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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

David Attenborough says air travel should be more expensive to fight climate change https://7news.com.au/news/environment/david-attenborough-say...

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I find it amazing that if an alien civilization descended on us and taxed all fossil fuel usage by 100%, and took all that money out of planet Earth forever, both we and the aliens would be better off.

An alien civilization would be better off if they started using our money?

Let's assume they took it in the form of gold, ergs, Apple store credit etc.

Do they take plastic?

no, they will become corrupt.

Why just fossil fuels? Other massive contributers like the meat industry should be taxed as well.

Are you referring to cow farts? ISTM that cow farts come from cow food, which in turn comes from plants that pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Elsewhere ITT this cycle is used to justify using paper products. This seems very different than pulling fossil fuel out of the ground and burning it?

Why be especially drastic on air travel when its 2% of carbon emissions, per Huffpost?

If you account for the impact of the emissions, rather than their weight, air travel is ~6-10% (Because emissions at 30,000 feet have a larger greenhouse effect.)

Since CO2 is mixed in the atmosphere on a timescale short compared to how long it's going to linger there, your argument does not work.

Air travel is particularly carbon intensive on a per-journey basis and cannot be decarbonized using current technology. We can replace your car with an EV, we can run your air conditioner on renewable electricity, we can swap your gas furnace for a ground-source heat pump, but passenger aviation is going to involve burning tonnes of kerosene for the foreseeable future.

Direct Air Capture can pull carbon out of the atmosphere for ~$200 per tonne. Flying generates about 0.1 tonne per passenger-hour. We can make flying carbon neutral and it'd only be ~20% more expensive.

So about 100 tonnes per flight.

Society tends to underestimate the power of inefficiencies and shortcomings to keep us in the right track by making it difficult to attain our immediate aspirations. The exception is in the case of the underclasses. In this case most people just find it obvious that if they have too much too easily then the entrepreneurial spirit would collapse and along with it society.

I wonder why the comment is called "incendiary" in the article. Flight prices are ridiculously cheap, especially in Europe. As far as I know the jet fuel isn't even taxed, while it would make sense to tax it harder than fuel for other uses.

I do take advantage of these almost-free flights, but often wish they'd be more expensive -- to make rail travel more competitive if nothing else.

This might be off topic but why does the Australian media constantly source their "expert" quotes from the Institute of Public Affairs? The entire organisation is complete bullshit. Surely they can find people with actual credibility to put up an opposing argument once in a while.

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