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Comment by freebear | Hacker News Reader

Air travel is such a non issue, for any person flying it will of course be a large part of their carbon footprint, but the atmosphere does not care where the CO2 came from.

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This is largely my problem with climate activism. It seems largely based on what's fashionable. For example, ban straws in SF even though all of the ones in the ocean come from another continent[1]. Also stop offering glasses of water because there's a drought (strangely enough the drought ended but of course the laws stick around)[2].

Now a new deal which, even if 100% effective, would only reduce global CO2 emissions by... 15%?!?[3]. To make matters worse, we're 12 years away from point of no return, but we're stubbornly refusing to build a new nuclear power plant even though things are so dire? It strikes me as unserious, happening only for show or other reasons.

1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti... 2. https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler... 3. https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/emis/top2014.tot

What does this have to do with fashion? It makes sense to ban single use plastics.

What are your suggestions? 15% is leaps and bounds better than what anyone but Jay Inslee has suggested. Anyway that’s goddamn AMAZING for a single country.

Also, 12 years is the best case estimate. The worst case is in the past, and I’ve seen good qualified arguments for at most ~4 years before irreversible climate collapse with current technology (the figure I am citing is from speculation that high CO2 levels inhibit cloud formation, but I can’t find the source at the moment, so I encourage your own research to clarify my numbers). We need to try anything and everything in some reasonable order.

The Pareto principle says that reducing CO2 by 80% is doable, but reducing it by 100% will probably destroy us. How much CO2 do you think will be released if we destroy every outdated building and build a new energy efficient one in its place? What’s the payoff time? What’s the cost? The answer I see and hear is often “I don’t care. World is ending. Etc”. This is why I said it strikes me as unserious. I wouldn’t let an intern at my work make such a sloppy suggestion, let alone a politician.

And our climate predictions are just that, predictions. And they can definitely change[1] when you’re talking about geological time, though we often accept them as some sort of gospel.

1. https://www.dailywire.com/news/48287/national-parks-toss-sig...

Carbon neutral, not carbon zero.

Banning glasses of water is silly, given that beer, meat, bread, and soda all use more water than they give back.

The plastic straw ban had almost nothing to do with climate activism, it's just a low priority measure to fight plastic pollution. These two issues are barely related.

What's your point? According to your link aviation emits twice as much CO2 than long distance road travel. Clearly limiting long distance travel would have an impact. Doubly so if aviation was reduced.

Yet many global elites (Obama, Macron, et. al) agree to impose heavy restrictions on vehicle emissions used to feed, transport, and employ the average citizens of their countries. Meanwhile those who can afford it take needless trips across the globe to entertain themselves.

Air travel should be limited to those that have a reason to fly that out weighs the damage it causes to the environment.

Absolutely not... who gets to decide what reason is good enough to fly? How about instead of reducing freedom we stop externalizing these costs, no matter their purpose or industry?

Just set up a carbon tax that is tied to the cost of removing carbon from the atmosphere and everybody can decide for themselves whether they want to pay or not.

The flipside to that is why should wealth be the determining factor?

Suppose I'm poor but need to travel to another city to get medical treatment to save my life -- but a global carbon-tax prevents me. In contrast someone who happens to have been born to a rich family in a rich country goes around the World because they're bored.

Sure, that's a purposefully extreme example, but it's necessarily so.

Is that situation morally superior to you? Is it fair, desirable?

If we were organising things on a global scale we might give every person carbon credits. But that would be a massive redistribution of wealth.

What strikes me is we're going to need to normalise around a lower consumption lifestyle or vastly reduce the population.

I think aviation is pretty well-suited to carbon taxes/offsets. There are only a few major players and it would be very easy to enforce. Also I think the market would rather easily bear a 30% increase in flight costs

> Also I think the market would rather easily bear a 30% increase in flight costs

Was that sarcasm? Because air travel has been a race to the bottom from what I've seen

The government has always defined the bottom (above physics), and they can certainly boost the bottom up by 30%. Remember when pretty much everyone took the Greyhound?

Sure, but that doesn't mean we can't pay its actual cost. I would be for that, as long as every last cent was used ofset the CO2 in the most effective way possible.

If used in any other way, forget it.

The UK is an island, if you crank up airfare by 30% if would have a huge impact on the economy.

You know what else will have a huge impact on the economy? Catastrophic climate change.

> agree to impose heavy restrictions on vehicle emissions used to feed, transport, and employ the average citizens of their countries

Lets ignore all the other environmental costs of vehicles, roads, gas, refineries, deaths, gas stations, and the big one, city sprawl.

Cars are the single worst thing every created, and not just for the environment.

The entire aviation industry accounts for about 2.5% of carbon emissions. If we banned air travel entirely it would do approximately nothing to reduce climate change.

The single best thing people can do for the environment is refrain from reproducing, but that's not quite such an emotionally appealing thing to protest about.

That is exactly like saying that I only account for a billionth of the earths cO2 emissions, so there is no reason for me to cut emissions in any way.

The vast majority of the worlds population has never set foot in an airplane.

You have to calculate per capita.

2.5% is HUGE when divided by the number of people that make use of airplanes.

No that's not the same, because air travel is a different industry than agriculture for instance. And it would be a lot more efficient for mitigating carbon emissions that everybody on earth reduce their meat consumption, rather than banning air travel, that would definitely have little impact overall, and impair a lot our ability to meet, explore, make business. Just take the very scientific that do research on climate change: they do take planes to meet... And that's probably very important they continue so.

Yes, it would be more effective to reduce meat consumption globally. But we need to do both because time is running out. See the Drawdown project for an exhaustive list of policies.

I'd argue that people who actively work on climate change mitigation should keep flying if it really helps them be more effective. One of my friends does that: she helps urban planners save millions of tons of CO2, while emitting a few tons by herself. Overall, it's a good investment.

Completely disagree. Airtravel has been consistently growing at 6% for a while now, there's still billions of people waiting in line to get easy access to it.

As your graphic alludes to short distance regional flights can be replaced with a greener alternative, but the vast majority of flights cannot.

Air travel is growing exponentially and we have no way to stop those emissions. Virtually everything else has alternatives, there simply isn't the energy/kg to move airplanes with anything other than petroluem products. Biofuels would be an even worse disaster.

High-speed rail is a great alternative to short flights. Sadly, the US has no high-speed rail due to the auto-industry.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qaf6baEu0_w

Side note: I just launched a web app for offsetting the emissions you havent been able to reduce— I’d love to hear what you think of it projectwren.com

Email is in profile if you have feedback, the goal is to get more people involved with reversing climate change

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