Your definition of reasonable is not universal. For many people, life is for living, not for sacrificing worldly pleasures to eke out as long an existence as possible.
It's about perhaps rethinking whether one needs to fly so often for one's vacations.
However, up until about 8 months ago, there were lots of 15-30 minute flights that could be replaced with videoconferencing and (post-pandemic) train travel. Sure, you still might need to catch a plane if you're going on vacation on the other side of the globe, but you can usuall have that client meeting over Zoom, and if you're going on a trip from one European city to another then train travel is often not a bad option.
The comment I was replying to was implying that recreational air travel should be banned completely.
A total ban of air travel is, of course, not possible.
In reality, the best chooser for an individual is him/her/self owing to their unique perspective. Not going on vacation may well indeed be suffering.
In any case, taking a holiday or going abroad doesn't mean taking a flight, or driving. And I really doubt that taking a boat trip produces more CO₂ per capita than taking a flight, given that many more people will typically board a ferry boat, than board an airliner going the same distance.
The purpose of travelling for holiday is not always sightseeing. Sometimes (for me, most of the time) it's about what's at the destination and what you do when you get there. For example, a sporting event, a particular sporting or leisure activity etc.
On the other hand, I've also travelled by bus (no good trains) to go to a conference in Plovdiv, Bulgaria and I'd have also travelled my usual way to conferences in Athens and Rhodes this year, that got cancelled because of Covid. Like I say above, you can do this kind of thing at a leisurly pace, or you can do it fast.
But I think the real problem is that travelling like that limits your range. I was offered an exchange position in China but travelling there by land would have taken me a week or so, so I declined.
But I can accept that my options are curtailed this way. Air travel has spoiled us in that we take it for granted that we can travel to the other end of the world in a few hours any time we like (if we can afford it), but this luxury has cost us greatly in terms of environmental damage. So, personally, I don't accept that going at a sporting event or leisure activity trumps the need to reduce emissions from air travel.
So, to rephrase my original comment, above, taking a holiday doesn't mean you have to go around the world for it. You can holiday closer to home. So I won't get to see the Fiji islands? I can live with that. We're not going to get out of the mess we've done and still enjoy our way of life, one way or another (the "other" being that eventually climate change will make our current way of life unfeasible anyway; for example, Fiji will sink under the sea).
When I was a kid we were too poor to afford vacations out of the country, we drove to the nearest seaside every 2 or 3 years, during summer, with no AC, and I still had loads of fun. You don't have to go to _exotic_destination_234_ to enjoy your vacations.
People won't be able to drive from Berlin to Barcelona for the weekend in 3 hours for $50 (round trip), nor book a cruise from London to NY in 6 hours for $400. It doesn't take much to imagine how the world would look like actually, since coronavirus made most touristic places either very inconvenient or impossible to visit most people stay local and discovered that their region is just as beautiful as others.
These "what will people do without all these cheap vacation destinations" comment reek of entitlement
And if we apply that logic to every industry, we end up driving people's standards of living back centuries.
Right?
We don't know how to fly in a sustainable way, nor is flying necessary.
This is why it is really important to ask questions about what we really need, and if we're at all interested in human survival in the future, we need make serious decision to scale down the economy soon.
Of course I'm not very optimistic that this will happen.
That assumes that the only way to reduce CO2 is to halt the industry, and that is not true for most industries. The problem is that most industries have no cost associated with CO2 emissions. So they have no profit incentive to reduce those emissions. Simply adding in the full cost of operation, including CO2, would drive industry to innovate more efficient technology, reduce CO2 waste, and yes, some industries would be revealed as being too costly in CO2 production to be viable at the current levels of use.
There are many industrial processed that are horribly inefficient and wasteful, but the cost of that inefficiency is not paid by the company, so switching would only hurt profit margins. Any company competing would be at a massive price disadvantage. If the full cost fell on the company, consumers would quickly buy products and services that used efficient tech and reduced waste, because those would be the cheaper options.
Most industries are not CO2 producers because it is required to maintain that standard of living. I pay for my garbage to be collected and properly disposed of, but if I could just dump it in my neighbor’s yard for free, I could save money. Forcing me to pay for it myself keeps us all from having our yard filled with garbage.
All IPCC targets assume getting to 0 emissions relatively soon. If we can't take economic hits to get there, then we'll take a fantastically more wild economic hit once we miss those goals.
I suggest you spend some time researching a bit what happens with each degree C we get to. It's far worse then just rising sea-levels.
>Our survey of the climate record from station data reveals many global TW exceedances of 31° and 33°C and two stations that have already reported multiple daily maximum TW values above 35°C. These conditions, nearing or beyond prolonged human physiological tolerance, have mostly occurred only for 1- to 2-hours’ duration (fig. S2).
