How is it misplaced? The Q400 is one of the most efficient turboprops in the world, in comparison to a similar sized jet it's on par with an eco friendly car per passenger basis. This is what gets me really angry, Idiot's claiming aviation causes massive global warming, and saying it should reduce its carbon footprint and be more fuel efficient, yet airlines have the biggest incentive to anyway, FUEL COST. Jet A1 is massively more expensive than the diesel you can fill your car up with, most airlines only use what is required for the journey plus an extra amount for safety. No airline runs around with full tanks unless its needed (this saves massive amount of fuel and thus pollution). Most airlines are upgrading fleets to reduce fuel bills for more environmentally friendly efficient aircraft. If electric aircraft where possible airlines would already be buying them, but the technology is not there yet and even if it was, it would still have to be proven to be safe.
To be perfectly honest, if train & bus companies and car users copied more how airlines work, there would be quite a considerable difference. I'm not saying airlines are perfect with roses, but I'm saying the days of aircraft burning fuel for the fun of it, 707, Concorde etc are long gone, why do you think the A380's are already being retired even though they only nearly 15 years old.
Even with an aircraft which is comparable to cars that's still higher than rail travel.
What are your sources for how any aircraft is comparable to a car in terms of CO2e emissions?
Then how does that compare to rail?
Then how does air travel continue to improve, bearing in mind that significant numbers of rail passengers are carried by EMU's which are powered by a rapidly greening power generation system?
Even then rail is significantly higher than walking/cycling.
The problem is that with a growing population (either at a local level within the UK or worldwide) that to stand still on emissions we've got to:
a) travel less
b) travel using much greener modes of travel
c) reduce the emissions of the travel which we are doing
d) carbon offsetting
e) mix of the above
Rail does well on b and c and can even be part of the answer with a. In comparison air travel does badly on all options, with the possible exception of d.
However carbon offsetting generally only works where there's easy wins in terms of helping others cut their emissions, as time goes on that's going to get harder (read more expensive) to do. As such it's likely to be a short term option.
Since 1990 what had the emissions of the UK done and how has aviation contributed to this?
From what's generally available it would appear that UK emissions have fallen, however aviation's emissions have doubled (i.e. the fall would have been much bigger if we weren't flying as much). Unless there's information which can be cited and ideally sources provided which provides evidence which is different to this.
The evidence for aviation's emissions doubling is from here (p9 of the PDF, P8 as labeled on the pages):
https://assets.publishing.service.g...ta/file/787488/tsgb-2018-report-summaries.pdf