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Comment by ddxxdd | Hacker News Reader

If climate change is truly the harbinger of the apocalypse, and if it needs to be stopped at all costs, then the flight tax would have to be infinite.

On the other hand, if a tree can be planted to capture 1 ton of carbon for 50 cents each, then a flight from NY to Sydney can be offset with $130.[1] That's about $1 per person on a 100-person flight.

Some environmentalists claim that the social cost of carbon is $40 per ton of CO2[2]. That comes out to about $10,500 in taxes for a flight from NY to Sydney. That's basically $100 per person on a 100-person flight, enough to prevent many people from flying.

[1] 53 lbs of CO2 per mile of flight, multiplied by 9,929 miles from NY to Sydney, divided by 2000 lbs/ton, times $0.50 of offset costs per ton

[2] https://www.edf.org/true-cost-carbon-pollution

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When a tree dies that CO2 will mostly just be released into the air again. Planting trees is a measure to slow the immediate effects of fossil fuel usage, but not a long term solution. At some point you’ll run out of space for new trees.

It’s like fixing a leaky pipe by adding sponges. Sure, they’ll soak up the water and are cheap, but eventually you will run out of space for new sponges and have to pay for a plumber.

It's more like fixing a leaky pipe by adding a patch that will last for centuries, that can pollinate itself and produce additional patches in the future, and that can be removed and used as a building material for a new house.

"and that can be removed and used as a building material for a new house."

I'm all for building wooden houses. But I can also imagine the amount of work (=> energy consumption) needed to convert theses trees we need to plant to "offset emissions" as new houses.

Transport the workers, feed the machines to chop the trees, the machines to transport the wood, to run the lumber-mill, to transport to the construction site etc. Unfortunately for now we still have: feeding machines => energy consumption => emissions

We can argue that this energy would have been needed anyway to build new houses. However I find it dangerous to couple a carbon reduction strategy to a substantial amount of an activity involving machines (construction). Are we going to need the amount of houses at the scale of the amount of trees we need to plant? In all parts of the world concerned (we don't want to move trees across the world anymore..)?

Unless you have a system in place to take responsibility from seed to logging to long term encapsulation I'll be highly skeptical of that.

What's to say it wont be slashed and burnt to make room for agriculture? What's to say the surplus of timber wont decrease the price and cause less trees to be planted elsewhere?

It's still sponges, not patches. They absorb the water, and you have to manage them. If you don't actively store them, the water will leak out. If you do actively store them and then hand off storage to someone else, the water will leak out when that someone stops paying attention.

The way to sequester carbon with trees is to cut them down when they're grown, and bury them somewhere where there's no air and no one will touch them for thousands of years, or otherwise store them in perpetuity while preventing decay or burning.

Turning them into biochar is a slightly simpler proposal. Biochar is stable for a pretty long time. But of course the process of unburning all the coal we burned so far is not very viable.

It's not an infinitely long term solution but it's a solution that buys us at the very least dozens, if not hundreds of years before we run out of space. Because no solution is ever infinite, given that the Sun isn't, it doesn't make sense to consider something that will potentially work for a hundred years as a non long term solution. By the time that solution stops being long term, we'll have far more advanced options to buy us another century of time.

That's all the CO2 lifecycle is in nature - Oil / Gas are basically large sponges which absorbed Carbon a long time ago, and were buried.

It's not impossible that we could grow a huge number of trees, and bury the resulting wood in a mountain-side to offset burning coal - but the amount of wood we'd need to bury might be prohibitively large.

(We've buried much worse things than wood :) ).

That's basically $100 per person on a 100-person flight, enough to prevent many people from flying.

I don't think there are many trans-Pacific flights with just 100 people on board.

The last flight I took on Singapore Air was around 350 people. So the tax would be about $30 per person. Certainly not enough to prevent people from flying.

Emirates has A380's with 615 people on board. That's just $17 per passenger.

> Certainly not enough to prevent people from flying

That’s fine. The point isn’t the dictate what people do. It’s to offset their negative externalities.

I am under the impression that the problem is excess consumption. Without reducing consumption, i.e. changing what people do, how is it possible to “offset” negative externalities?

Carbon capture is a possible solution.

The issue with offsetting is that it's not actually enough. The idea is basically to help less developed economies grow in a more sustainable way.

But we could delete the entire developing world and still be emitting too much, so capture and/or reduction are necessary, yes.

Why would the tax be infinite? At worst it needs to be equal to the cost of removing enough carbon from the atmosphere to offset the emissions.

Planting trees (and removing the carbon they capture from the carbon cycle, e.g. by turning them into biochar) probably doesn't scale to the amount of carbon we release.

> If climate change is truly the harbinger of the apocalypse, and if it needs to be stopped at all costs, then the flight tax would have to be infinite.

I don't see how that follows. On the assumption that we don't have infinite taxes in general, every $1 raised via a tax on emissions from flying can be put in to offsetting, capture, or research which wouldn't otherwise.

> That's basically $100 per person on a 100-person flight, enough to prevent many people from flying.

It's unclear to me what you mean by this. I think you mean that it would likely reduce demand? Sure, bonus.

> On the assumption that we don't have infinite taxes in general, every $1 raised via a tax on emissions from flying can be put in to offsetting, capture, or research which wouldn't otherwise.

That’s very...optimistic of you. I wish I had the same trust in these systems.

Regardless I highly doubt there will be a global movement to kill air travel any time soon, there’s no world gov to implement this mass tax so it will have to be a few very brave souls who do it while trying to convince everyone it won’t result in a massive brain and money drain which will be multiple x bigger than the tax “return”. Not to mention lost productivity.

Asia and the US (I’m assuming EU would be the first) will suddenly sound like a far better place to live and do business, then there will be a ton of disincentives to follow suit.

Remember when France was going to do their millionaire tax? That didn’t last long once the consequences became apparent and they could be dismissed with campaign slogans.

Countries already apply taxes to flights in or outbound from their territories.

Airlines already apply "fuel surcharges" as part of their ticketing.

Adding a, for example, EU-wide tax on outbound flights based on the distance of origin/destination, would be one way of implementing.

Getting international agreement on, for example, having it apply only to outbound flights, would mean that is not a tax on imports, that could be considered a tariff.

The income could then be spent on subsidizing the other costs of decarbonization.

One of your examples is a recommendation for a solution. The other is a way to profit off of the opportunity.

If climate change is truly the harbinger of the apocalypse,

If you start your argument with an extremified and overly emotional premise, then sure, you can make just about any point you want.

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