emissions from that flight compared with getting a 3 litre Audi A6 TDi from the local dealer. (I've used UK grid emissions in that calculation but German and Dutch are very similar.) 'Fraid I'm with Andrew on this: If you have to go there anyway, fair enough, but if you're just going to see the car then it kinda wipes out the benefit of the car.
 
Can we please not turn this thread into this? Not everyone is into EVs for the uber green credit. With me, discussions about my "Carbon Footprint" is nearly equivalent to PETA telling me I can't have a steak.

It's all hypocritical anyway unless you're living like the Amish folk around here, but if that's what you're about: great. Just don't preach to me.
 
HypocrisyOffset.jpg
 
Well you do have to divide that 1.53 metric tons by the 200 or so passengers and crew right ?!?!?! LOL :)

No this figure would be correct for each passenger. Typical flight 200 seats will burn about 15,000 gallons San Francisco to London. Weight of Fuel ~90,000 lbs. C02 produced is about 600,000 lbs divided by 200 passengers is 3,000 lbs per passenger each way.
 
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Not sure how much one less ticket sold will reduce the amount of kerosene burned on any given flight, but it sure would be nice if jets burned hydrogen in the future and it was derived from alternative, non-carbon renewable energy. We're not going to change everything at once, but our electric cars make a significant impact in many ways. One thing to keep in mind, even if we can't reduce our carbon footprints as fast as we'd like, is that we've never had to fight a war over electricity. Coal, uranium, hydro, natural gas, solar, wind, geothermal... it's all right here in North America and requires no guns, tanks, rockets, drones, or fallen soldiers. To me it's more about moving the focus of our precious financial resources away from killing and toward developing a sustainable course. It's not so much about the momentary guilt of buying an airplane ticket... it's about the overall direction we're headed. It's impossible to live in the modern world at the moment without having significant carbon footprints, but I'd like to believe that the directions my footprints are headed are beginning to aim away from fossil fuels. Oil is a great resource, and the oil left in the ground needs to stay there for use in making plastics and other materials we need in the future. Even natural gas is used to make plastics.
 
Not sure how much one less ticket sold will reduce the amount of kerosene burned on any given flight

It's more about reducing demand so that maybe 9 instead of 10 flights operate a route on a given day

but it sure would be nice if jets burned hydrogen in the future and it was derived from alternative, non-carbon renewable energy.

Or they could be switched to run on methanol pretty much tomorrow. Hydrogen for planes en masse is as much of an unobtainable dream as for road cars.

From http://www.efcf.com/reports/E21.pdf

The full dimensions of the challenge become apparent when these numbers are translated to a specific case. The following case study may serve to illustrate the point. About 50 jumbo jets leave Frankfurt Airport every day, each loaded with 130 tons of kerosene. If replaced on a 1 : 1 energy base by 50 tons of liquid hydrogen, the daily needs would be 2500 tons or 36 000 m3
of the cryogenic liquid, enough to fill 18 Olympic-size swimming pools. Every day 22 500 tons of water would have to be electrolyzed. The continuous output of eight 1-GW powerplants would be required for electrolysis, liquefaction, and transport of hydrogen. If all 550 planes leaving the airport were converted to hydrogen, the entire water consumption of Frankfurt (650 000 inhabitants) and the output of 25 full-size power plants would be needed to meet the hydrogen demand of air planes leaving just one airport in Germany.

For hydrogen derived from fossil hydrocarbons, the availability of water and the safe sequestration of CO2 may pose serious problems, not because of inadequate technology, but with respect to logistics, infrastructure, costs, safety, and energy consumption. To fuel the 50 jumbo jets with hydrogen, about 7500 tons of coal and 11 250 tons of water are needed daily and 27 500 tons of carbon dioxide must be liquefied for transport, shipped to a suitable disposal site (perhaps in the deep waters of the mid-Atlantic) and safely deposited. The significant energy needs for hydrogen liquefaction and transport are the same for any source of hydrogen. Fueling the 50 jumbo jets at Frankfurt airport is only an insignificant part of a hydrogen economy. Has the magnitude of the task been recognized?

It's not so much about the momentary guilt of buying an airplane ticket... it's about the overall direction we're headed. It's impossible to live in the modern world at the moment without having significant carbon footprints, but I'd like to believe that the directions my footprints are headed are beginning to aim away from fossil fuels.

But is that going to really be affected by your seeing the car a few months before it's in the local store?