If everyone stopped traveling for fun, that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions even more.
You’re not going to guilt people into changing their behavior.
A carbon tax fixes this.
You’re not going to guilt people into changing their behavior.
A carbon tax fixes this.
I'm not willing to agree that it would reduce emissions more than ending meat consumption. It would help, however.
Like most problems, there is not just one solution. Multiple modest to moderate changes in behavior can make a big difference.
- redesign cities to include more and better public transport (less car/truck traffic)
- reduce general product consumption (less global shipping) - we all know there's a lot of worthless stuff that gets manufactured and shipped, such as the low-end products you find in Walmart which break or fail after a short period of time
- create permaculture food forests in and around cities (reducing global shipping of produce)
- eat less meat (reducing production and transportation emissions)
To put it into perspective, it's a bit like getting fit and losing weight. Yes you can radically change your diet, or you can do crossfit every day, but those narrow+deep efforts are usually very unpleasant and unsustainable (in terms of a human's ability to keep with the changes). Instead, some diet changes, some consistent exercise, some lifestyle changes (walking/biking in place of some car drives) tends to result in lasting health benefits.
> A carbon tax fixes this.
Not really. A carbon tax encourages projects like mass forest planting of monocultures. That will result in some problem down the road.
Not really.
You're conflating the tax with spending the tax revenue. You don't need to spend any of the revenue on carbon sequestering projects. Just implementing a carbon tax that pushed the price of things like air travel up to the reflect the real cost would do a huge amount to reduce the amount people pollute.
If the price of a flight doubled then fewer people would fly.
Regarding air travel specifically, it's less (and decreasing) in terms of pollution relative to other forms of transportation. One of the sources: https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/policy_guidance/env...
Cars in sum produce more pollution than planes (at least in the US), and recent estimates say that the 15 largest ocean freighters produce as much pollution as all cars globally for a year.
So my feeling is that reducing global shipping - eliminating consumption of junk - and reorganizing cities to enable more walking/biking, would have a far greater benefit than focusing on air travel.
Concrete is a massive source of CO2 emissions. Rebuilding cities is really, really not going to help.
Animal agriculture is responsible for 14~18% of greenhouse gas emissions [0]; aviation only ~5% [1].
[0] - https://skepticalscience.com/how-much-meat-contribute-to-gw.... [1] - https://www.transportenvironment.org/news/aviation-2-3-times...
Uhm... how about stop travelling for business in the world of instant communication?
No question that physical presence is huge, but that doesn't justify it from an environmental POV at all, esp. since most sales are about making owners/investors richer, not making the world a better place.
I think real creative thought about how business travel could reduce impact would be massively impactful. It would probably need regulation, because the sales team that tries to, say, do all meetings virtual will be whomped by the other team that shows up.
The problem with that however is that many climate activists don’t actually care about the climate as a first priority, they care about wealth redistribution and larger, more powerful government. Climate policy is first and foremost an anti-capitalist masquerade. While that might seem to be a weird assertion, from where I sit, Climate activists also seem generally to share a strong anti-capitalist, anti-market perspective.
Nuclear power and profound incentives for remote work would get us much further than eating a fake-hamburger.
A challenge to get right for sure, but it could have significant positive impact.
Also it’s not just that can’t guilt people into changing behavior, I don’t think we should. Humanity moves forward by solving our problems not through everyone magically changing how they act.