The elephant in the room is obviously the “domestic flight” emissions number sitting proudly at the top of the list. Based on the average length of a UK domestic flight and this source, that’s 20% of all global commercial flights, and just under 50% are under 500 nautical miles/926km, which is still on the highly inefficient end of the spectrum. But then you realize that it only accounts for about 42 million weekly seats when estimates are much closer to 100 million, then you realize it’s 2009 data and you don’t want to deal with this rabbit hole…

That second chart you provided is… tantalizing, and just like my own source I’d much rather have access to the data than the charts they’ve made with it, because napkin math based on their red line falls shy of any sort of accuracy.

If we just rely on the provided numbers, new European internal combustion vehicles are way more efficient than short and long haul flights (cars’ grams of CO2/km should should be divided by ~1.5, which is the US/EUR average vehicle occupancy rate), and the average is dragged down by older ICE cars. New U.S vehicles lose the efficiency battle comically and are about as bad as ultra short haul business flights, lmao. Thanks for the link.

Lemmy’s search function is disappointing, yeah. Carrying on a long tradition of worthless forum search functions I suppose. I envisioned a world where everybody adopted Google’s late 2000s-early ‘10s algorithm but instead even Google has sworn off of it.

I replied to the other comment first because I can’t actually get your media to load. What domain is this? I think it’s an issue with my client because I encounter this frequently in a few communities.

Yes, American rail in particular is… bad. I think the romance of the notion of rail transit is doing a lot of the heavy lifting stateside. So are the new ICE cars, as I stated in my other reply. The new European and Asian models on the other hand should be winning out on efficiency easily, as would their trains, and all hybrids and EVs. Air travel may rank decently in carbon efficiency in the U.S., but I don’t think that remains true elsewhere, where transit industries have been allowed/incentivized/required to improve.