https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/climate_law_ins...
You ban air travel and suddenly people cover a big chunk of the difference with mass driving, causing significantly more deaths and increased CO2. (Remember: Southwest's most popular route is Dallas<->Houston which is drive-able)
I think the biggest blocker on high speed rail is being able to get places once you arrive, without a car. The Northeast Corridor works because you can get anywhere in New York, Boston, and DC with public transportation once you arrive. A lot of cities with intercity train service don't really have that option, so you end up driving to the train station, taking the train, and renting a car at your destination. At that point, you might as well fly because the steps are the same, but it's faster.
Sure, you can tax carbon, especially passenger automobiles... but you will cause a much larger recession than Coronavirus as people suddenly can't afford to go to work anymore. The country was built on cheap driving. It has a disastrous climate impact, but it's too established to just will out of existence. It is a tough situation, which is why nothing is being done. (We can't even get our train tunnel between New York and New Jersey repaired, and that brings 200,000 people to and from work everyday.)
What you do is give the proceeds of the carbon tax back to the populace, as Canada is doing. There may be some hardship, but it should mostly work out—on the whole, the rich create more carbon than the poor, so wealth will be redistributed to the more vulnerable.
That last quality is also likely why conservatives don't like these plans, but until they provide an alternative I don't see what else to do. ("Do nothing because climate change doesn't exist" is not an alternative.)
(OK, the Bay Area is different. Well-off people do commute two hours a day because there simply isn't any housing near where they work. I stayed in some corporate apartment in downtown Mountain View once and could bike to the office... but the apartment was going for something like $3500 a month for one bedroom. Just incredible.)
Now of course, if everyone just pays the tax and gets the rebate, there won't be much emissions impact. But over time, people will realize they can get ahead by buying smaller cars instead of SUVs, or carpooling, or lobbying their local governments for more public transit, or switching jobs.
I've lurked near daily on HN for over five years - and this is the unfortunate comment I finally feel the need to make an account to reply to.
I presume you're living in the U.S. based on your comment.
I too live in the U.S., with severely debilitating health issues. I've been chronically ill for over half of my life now, and only just recently could I legally consume alcohol.
I'm in the MidWest, and have to somewhat regularly fly to California and Massachusetts for medical treatment. I have no parents, and haven't throughout the duration of my illness. I receive no government assistance financially, because our medical system is shit on recognition of many musculoskeletal illnesses. My insurance is also shit in general, because medical care availability is shit in the U.S.
Anyways, I'm practically only alive/still somewhat sentient because of availability of cheaper airline tickets to get to my care.
Don't advocate for making accessibility even more expensive unless you're going to also make sure that people like me (which there's a surprising fuckload of) don't have to rely on it.
Check your privilege, or something like that. Or maybe I should, and just let my body die ^__^
The point (the transportation/energy use issue cannot be tackled without also working on the social problems) is an important one though.
If we're talking about a rare disease, there is no solution other than moving to one of the few specialist centers in the world if air travel goes away.
Living with a rough disease is tough and my heart goes out to everyone that has to struggle in their daily lives but, it'll always be easier to relocate closer to the facility unless the trips are extremely infrequent and other factors are more important (like family, work etc...)
In Canada this is less bad since being forced to move away from work for medical care doesn't prevent you from affording that care - in the US this can result in an impossible choice but :shrug: the US is broken and unable to afford a good standard of living for their citizens.
It would totally suck for you, I realize that. Unfortunately, our society simply cannot continue on as it has. We either change now, proactively, or we change after the climate catastrophe has forced our hand. Under the latter scenario, the change will be much worse.
(We should also make healthcare accessible in more places, but it sounds like your needs are highly specialized. There are some treatments we cannot realistically provide everywhere.)
I was born in the 8th poorest community in the U.S., by parents who were born and lived their lives in the 8th poorest community in the U.S., and had to drop out of my full-ride scholarship college I somehow got from being at the top of my highschool (can't really remember how at this point, partial amnesia from untreated chronic pain) because of complications caused by lack of medical treatment. Couldn't afford it/the ability to get care as a minor without a guardian is near impossible.
If you think you can just choose where you want to live, no matter the desperate circumstances to do so, you must be gleefully unaware of the realities of life, which is something I wouldn't expect from a H.N. poster, for the most part at least...
Some people just had no real chance. It's unfortunate.
Care for one of my issues is only conducted as Stanford and Cedars-Sinai. There's a little more specifics/a split subgroup to it, and Stanford cares for the subgroup I'm in. The majority of the rest of healthcare in the U.S. claims that it does not exist, is impossible, and that symptoms are completely psychosomatic.