[...]
>Steep and statistically significant upward trends in extreme TW frequency (exceedances of 27°, 29°, 31°, and 33°C) and magnitude are present across weather stations globally (Fig. 2). Each frequency trend represents more than a doubling of occurrences of the corresponding threshold between 1979 and 2017.
[...]
>The southern Persian Gulf shoreline and northern South Asia are home to millions of people, situating them on the front lines of exposure to TW extremes at the edge of and outside the range of natural variability in which our physiology evolved (36).
I feel like air conditioning millions (and soon, billions) of people will be more than a rounding error of GNP. Indeed, economic activity may be... slightly curtailed... in countries where going outside results in death.
If we get to 6C, which is a very real possibility given the fairly large number of positive feedback and history of rapid climate events on the planet, human extinction is a potential outcome.
But I suspect that's really no evidence or argument that would convince you that things won't be pretty much fine, which is why I'm personally more convinced then ever that we will likely see that 6C.
It nimbly skips over what will happen to get them there. India is the second most populated country in the world. Pakistan is fifth. Between them, they need to move hundreds of millions of people before the end of the century.
Directly north of them are China and Russia. China and Russia both have very restrictive immigration policies, and are one-party authoritarian states.
All four of these countries have nuclear weapons.
As far as agriculture is concerned, the IPCC says that rising temperatures will be good for farming (within a certain limit, 2-3c I believe). Carbon after all is an input to photosynthesis.
What percentage of human time is spent on airlines
It's an industry that has been growing a lot. It is an industry that is very unevenly used by the world population (many people don't fly at all). And it's an industry that barely has any idea how to fix its emission problem. (H2 will likely only work in short range and is still decades away, synfuels is extremely inefficient.)
We should really get started developing alternatives. Cement is a tough one, probably the toughest industry sector at all. For steel the swedish companies SSAB+LKAB have a very ambitious plan using hydrogen. I hope they succeed doing that.
That said and as othes have noted: Aviation is 2% of CO2, but a much larger share of overall emissions. I was surprised to recently learn that this is scientifically underresearched (particularly effects on cloud formation) and it may be everything between 4 and 7%.
Come on, do you think CO2 is the nastiest thing planes reject ? Also, plane pollution happens at high altitude, which surely has a different impact than at sea level.
If the airline industry goes completely bust, I am sorry for the people who worked there, and all in to give them another meaningful job, but at the same time it would be a very good thing for humanity as a whole.
This is completely untrue. One of the biggest sources of airline travel is Chinese domestic tourism, far from the richest 1%.
>but at the same time it would be a very good thing for humanity as a whole
How incredibly arrogant of you to think you speak for all of humanity. Clearly a huge number of humans value air travel, due to their extensive use of it, please explain to me how you know better than all of them about what's good for them?
It’s not full of rich people cramped into tiny seats, I’ll tell you that much.
If you make $33,500 a year, you are among the richest 5% in the world. [0]
The threshold for an individual to enter the global top 10% in 2012 was about PPP$15,600 per capita household income, or PPP$62,000 for a family of four. [1]
The threshold for an individual to enter the global top 1% in 2012 is about PPP$50,000 per capita household income, or PPP$200,000 for a family of four. [1]
[0] http://www.worldwealthcalculator.org/
[1] http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/771271476908686029/Segal.pdf
In some ways half of us dying would be good for humanity as a whole. Let's try to balance the humanity with the individual benefit a bit. Otherwise we'll get to absurd conclusions.
I am sorry for the people who worked there, and all in to give them another meaningful job
You can't. Some want that job. Some can't get other, e.g. countries living off tourism. It's a big, global industry feeding millions.
Easy to say working on a computer.
You mean countries like Greece which destroyed their local industries, and eco systems, in favor of tourism and can't go back ? People have been warning about these things for decades. If you build your entire economy on a flimsy and unsustainable business model you'll lose at some point.
It doesn't really matter if it feeds millions or not, the unsustainability will make it crash sooner or later, the longer you let it go the harder it'll be.
I underline: that's one flight.
See Figure 1 here:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/...
The number you're quoting is car-free for a year, so 1 return flight ~ 8 months of car use.
Consider this view: I'm currently trying to reduce my monthly expenditures, especially subscription services I no longer use. A service that was 2% of my monthly expenditures would be a pretty good savings for cutting a single service.
[1] pop sci: https://www.dw.com/en/to-fly-or-not-to-fly-the-environmental...
[2] source: https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/aviation/index.php?...
people will continue to want to fly. Climate crisis or not. I don't see, unless there's electric or hydrogen-fuel planes, how this can be resolved.
If we've learned one thing this year it is that we can totally do a lot of things if we take a crisis seriously.