Environmental concerns grow as space tourism lifts off
I’ve found a another gross scientific dishonesty being presented, this time by Gavin Schmidt of NASA. Gavin used to write the Real Climate blog, but now pilots a desk over at NASA. He’s a climate scientist, and he’s still deceiving the public:
Environmental concerns grow as space tourism lifts off
With Jeff Bezos set to launch on a Blue Origin rocket on July 20, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX planning an all-civilian orbital mission in September, the nascent space tourism industry finds itself facing tough questions about its environmental impact.
Right now, rocket launches as a whole don’t happen often enough to pollute significantly.
“The carbon dioxide emissions are totally negligible compared to other human activities or even commercial aviation,” NASA’s chief climate advisor Gavin Schmidt told AFP.
This is of course, complete bullshit. Space flight contributes an enormous amount of pollution.
Space Flight For Fun: Billionaire Egotism Trumps Sustainability
A SpaceX flight, however, generates the annual carbon footprint of 278 average world citizens. Space flight is among the most carbon intensive of human endeavors.
Today, all virtually all tourism creates CO2 emissions. An economy-class flight from New York City to London emits the equivalent to 11% of an individual’s average annual carbon emissions. But the scale of the difference between space tourism and more mundane approaches to travel is astonishing.
I quit Real Climate years ago because of the practice of always ignoring their detractors. The same crowd always making the same claims, many which were false. I pointed out that climate scientist, of which Gavin is one, had failed to warn the world adequately. They needed to declare a climate emergency years ago and had not done so. Nor did they put their careers on the line as they should have if they actually believed what they claimed and what their own studies have found. Now, years later, we are that much closer to utter disaster, and they STILL haven’t stepped up to the plate like they should.
I pointed out that if the ‘experts’ in climate science could not, would not do this, then why should policy makers, lawmakers, industry or business or anyone else actually accept their findings? The ‘experts’ were not sufficiently alarmed, and yet were constantly scrambling to update their predictions (always too low). It was as if they had no skin in the game, but the reality is we all do. They warned about environmental collapse that could eventually lead to disaster, and even an uninhabitable Earth, but they would NOT issue a climate emergency alert. Nor would they unify in their own ranks and insist the world pay attention. The logic is simple: if the experts are not alarmed (and do not act like it), then why should anyone else be alarmed?
If we can’t listen to the experts – then exactly who should we be listening to? A anonymous online blogger who has uncovered countless flaws in their own papers and claims? C’mon.
As far as I know, that is still the case. They’re not sounding the alarm.
They laughed and politely told me to go away. Whatever. They were wrong, I was and still am right, and now we read where Gavin claims space travel tourism is ‘negligible’ to other human activities. Maybe it is – if you NEVER ride a rocket, but when you do, so you can spend 3 minutes in ‘space’, it’s absolutely HUGE, which means it is never ‘negligible’. In fact, there is NO COMPARISON to anything else we’ve ever done as individuals.
Bear in mind that these calculations are based on the flight only. There is an enormous amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses being produced to even get to the point of privatized space flight (for billionaires) – none are included in the pollution calculations.
What this tells me is that the heads of these programs still haven’t learned even the basics yet while holding high credentials. Stunning. Misleading. Wrong. Another reason why I keep saying, you’re on your own, there is NO effective, competent, decisive leadership that’s stepped up to the plate and will deal with this problem.
More reading if you are interested:
https://www.afr.com/technology/why-space-flights-green-credentials-don-t-fly-20210711-p588oy
https://financialpost.com/financial-times/calculating-the-environmental-payload-of-space-tourism
