Taxing air travel to reduce frivolous trips would be a great policy. Add fast trains between major US cities.
Which is to say, the world-wide policy priorities need to be on transportation (other than flying), electricity production and industrial emissions [0]. Giving up coal and petrol cars has potentially much greater impact than giving up flying.
That said, when you consider the CO2 emissions that you cause yourself directly, a good rule of thumb is that as soon as you fly at all, CO2 from flying dwarfs all your other CO2 emissions. On the individual level, not flying, flying less, or offsetting carbon emissions from flying has the biggest impact.
[0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Take for example shipping, which uses 4.5% of global co2 emissions, yet most people haven't stepped on a ship in their lifetime, and never will!
Quote: "annual emissions from the world's merchant fleet have already reached 1.12bn tonnes of CO2, or nearly 4.5% of all global emissions" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/feb/13/climatec...
Also, note that aircraft are not limited to carrying passengers... They also carry cargo.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that this is not a problem that should be solved individually. I don't hold my breath for what the higher ups are coming up with though, their measures seem misguided at best, deliberately loop-holed at worst.
[0] http://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Sulphur-20...
All arguments that we shouldn't fix X climate problem because it's less important than Y are just arguments that we shouldn't fix climate problems because the arguer doesn't want them fixed.
No individual actions have any effect at all, and people who argue about them are, again, just distracting from the important work of creating collective solutions.
In Europe I usually take the train places. If it's 2-3h away by train it's usually faster to take the train, and it's often (though not always) comparable or cheaper on price. In the US, I virtually never take the train, there simply aren't adequate options. The distances tend to be much larger, and we simply haven't built the infrastructure. We could build it, but that's proven quite hard (see CA high speed rail and efforts to modernize northeast corridor) for both political and practical reasons. NY<->DC I often take the bus, it's cheaper and only a slight time penalty vs. the train.
4/5 people sounds like a big number but those people are much more likely to start eating meat or buy a car at first than to fly. That's a way bigger problem environmentally.
A train with 500 seats running London to Manchester costs about £4/mile in electricity, of which 20p will be VAT (which I think is reclaimed) - so tax would be about £35, or 7p per passenger.
A flight of a 150 seat plane from London to Manchester attracts £3900 in tax.
Not in most of the USA (well, it is electric generated from a diesel hybrid). Electrification over large distances is expensive, the only country to have done that so far are the Chinese (and even then they don’t bother with way out Tibet...yet).
All of Sweden's rail is electric and most of Europe's too.
> In europe, jet fuel isn't taxed at all (but train/car fuel is) which often makes flying the cheaper option. From london, I can fly to several european cities cheaper than I can get a 2 hour train within the UK. Which is pretty ridiculous.
Australia and America are irellevent. Almost all long distance trips in Europe is electricity