Air travel is one of the least efficient and most polluting forms of travel. Going slower and burning less fuel is great, even if it isn't as fast as technically possible.
I just want to point out that those car CO2 figures don't go to very high fuel efficiency rates. I have a prius c (high on the efficiency scale, I know) and I just calculated about 290 grams of CO2 per mile (about 50mpg). Still not amazing, but a good bit better than 390g CO2/mile. That's just for one passenger as well.
Good point. Of course, modern 787s and A380s are also far more fuel efficient then then '60s and 70s era aircraft. According to Wikipedia, the 787 is 20% more efficient then a 767
People don't use cars to travel thousands of miles - especially as this topic was about speed of travel. So this per-mile statistic doesn't make flying any better as a form of travel. It's like comparing safety of moon rockets vs bicycling per mile of traveled.
Secondly, the co2 injected directly into the upper atmosphere has ~3x the warming effect as co2 emissions
released by cars.
If we look at an hour of flying vs an hour of driving,
the air traveler contributes 20-30x as much to global warming.
Of course 1-2 passanger car travel is horrendously bad as well, especially if you do it daily...
The 787 can get up to 100 miles per passenger per gallon. That's pretty good. On par with a 25 MPG car with four people in it.
Until you consider that car needs to drive a non-direct route. And stop and stay at hotels. And get food. And more gas. And all of that too has distribution costs and expenses. And takes significantly longer.
If you really want to take a 36 hour train trip across the US go right ahead. I'll take my 7 hour flight and enjoy my extra day there.
It depends what kind of trip you are taking. For some trips the journey is more important than the destination. I wouldn't trade my childhood road trips across the country in for the alternative.
That's misleading. On CO2 per unit distance traveled air travel is pretty comparable to other forms of transportation. The long distances are what make the absolute contributions of air travel to CO2 emissions large.
