@whitequark square footage is not the correct metric, obviously. But first class seats are heavy. A brief web search not only gives me figures of 135kg to over 200kg for the luxury variant which already nearly doubles to triples the weight pp, in some cases airlines even need to add counter weights to the back of the plane. Add things like showers and the additional water for those.
These are extremes, of course, but this can add all up.
@whitequark that being said, I find your argument about how airlines don't fly economy only a bit disingenuous. "These flights would not exist without the business class seats" is probably correct, but that should not affect an attempt to properly attribute emissions to different seatings, should it?
@halfbyte I think it is intellectually dishonest to make attributions like that when no clear causal link exists
@halfbyte now I'm not saying there's no link. the fact that business seats subsidize the existence of some flights is a link, and a pretty important one! but that doesn't justify distilling it into an infographic with opaque assumptions that imply a clear and immediate causal link where there isn't one
@whitequark to be honest, in the grand scheme of things, it probably doesn't even matter. People who fly business or business plus or whatever are (with the obvious exceptions, see my other post, haha) probably frequent flyers, so their CO2 emissions are off the charts anyway, so a one digit factor is probably ending up as a rounding error.
@halfbyte ... which would have been a much better statistic to highlight in terms of impact
@whitequark that said, one last tidbit from the article that mentioned the counter weights (a refitting of a Swiss A330 btw.), they ended up with an emission factor of ~5 due to the 1,5t counter weight. Guess which seats actually got lighter in the refitting. Also the counter weight obviously means higher overall emissions for the flight.
That's just completely bananas.