Care for my second large issue is an incredibly misunderstood surgery that is led world-wide at Massachusetts General Hospital. 10 years ago, the condition wasn't really accepted as being real across the majority medical community. 5 years later, things are a bit better but many doctors believe some hoo doo it's only X because Y and definitely not Z.
8 years later, vascular surgeons are still basically at war with each other on deciding the correct course of surgery... Despite 1 of 3 being successful in over 80% of cases and the other 2 of 3 leading to permanent disability and chronic pain in ~50% of cases. To be fair, there's about 5 truly good surgeons in the U.S. right now, but only MGH accepts out of state Medicaid, and coincidentally/luckily enough for me, that surgeon is widely regarded as the best.
Anyways, now I'm just rambling off topic in this thread. Yes, I agree that society cannot continue this way. I'm actually in the realm of wishing we said fuck medical ethics for as long as it takes to figure out how to cure most of disease/conditions that can be seen before birth. Would probably happen fairly quickly in the grand scheme of things if the medical community had the funding and ability. But, that's something that will also never happen. Science is the only way forward to have a civil society (which the U.S. claims to be, but is clearly not), but the bulk of the U.S. populace, especially those who vote, seem to be quite anti-science and willfully ignorant in a time where we have near all of thousands of years of knowledge condensed in the palm of our hands. And then there's the sociopathic portion of the government masquerading as "civil servants" who exploit that for money...
I'm honestly happily awaiting the downfall of what the U.S. believes itself to be. I expect it within my lifetime.
Of course I would like to see better healthcare available to everyone as well. Can't we focus our attention on making healthcare (even specialized treatments like yours) more accessible and affordable, instead of artificially propping up a massively wasteful industry in perpetuity?
1. Accept that a tiny portion of our population has extremely rare diseases (true by definition of rare disease lol), and that some portion of our socialized healthcare system involves flying the doctors to this population, or vice versa
2. Dump funding into telehealth solutions, including robotics.
The poster above is between a rock and a hard place, it's a really terrible situation to be in no matter what safety nets are in place. But the US tends to go out of its way to make things just that little extra bit terrible.
Why not lobby to have your healthcare become cheaper instead?
I am sorry you have a condition that causes you this much stress. I know these must be especially terrifying times for you (even more than people that are for the most part healthy). I would just suggest you aim your frustrations at the industries that are actually causing you problems.
>I receive no government assistance financially, because our medical system is shit on recognition of many musculoskeletal illnesses. My insurance is also shit in general, because medical care availability is shit in the U.S.
This is your problem, and the ultimate solution to that problem is not "cheap flights" - that is no more than a workaround, with huge collateral damage.
This is broadly analogous to https://xkcd.com/1172/
I can barely live and function in my daily life, as well as trying to not become homeless and die.
How do you expect me to successfully lobby anybody, especially when they can say "well X amount of doctors don't even believe this specific rare disease even exists? Obviously, he's just lying to in an attempt to financially cheat the system"
Get out of your bubble haha. While cheap airfare may be a plague upon the world, things like the U.S. government is as well, and for quite some time has been (see overthrowing other countries in S.A. and trying to deny it) - but cheap airfare is really the only option I've been given for an attempt at a normal life. The U.S. government... for the most part hasn't. The small handout of Medicaid I get tries to haggle me, probably in a hope that without the care I'll die sooner and no longer be a drain, every step of the way...
I'm sure we all know solutions to a lot of problems. However, we should know, that those solutions are simply unattainable. Which I guess, would in the end... make them not a solution?
Airframe manufacturer definitely should be preserved and not allowed to wither away. That kind of engineering/institutional knowledge should be preserved and developed.
For the sake our environment, I think COMMUTING to office work should become the norm.
Transportation (including commuting) is the country's second biggest source of carbon emissions, after the electricity sector. Both are far greater source of carbon emission than airline travel.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/summer-2017/ar...
I think COMMUTING to office work should become the norm. >> I think working from home should become the norm.
Cutting down commuting will cut so much carbon foot print and also generally have a happier population.
I am hoping that we can at least ditch the majority of business related flights when we come through this crisis as that alone would really dampen air flight volume.
Scaling back civilization is not the solution. Technological progress and smart regulations are.
Maybe less air travel would be more civilized.
Until we have carbon-free or at least greatly-carbon-reduced air travel, we need to cut back on it.
Scaling back tech is definitely a solution. Especially a modern spin on "older" tech (e.g. bullet trains, passive solar heating). You speak so matter-of-factly yet there's no evidence that more "progress" is the solution, when there is no way to be sure (its a gamble), whereas its a fact that scaling back our reliance on more tech is a known solution.