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Comment by odiroot | Hacker News Reader

Myself living in Berlin I'd still take the flight (and I did usually).

First of all, it's nearly legendary how unreliable the trains can be here during winters and hot summers. Second, flying is actually cheaper (I rarely fly with a big luggage).

Finally, it takes me 15 minutes to get to Tegel airport. All the security and boarding procedures are highly optimised there. I usually leave my flat around an hour to the boarding time.

Then the flight to Munich is an hour or less. In the end (with the train to the city center) it takes less than 4 hours.

On the other hand I wouldn't mind taking a long distance overnight international train provided I had a bed there.

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> In the end (with the train to the city center) it takes less than 4 hours.

But for only one hour of that can you be working, reading, or just relaxing. For the rest you'll either be on your feet or at the very least aware of your next connection.

Thanks but no thanks. I don't have this overwhelming pressure to always be "on" or even squeeze every bit of work out of my day.

I use this time to organise my thoughts and take a breath.

Huh? I really don't understand why people don't read and comprehend entire sentences. You got to the word "work" and just stopped reading and left a reply?

The CO2 emissions of trains are significantly lower, though.

You might want to reconsider if slightly more convenience is worth ~80-90% higher emissions.

The government should be enforcing this. Nobody should be expected to make a personal sacrifice to do the right thing.

If only we had a uniform, slowly ramping global $100/ton carbon tax. From the models I've seen it would fairly abruptly correct all of these "two methods are vastly different in carbon emissions but otherwise fairly comparable" situations.

abdolutely. Industry is known to lie about its ability to cope with even slight changes in price structure when asked. Even though things like tripling of oil prices mostly change if people buy v4 or v6 engines. A small yearly increase that that companies can price into their plans will absolutely not destroy our economy

The carbon tax should be tied to the price of extracting a ton of carbon from the atmosphere.

In Norway there's taxation on drinks containers that is set high enough that it's cheaper to participate in a return scheme. The audited return/recycling/reuse rates are then used to provide a discount against the per-unit tax.

I've always liked this scheme, because assuming you set the tax high enough for society to - as a fallback - take action to rectify the problem (e.g. hiring more people to clean up in this case), with a punitive margin on top, the tax provides a financial incentive to innovate to drive down the cost of acting responsibly.

There is a collective return service you can participate in, but if you find a better alternative you're free to use it as long as you can demonstrate what your return rate is. Or you can pay the tax and leave it to the government, but your margins will be worse than the competitions, as the return scheme is cheaper.

The general mechanism feels like it'd be adaptable to a lot of situations where you want to make sure it gets rectified, but also don't want to trust the government to dictate specific solutions - in this case it doesn't matter if e.g. the fallback solution is severely cost-ineffective; the more costly the fallback is, the stronger the financial incentive to find a better solution is.

Aircraft fuel should be taxed to a similar level as that used for ground transportation.

I would love to make the carbon friendly decision every time, but unfortunately price comes into it. I’m travelling to London this weekend. For two of us the flight, including a bus to the airport and the tram on the other side is less than half the price of the train for the same journey. The train is more expensive than our accommodation in London!

I'm looking for a good way to offset the carbon emission from the 20+ flights I take a year.

Anyone has good recommendation of a reliable charity for this? Also, so far all calculators I've seen usually count the carbon emission for economy, but for longhaul flights in business class, I'm sure the actual emissions are significantly higher... I cannot avoid flying but I do think that I should at least pay the actual cost of the carbon emissions I cause.

Atmosfair (https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight/) has received positive press and reviews (https://www.test.de/CO2-Kompensation-Diese-Anbieter-tun-am-m...) in Germany.

Its calculation also includes the flight class, aircraft type, flight type (charter, scheduled) and they documented it as well (https://www.atmosfair.de/en/standards/emissions_calculation/...). We use it to offset our business flights. It's a charity and donations are tax deductible under German law.

Partially why I believe short haul city-to-city flights should have more taxes applied to them if viable alternatives exist. And ways to further ease the tax burdens more for the alternatives if possible. (A stick for using flights and carrot for alternatives)

Penalising medium and long haul, and flights to minor towns or remote towns excluded of course as alternatives are rarely viable. And of course, alternatives can't immediately handle all the passenger load so scaled approaches are needed.

Thinking more of the Paris-London, New York-Boston, etc. Seems it worked with Barcelona - Madrid already, which might be more due to convenience than price?

Though don't think it will happen as the opposition will be too much, and making the taxes/fee rules work easily without complicated red tape will also doom it.

>Finally, it takes me 15 minutes to get to Tegel airport. All the security and boarding procedures are highly optimised there.

Maybe it's just Tegel airport, but every time I have to pass security in Frankfurt Flughafen (last time a few days ago), I feel violated. I travel quite a lot and it's the strictest security I've seen in an airport.

The ICE trains in Germany are not that great either. I remember buying a ticket from Hanover to somewhere in the south and to save money I bought a non-registered seat ticket. Imagine my shock when upon entering the train there were dozens of people sitting on their suitcases or on the floor, and I proceeded to spend the next 3 hours in similarly miserable conditions.

Regarding Frankfurt airport's strictness: It's Germany's biggest hub with the most international connections, some of them more "targeted" than others (say El-Al flights...).

Regarding ICE's: That's one of the trade-offs. Either guaranteed (cramped) seating after being "violated" or un-violated uncertainty.

Every time I use one mode of transportation, I'll damn myself and vow to always use the other mode from now on.

For some people, sure, it's faster to get to Tegel. If you arrive by car, Tegel is an awesome airport, built before airports were designed as shopping malls with a small aviation division attached, and without a strong eye towards making sure that low-paid security personnel's time wasn't wasted.

Unless you live north of Tegel though, it's going to be faster to get to either Hbf or Südkreuz, and when you get there, you just walk to the platform, wait for the train, walk on, and sit down.

Ah, so you are one of those who voted to keep Tegel open I guess?

I couldn't vote but I campaigned to keep it open indeed.

The decision to close it is just a way for insincere and short-term thinking politicians to gain some cheap points.

How does it gain cheap points when the majority are against it?

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